I Am Kandi Blaze

I Am Kandi Blaze

If you really want to know who Kandi Blaze is, you have to go back long before there was a Kandi Blaze.

Actually, if we are going all the way back, my spark of life started practically in the shadow of Dragway 42. My parents never hid that I was conceived right there by the dragstrip, but there is something wonderfully appropriate about it. That track would weave in and out of my life for decades before I could have possibly understood how completely life would eventually circle back around.

By the time I was four or five years old, I was already building my own little automotive world. Wooden blocks became garages and hot rod shops for my cars. I built racetracks for my Hot Wheels and created places for them to live, work and race. Nobody had to introduce me to car culture later and convince me that I belonged there. I was recreating it on the floor before I was old enough to understand that someday I would build the real thing.

Then came my secondhand yellow banana-seat bicycle. It wasn’t a hot rod, but it was mine, and it belongs in this story because those early years were already filled with wheels, movement, curiosity and an urge to explore. Long before I had keys in my hand, there was something about anything on wheels that represented freedom.

At the time, my parents didn’t have a lot of money, and I wanted a new bike. So they surprised me with a secondhand yellow banana-seat bicycle. Yes, one of those. While I was excited to have a bicycle, I was a little bummed that it was dingy yellow. I bugged and bugged my dad to paint it hot pink with black pinstriping. One day, he finally got so tired of my persistence that he told me he would teach me how to get it ready for paint—and if I prepared it, he would give me that custom hot pink paint job.

Little did my father know that I was about to go into hyperfocus mode. About 12 hours later, that banana-seat bicycle was ready for him to begin painting.

Dad kept his promise. And I loved that bike.

Something clicked in me that day, as if a passion had been unlocked. I saw what once was—and what it could be.

Cars themselves fascinated me just as early. I learned to notice them and recognize their different engine sounds as they rolled through town on the way to the dragstrip. I could recognize the difference in the rumble of a small block and a big block. Dragway 42, cruise-ins, garages and the automotive world around me weren’t hobbies waiting for me to discover them when I became an adult. They were part of the landscape of my childhood.

Eventually, watching became learning, and learning became doing.

I spent much of my life around garages and later worked in the automotive paint and supply world, where the language of bodywork, paint, materials and restoration became part of everyday life. I learned the actual work behind what I had admired as a child: how much patience hides underneath beautiful paint, how many problems have to be solved during a restoration, how one seemingly small decision affects the next ten, and how much craftsmanship it takes to make something look effortless when it is finally finished.

Eventually that road led to my own hot rod and restoration business, Kandi’s Rods & Kustoms.

For years, my life revolved around restorations, classic cars and trucks, fabrication, custom work, paint and bodywork, pinstriping, antique machinery, hot rods and the wonderfully obsessive people who love them. There were times our schedule was booked months in advance. I restored cars, managed builds and projects, worked with customers and craftsmen, tracked down parts, solved problems and knew exactly how much work could be hiding beneath one beautiful finished vehicle.

I was meticulous because I understood something that has stayed with me: the details matter.

At the same time, another part of me was already finding her voice.

I wrote Cars & Cycles for the Ashland Times-Gazette, bringing the automotive world I knew onto the page. Looking back, that matters to my story far more than simply being able to say I once had a newspaper column. I was already doing then what I continue doing now. I was noticing the story around the machine and trying to give other people a reason to notice it too.

The automotive world also introduced people to another version of me. I became involved in pinup and rockabilly culture, modeled and appeared in publications, raced, pinstriped everything from cars and trophies to some considerably less traditional canvases, and increasingly found myself on the other side of the velvet rope at automotive events. I wasn’t only attending anymore. I was being invited to host, judge, teach, make appearances, take the stage and become part of the experience.

Those invitations took Kandi Blaze beyond home, across Ohio and into surrounding states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Indiana. Some events invited me back for several years. Sometimes I was the host. Sometimes I was a special guest, judge or stage personality. The title changed depending on the event, but the reason I loved doing it never really did: I loved the cars, but I also loved the people gathered around them.

