Born to a hot rodding father, Pete grew up in El Monte, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and started "cruisin' the boulevards" with his friends around 1955. It was a good time to be a young hot rodder, and before long Pete acquired his first machine, a '32 Ford roadster. It's hard to believe now, but roadsters weren't very popular then, so Pete promptly swapped a Model A coupe body for the roadster shell, (which he later sold for all of fifty bucks). He then sent the coupe to Blair's Speed Shop, where it received a Chevy V8 mated to a Packard tranny, and on to Barris Kustom, which charged $10 to reverse the wheels. Several cars and customizations later, Pete met Mike Hoag, a young rodder who had worked at Blair's before he and Sherm Gunn founded M & S Welding in order to build dragsters. Pete, by then a product development technician at dynamometer maker Clayton Industries, knew immediately that he wanted to work at M & S. He studied welding at night while working at Clayton, and, after a part-time stint at M & S, left Clayton in 1971 to join the crew at Blair's Speed Shop.

It was around then that Pete started work on a chopped '34 coupe. At the time, he had no idea that this car, finished in traditional black and flames, would have a seminal impact on not only his life, but also on the hot rod world. Pete's coupe shared the cover of the November 1973 issue of Rod & Custom with a similarly chopped canary yellow coupe by Jim "Jake" Jacobs. The two rodders hit it off and soon set up Pete and Jake's Hot Rod Parts in Temple City, some 20 minutes east of L.A. It didn't take long for Hollywood to find them. Howie Horowitz, producer of the hugely successful Batman series, wanted Pete's car for a made-for-TV movie called "The California Kid", which starred a young actor named Martin Sheen. The "Kid" put Pete and Jake's shop on the map, and the business took off. With their innovative style and seat-of-the-pants marketing savvy, the partners took hot rod building from the backyard into the mainstream. In 1987, Pete and Jake sold the business, and Pete signed on with the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA) as Director of Marketing. He was a natural in the job-after all, he'd already been a driving force in the formation of the Street Rod Equipment Association (SREA)-and he quickly transformed the SREA into the Street Rod Market Alliance and a council of SEMA. Formal recognition of Pete's contributions to the organization came with his 1999 induction into the SEMA Hall of Fame. Pete has also been honored as one of the high-performance industry's Top 100 Most Influential People, and is in the Hot Rod Magazine Hall of Fame.

Pete and Martin Sheen