One day in 1940, an 18-year-old George Nakamura—part of a Culver City truck-farming family—stumbled across a unique car for sale. Even amongst other innovative hot rod designs, this roadster stood out: long, tubular, and clad in hand-riveted aluminum panels, it resembled the fuselage of an airplane or, as photographer David Fetherston put it “a Jules Verne submarine.” The car even had a futuristic name: The Meteor.
The hot rod was built in 1939 by Alfred Churchill, a West L.A. truck driver who had wanted to fly The Meteor across the hard clay of Muroc Dry Lake in the Mojvae. If the car seemed aircraft-inspired, that’s because it was, as Churchill—a future aerospace worker—salvaged scraps from Douglas Aircraft to shape the aluminum body. The rear wheels were originally meant for dive bombers, while the steering wheel was a pilot’s yoke taken off a B-17. Despite the design, Churchill felt it underperformed at Muroc, peaking at a respectable but unremarkable 104mph. He sold the car to Nakamura in July 1940 for just $200.
Initially, Nakamura used The Meteor to cruise around town, a sight sure to have turned many heads…except one: he got into a minor collision on Sepulveda Blvd. because, as his son Walter explained, “the car was so low, the other driver didn’t see him.”
The Meteor was hauled to a storage yard, and when George wasn’t able to initially pay to release it, the yard owner sold off the engine. With the help of his two friends, Dick Phippen and Karl Hoogoian, Nakamura finally paid to have the car released, and the three installed a powerful, 1937 LaSalle V8, a more proper hot rod engine. With enough time, the trio could have returned to Muroc to chase higher speeds but for Nakamura and his family, time ran out.
In the spring of 1942, in the wake of EO 9066, the Nakamura family had 72 hours to settle their affairs before reporting to the Santa Anita Assembly Center. Phippen and Hoogoian tried to help the family as they could, including taking over payments on new appliances the Nakamuras had purchased so they wouldn’t get repossessed. As for The Meteor, Walter explained, “Phippen said, ‘I’ll store the car for you until you come back’ but little did he know it was not one or two years but it ended up over 60 years.”
Public records suggest that George’s father, Masaji, passed away in July of 1940. With George being the oldest of five siblings, he would have had to grow up fast, under duress, as his family first went to Santa Anita and then Colorado’s Amache incarceration camp. George moved to Chicago on early release in 1943, sending money back to his family and his new wife, Shizuko, who he had met and married at Amache. However, the winters were too much and George and Shizuko, along with their newborn son, Walter, moved back to Shizuko’s childhood home in East Los Angeles, kept safe during the war by an African American family of renters.
The wartime experience had changed George’s priorities. As Walter shared, “When my father came back from concentration camp, he said ‘No more cars, it’s time to go to work’.” Like many Nikkei after WWII, George initially turned to gardening but later moved the family to Camarillo to run a successful fruit stand. He and Dick Phippen resumed their friendship but whenever Phippen asked if George wanted The Meteor back, Walter recalled, “My father didn’t say anything but my mother chimed in ‘You should throw it away.’”
Luckily, Phippen didn’t heed Shizuko’s advice and kept The Meteor in storage for decades. George passed away in 1994 and eight years later, Walter remembered, “Dick called me up and said, ‘Do you want your father’s car?’ and I said ‘Yes, what does it look like?’ I never saw the car except in photo albums and even then, I didn’t know what it was.”
Ironically, though George never wanted to talk about his teenage car days with his son, Walter grew up as an enthusiast anyways; his first car was an El Camino pickup which he traded in to buy a 1965 Corvette Stingray. When he and his wife Marsha moved to Pleasanton, in the Bay Area, Walter joined a local car club, The P-Town Push Rods.
After Phippen returned the car in the early 2000s, Walter took it to car shows all around California. “People resented him parking it next to them,” said Marsha: “spectators were not looking at their cars, they were looking at this historical car.” Walter knew the car would be an attention-getter so he created a sign that explained what happened to his father and family during WWII: “It was a way for me to tell people about the camps and what our government does to minorities,” he explained.
Walter toured The Meteor for the next 15 years but health issues compelled him to make the difficult decision to donate the car to the Petersen Automotive Museum in the spring of 2021: “It was like taking my left arm,” he said. His fellow P-Town Push Rods friends came to help load it onto the trailer.
When Cruising J-Town learned about The Meteor from Petersen staff, there was instant interest in borrowing it for the exhibition. After all, the hot rod isn’t just a remarkable artifact of the Nisei dry lake era but the hot rod also serves as a powerful, sobering symbol of how the wartime incarceration profoundly stalled many Nikkei dreams and ambitions. As Walter did for many years, in memory of his father and family, by showcasing The Meteor, it’s a reminder that behind the car’s shiny exterior lies a dark part of American history.
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Cruising J-Town: Behind the Wheel of the Nikkei Community will be on view July 31 - November 12, 2025, presented by the Japanese American National Museum at the Peter and Merle Mullin Gallery at ArtCenter College of Design, 1111 South Arroyo Parkway, Pasadena, CA 91105. Learn more.
© 2025 Oliver Wang