One of the defining moments of that chapter came in 2015 at the 28th Street Metro Cruise in West Michigan.

This was not a little local cruise-in. The Metro Cruise stretched along 15 miles of 28th Street and, at the time, was drawing hundreds of thousands of people and thousands upon thousands of vehicles. Its official program that year featured legendary hot rod builder Pete Chapouris of SO-CAL Speed Shop near the front. A few pages later was a full feature on Kandi Blaze.

Even now, that is a little surreal to write.

I had been invited to the Metro Cruise to present “Know Your Stuff!”, a workshop aimed especially at women who wanted to better understand their vehicles. We opened the hood and talked about engines, major components, fluids, maintenance, warning signs, what to look for and what something might be trying to tell you before it became a much larger problem. I showed the ladies—and others in the crowd—how to check fluids, what to look for, what things should look like, and more. It was never about pretending everyone needed to become a mechanic. It was about taking away some of the intimidation and giving women knowledge they had every right to possess.

I also got to meet Pete Chapouris.

For someone who had spent her life loving hot rods, Pete wasn’t simply another person at an automotive event. He was a legend in the hot rod world and one of my lifelong idols. I was prepared to be the excited one. What I wasn’t prepared for was how excited he was to meet me.

That moment stayed with me.

There I was, the little girl who once built imaginary hot rod shops out of wooden blocks, standing at one of the biggest automotive events I had ever been part of, teaching other women about cars and meeting one of the people whose work had helped shape the culture I loved. I couldn’t have seen that road when I was four years old, but looking backward, I can see the line connecting it.

There were many more stages, events, cars and miles during those years. Some were enormous and some were intimate, but they taught me something about myself that I didn’t have a name for yet. I wasn’t interested only in putting a beautiful thing in front of people. I cared about what happened around it. I cared whether people connected, whether they learned something, whether somebody felt included, whether a person had a moment they would remember later.

That instinct followed me everywhere.

It followed me into the events I created and promoted, where a car show was never just rows of parked cars and a fundraiser was never only about collecting money. I wanted people to experience something. I wanted the person who might normally stand at the edge to feel welcome walking into the middle of it. I wanted to create opportunities for other people to shine, and I wanted whatever platform I had to occasionally make somebody’s day, help a cause or remind another human being that kindness still matters.

Years later, I finally found language for something I had apparently been doing most of my life: experience designer.

The professional hot rod chapter eventually changed too.

The years surrounding and following the pandemic changed the restoration business in ways that were particularly difficult for a small specialty shop. Parts that had once been dependable became difficult to obtain. Waiting times stretched beyond reason. Costs climbed dramatically while quality and consistency did not always climb with them. It became harder to promise a customer the quality, timeline and experience I believed should come with entrusting someone with a vehicle that often represented years of work, money and dreams.

At the same time, I was facing my third battle with cancer.

There comes a point when life makes you examine where you are putting your energy. Between what had changed in the industry and what was changing in my own life, I knew it was time to close Kandi’s Rods & Kustoms and retire from professionally building hot rods.

I did not, however, retire from being a gearhead.

I’m not sure that is possible.

Today I may be standing behind a microphone at a dragstrip instead of wearing dirty work jeans and a Kandi’s Rods & Kustoms work shirt, but the woman looking at those cars is still carrying everything she learned in the shop. When a race car rolls into the staging lanes, I don’t just see a car and a number on the window. I know there may be years of work sitting there. I know about the parts that didn’t fit, the problem that took three nights to solve, the friends who stayed late, the family that made sacrifices, the busted knuckles, the money that probably should have gone toward something more sensible and the person sitting behind the wheel hoping all of it comes together for the next few seconds.

Maybe that is why announcing feels so natural to me. I don’t want to simply tell people what happened on the racetrack. I want them to understand why it mattered.

And somehow, all these years later, one of the places where I now get to do that is Dragway 42.

