Gene Winfield has left us behind and gone on ahead. This sorry world won't be any damn good without him... I was lucky to have met and talked with him

 if you want to read his bio, or see what he'd created, I've posted 4 dozen times about him https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/search/label/Gene%20Winfield  and covered it all. 

Or read the well written article at https://www.autoweek.com/news/a64040173/gene-winfield-custom-car-icon-obituary

But today I found that Kustomrama did a better bio about Gene than I ever could, seriously. But then, they have FOCUSED on customizers for longer than I've been blogging. So, give the credit where it's due, they knocked it out of the park for Gene

https://kustomrama.com/wiki/Gene_Winfield  (and here's just some of the info there, that I didn't know!) 

At 10, Gene worked as a car hop for his mom's burger stand/lunch bar, joined the Navy right after high school while WW2 was happening, he held a NASCAR license from 1951 to 1953. He joined the Army in 1949, and was transferred to Japan as a trained cook, but when he arrived, he was placed in charge of the battalion hobby shop instead. After arriving, Gene ordered all of the necessary items to open a hobby shop for his battalion. At night he would teach classes in leatherwork, model airplane building, and copper tooling. He also included a photo lab, so he could learn how to process film. 

While putting the hobby shop together, Gene and three other GI's came together and rented a small shop in the city where they started building cars. In the shop, they built 4 cars, a little sports car with a Crosley engine, a full-size sports car based on a 1939 Ford convertible with a loaded flathead and stepped frame, front and rear, a half-chopped and half-sectioned 1941 Ford coupe that they installed 1946 Ford fenders on, and a 1941 Ford convertible that they hand formed new front fenders, hood, and a grille for out of sheet metal.

 Gene raced the 1941 Ford in the first stock car event ever held in Japan!