Pinstriping on cars and motorcycles was a dead art when 15-yr. old Kenny Howard went to work in George Beerup's motorcycle shop in the mid-forties. The last automobile striping on an american car was done by General Motors in 1938. Then, in the mid-fifties, customizers brought it back in style in mostly radical form believing they were doing something entirely new! Kenny, the motorcycle mechanic was the man who started this "new" vogue under the name "Von Dutch."

Dutch's Dad was a well known designer, sign painter and goldleaf man in the South LA area known as Maywood. The well known Western Exterminator Logo is an example of his work that lives on today. Dutch would occasionally bring a bike home from Beerup's shop borrow his Dad's brushes to put pinstripes all over it. When Beerup saw what dutch had accomplished, he couldn't believe it, and moved him from mechanical work to painting and striping. For the next decade, he built a reputation that he really never wanted.

For the next several years Dutch painted and pinstriped nothing but motorcycles, moving from shop to shop, saturating each area. By the mid-fifties he had done thousands of bikes, but very few cars. Striping cars started as a joke when he was working at Al Titus' motorcycle shop in Linwood, California. The whole car striping idea started to 'snowball' and he was there

He was approached by a guy known as the Crazy Arab, who thought it could be worked into a full-time occupation. Dutch didn't believe it, but he tried it, and for the next three years he worked at it until it just drove him nuts!

When Dutch quit striping in 1958, he was still in great demand. Customizers from all over the country had heard of him, and cars came from as far away from the L.A. area as New York to be "Dutched." When a car owner came to him, he didn't tell Dutch what he wanted, he just told him how much 'time' he wanted to purchase. The designs were up to Dutch, and many of them were created way down deep in the recesses of his eccentric imagination. He had hundreds of imitators and followers; Shakey Jake, The Barris Brothers, Tweetie, Slimbo, Big Daddy Ed Roth and many others.