There is something almost impossible not to love about that circle. The place so close to where I got my spark of life became one of the places where I eventually found myself behind a microphone, talking about the same machines and people that fascinated me before I was old enough to know what any of it would become.

But cars have never been the only things I notice.

I have never fit particularly well into one little box. Alongside the gearhead has always been the writer, the traveler and the person who wants to know what is hiding beyond the obvious. I have wandered old roads and forgotten places, explored history and haunted locations, investigated the paranormal and followed stories simply because some little voice in me said there was something there worth understanding.

Once, I thought I was searching for ghosts. Over time, I realized that what fascinated me even more were the traces people leave behind.

An abandoned building interests me because somebody once opened its door every morning. An old road matters because generations of people traveled it while going somewhere they believed was important. Ancient places make me wonder who stood there before us and what they understood about their world. History becomes different when you stop treating it as dates and begin looking for the human beings inside it.

Apparently, I do the same thing with places that I have always done with cars.

I look for the story underneath.

And increasingly, I find those stories in much quieter places too. Lightning spidering across a dark sky while I am driving. A hawk that catches my attention in the middle of an ordinary parking lot. The predictable little routes traveled by chipmunks. A butterfly that makes me stop what I was doing. The strange pause between things when nature seems to take a breath.

Those moments matter to me because I think an enormous amount of life happens while we are looking somewhere else.

That is the writer I have become. I write about survival and strange places, people and machines, forgotten history, grief and wonder, adventures that did not follow the itinerary, and the seemingly insignificant moments that become something more simply because somebody noticed them.

Somewhere in all of this is another belief that has become increasingly important to me: witnessing is not passive. Paying attention can be an act of kindness. Remembering someone can be an act of kindness. Giving another person room to tell their story can be an act of kindness. Sometimes the most important thing we can offer another human being is the knowledge that somebody actually saw them.

Maybe that helps explain why another piece of my story has always felt so fitting.

I was born on April 3, National Find a Rainbow Day. Years later, Cherokee elders gave me the name Rainbow Tree, a name whose meaning has followed me through much of my adult life: roots that grow deep while the branches continue reaching higher.

I used to think of that mostly as a beautiful metaphor.

Now I can see the actual tree.

The roots are a little girl building hot rod shops on the floor. They are Dragway 42, a yellow banana-seat bicycle, garages, family, tools, race cars, hard-earned lessons and everything I survived along the way. They reach through Kandi’s Rods & Kustoms, newspaper columns, pinstriping brushes, racetracks, stages, cancer battles, autoimmune issues, closed doors and all the people who left something behind in me.

The branches are still growing. They have reached toward announcing, writing, event creation, travel, history, nature, photography, storytelling and whatever comes next that I cannot see yet.

I am a wife, a mother and a grandmother. I am a three-time cancer survivor living in a body that has forced me to rewrite the map more than once. There are parts of the future I once imagined that no longer exist, and there are entire parts of my life today that I could never have imagined back then.

I don’t think survival is about becoming the person you were before something happened to you. I think we carry everything forward—the good, the terrible, the ridiculous, the beautiful—and eventually discover that none of the pieces were as unrelated as they once seemed.

That is how I understand Kandi Blaze now.

She was never a character I invented to hide behind. She isn’t a reinvention, and she certainly didn’t suddenly appear when somebody handed me a microphone. Kandi Blaze is the name that eventually came to hold all the pieces that had been growing together my entire life.

The cars and the words belong together. The stage and the quiet woods belong together. The woman who restored hot rods and the woman who watches butterflies belong together. So do the scars, adventures, history, microphones, strange places, laughter, darkness, color and every new branch still reaching toward something I haven’t discovered yet.

That is what this website is becoming: a home for the whole story rather than selected pieces of it.

So whether you knew me from a hot rod shop years ago, read something I wrote, met me at an automotive event, heard my voice from an announcer’s tower, wandered into one of my events, followed one of my adventures or somehow just found your way here, welcome.

I am Kandi Blaze.

The story is still being written.