Artwork of '60s icon lives on in his widow's Manti home

MANTI -- When a mother of two from Manti began dating '60s icon Ed "Big Daddy" Roth a few years ago, she had no idea what she was getting into.

She didn't even know he was an icon.

"I had seen some of his monster drawings," she said. "I knew they existed. I remember my brothers having some of his trading cards in the '60s."

But now, seven years later and four years after Roth's death, Ilene Roth has turned her home into a veritable museum of a curious subject for Manti -- Ed's rebellious answer to Mickey Mouse: Rat Fink.

And although the sleepy pioneer town of 3,070 is visited more often by attendees to the town's LDS temple and its annual Mormon Miracle Pageant, this weekend it is the meeting place for enthusiasts of the hot-rodding rodent and its impressive creator during the third annual Rat Fink Reunion.

Ilene says she couldn't be happier.

"This has been the greatest thing in my life," she said, speaking both of her marriage to Ed and her subsequent involvement in preserving his work.

That work began, she says, almost immediately after Ed died suddenly of a heart attack in 2001.

"The morning he passed, he was talking about doing animated videos," she said. "The night before, he was welding in the garage."

But she says as soon as he was gone, she realized most of his memorabilia from decades of work was packed away in boxes, and she wanted to put it all out for everyone to see.

It's all present in the house, including pictures of all the models of hot rods he built in California when he was still unknown. It was while building those from scratch, pioneering the use of fiberglass in cars and taking them to shows that Rat Fink was born. At the shows, Ed would popularize his cars by selling T-shirts he had painted with custom-drawn monster rats, complete with large teeth, cool cars and flies buzzing around their heads.

But while his shirts sold fast and his cars met with success, his rebellious icons met with resistance in the early 1960s, says Tim Petro, an enthusiast from Cleveland. Petro says Ed was interested in creating a nonconformist, unashamed character as a counter to Mickey Mouse.

"He wasn't taken very well in California, where he was airbrushing," he says. "People wouldn't let their kids buy his T- shirts."

But as the '60s culture evolved and rebellion became more of a norm, the popularity of Ed's work, both his car models and his characters, exploded. For example, in 1963, Ed licensed two of his model designs to a company that distributed model cars for a royalty of a penny for each model sold. When more than 3 million were sold, Ed pocketed about $30,000.

"Even now," Petro said, "hot-rod and street-rod enthusiasts all have either a Rat Fink sticker on their car or a Rat Fink T-shirt in their drawer."

But Petro did lament that many he teaches in his high school fine arts classes don't know who Rat Fink is.

"They think I'm into some kind of satanic thing because of the art they see on my walls," he says.

So is Rat Fink considered fine art?

"It's more of a custom-culture art," he said.

But despite reveling in a California-based culture, Ed ended up in Manti some time after joining The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1974. In "All Walks of Life," a Brigham Young University production taped in 2000, Ed said he read the Book of Mormon hoping to prove it wrong so he wouldn't have to give up his lifestyle. Ilene says it was an interest in family history work that brought Ed to Manti, where he could be near an LDS temple, in 1989.

Of course, relative anonymity was also a draw.

"Ed was Big Daddy Roth when he traveled all over the world," Ilene said, "but here in Manti he was Ed Roth, the neighbor guy who helped you do little things."

And that was how Ilene knew him until after the two were practically engaged. She says one day he showed her a book of some of his work, and it was only then that she got a clue of who she was really marrying.

And with Ed gone, Ilene is left to represent him in a culture she once had little clue about.

"This is a tribute to Ed -- sharing his legacy with others," she said, gesturing to a room filled with Rat Fink and hot-rod memorabilia. "I enjoy going to car shows and meeting people, having their time with him shared with me. There are people who believe their whole life direction was influenced by him. I just have a feeling this is what I'm supposed to be doing."

E-mail: dhinckley@desnews.com

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