Portrayed in the movie as hooligans, Modesto’s Faros were nice guys

More than four decades ago, Brian Murray climbed out of a hot rod and walked to the front door of a house in Modesto to pick up his date for the evening. Murray, who was a member of a car club called the Faros, got set to knock on the door when through the walls he overheard his date’s parents arguing.

“You don’t mean to tell me you’re letting her out with that gang member,” said the girl’s father, a prominent member of the business community. “I don’t believe this.”

As the girl’s mother defended her decision, Murray listened with mixed emotions.

“I was hearing all that thinking, ‘Wait a minute, I’m a cream puff,’ ” he said. “I’m a nice guy, really. We were all nice guys. Back then, we did have to put up with being labeled as troublemakers at times. But on the other hand, maybe we enjoyed that part of it.”

For the Faros, it always has been a battle between fact and fiction. Long before George Lucas immortalized the car club in his 1973 movie, “American Graffiti,” depicting the “Pharaohs” as a young group of fast-driving fighters and petty criminals, the members of the Faros often found themselves misunderstood by the public.

To counter their bad-boy image, the Faros often went out of their way to make nice.

Members who stopped to help stranded motorists always left behind white business cards that read, simply: “You have been assisted by a member of the Faros.” The group also installed seat belts in cars that didn’t have them, and helped rally support for various community efforts, including canned food drives.

But, in all honesty, being a member of the Faros had very little to do with doing good deeds for the community. In fact, the whole scene revolved around two things teenage boys always have tried to get their hands on: beer and girls. Sure, most of the guys in the Faros also loved their cars and cruising, but that never was the primary focus.

“We worked on some cars every now and then, but mostly we just got together and drank beer and chased girls,” said Dennis Billington, a retired Beyer High School teacher who was in the Faros in the early 1960s. “We had a lot of fun, but it wasn’t anything special really. The only thing special about us was we got put into a movie. Without that movie, you wouldn’t be talking to me.”

There can be no doubt that the Faros, like many young men, had their fun. And many of the best stories of their age of innocence involve a keg of beer.

Like the time Daryl Weitl and several other Faros loaded a keg into a boat and headed toward the middle of Modesto Reservoir. Then the boat’s motor quit working. It took them hours and hours to paddle back to shore using water skis. After all that, someone noticed that the beer keg had been sitting on the gas line, pinching off the fuel supply.

That story gets better. Back on land, one of the guys apparently pumped the keg too much, and the tap shot into the air, leaving foam and beer soaring high into the air as well. Weitl, attempting damage control, moved in and stuck his hand in the erupting hole, trying to save some of the beer.

“And about that time, the metal tap came down and hit me in the head,” said Weitl, a retired senior planner for Stanislaus County. “It left a pretty big bump. I had a beard then, and it was completely full of beer foam. It must have looked pretty funny. It took me quite a while to live that down.”

Another time during a sunset party at the lake, someone looked up and spotted the ultimate buzzkill approaching on the horizon: patrol cars, loads of ’em. Some of the Faros were 21 years old by then, but many had girlfriends who weren’t. So, as nearly everyone made a mad dash for the car that brought him, Jerry Jackman noticed the half-empty beer keg standing conspicuously unguarded on the beach.

As the others scattered, Jackman picked up the keg, set it in the water and floated off to an area hidden by trees. The sheriff’s deputies spoke a while with those Faros who didn’t flee the party. After an hour or so, when it became clear the sheriff’s main interest was breaking up the party and not arresting anyone, Weitl asked if the deputy would mind using his light to locate Jackman, as no one had heard from him in quite a while.

When the deputy shined his light onto the lake, there was Jackman, floating on the keg with one arm, using the other to take a drink from the spigot.

“Everybody was running off and leaving this keg,” Jackman explained. “I thought, ‘My God, the cops are going to get it.’ We couldn’t have that. ... After that, I remember we put it in the trunk of someone’s car and drove it to 10th Street. Then we just filled containers out of the trunk and drank it there and watched girls. We never really needed to make plans then, because we knew where everyone would be at night. And that was 10th or 11th streets, or later it evolved to be on McHenry.”

Officially, the Faros existed from 1957 to 1973 and, best as anyone can figure, the group likely had several hundred members. There were several other car clubs in Modesto at that time, and there were countless others scattered across the county.

However, the group remembered perhaps more than any other is the Faros, whose members happened to grow up in a town and an era as a young filmmaker was looking around his world for fresh ideas.

“To tell you the truth, it makes me grin inside,” said Murray, a retired assistant engineer for the county. “It pleases me to hear the Faros are still getting some notoriety. That makes me a part of history that people will remember. Not a big part of it, but a part.

“I’ve got grandkids who are teenagers now, and they’re starting to get curious about the Faros and ‘American Graffiti.’ They tease me about it. They say, ‘Hey, Grandpa, you were kinda crazy, weren’t ya?’ And I always tell them I was usually in church about the time the crazy stuff was going on.”

This story was originally published May 23, 2015 at 3:54 PM with the headline "Portrayed in the movie as hooligans, Modesto’s Faros were nice guys."