Noddy Watts grew up in Te Puke before his family moved to Thames when he was ten. At twelve, his uncle took him to the Meremere drags and that was it. He came home drawing hot rods on his school books. His teachers noted it on the reports. His parents got a phone call. He spent the next few years building a custom push bike, found a couple called Jenny and Les who painted cars and let him hang around, and spent his first paycheck on a T-bucket chassis kit. By 1990 that car was on the cover of Hot Rod magazine.

His first job was at Thames Hospital in the office. The matron took one look at the way he walked and sent him for an X-ray. He had scoliosis and ended up at Middlemore for surgery. He recovered, went on his OE, and landed in Sydney with thirteen Australian dollars. He got a job at W.C. Penfold the stationer, bought T-bucket parts, and made his way back to New Zealand. He walked into the Auckland Post Office at Britomart in 1983. When the post office split from Telecom in 1987, he chose the postal side, which he freely admits everyone told him was the wrong call. What followed was three years of paid industrial engineering training at CIT, then area manager for the Coromandel in 1992. He moved to Whangamata.

The career at NZ Post kept escalating until he was national service quality manager. One day his boss handed him a ten-thousand-dollar cheque on the spot as a bonus. He resigned the next day. He opened Vibes Cafe in Whangamata in 1996, the first espresso in town, along with falafels, sushi, and Allpress coffee. Then came international postal consulting: Portugal first, then Tehran in 1998 and 1999 on a UNDP contract, East Timor in 2000 setting up the country's first two post offices after independence, then Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Montenegro, Macau, and the Philippines. He was spending most of the year overseas.

Then came a second spinal surgery. He could not travel. While still on a walking stick, a local identity named Richard Scully grabbed him off the street and pulled him into a meeting at a hairdresser's shop. Someone wanted to run a rock and roll festival in Whangamata. Noddy ended up organising it. The first Whangamata Rock and Roll Festival in 2001 started with a hundred cars. He renamed it Beach Hop after year one because, as he explains, a hop is a rock and roll dance. The event grew from there: 500 cars, a thousand, eventually capped at around 1,100 to 1,200 registered vehicles with ultimate passes selling out in thirty minutes.

The critical test came in 2005 when a text chain went viral: burnouts, boobs, and beers in Whangamata. An extra ten thousand vehicles arrived. There was glass on the streets. At two in the morning Noddy told his partner Andrea he was done. Area commander Ross Adair talked him back by proposing a liquor ban, which held. He stayed, and over the next twenty-five years Beach Hop gave away 47 vehicles at no cost to entrants: a 1927 Ford roadster that schoolkids had built with a DIA grant, a 1952 Plymouth won by a seven-year-old girl, a 2008 Pontiac Catalina with a triple-carb 428, a Mercury done by Radio City Hall in New York for the 2015 event, and a 1934 coupe for 2016. At its peak the event brought 70,000 people through Whangamata on a single day with two staff running it. Beach Hop won NZ Event of the Year in 2017 and Noddy received the MNZM. He handed the event over to Denis Beaver after twenty-five years in 2026.

Running alongside that was Kiwis on Tour, the travel business he and Andrea built around American hot rod culture. Five tours of the United States including a 28-day Route 66 run, a 34-day Cars and Blues trip, and a 35-day Big Texan. Canadian tours to the Calgary Stampede, the Northern Lights, and the east coast. The Beach Hopper Caribbean cruise is 80 percent sold out. In 2026 Route 66 turns 100 years old and Noddy is running a tour on it. He talks about Angel Delgadillo in Seligman, Arizona, 99 years old in 2026, who founded the Route 66 Preservation Society and has spent decades in his barber chair meeting visitors from around the world. The Waikato Sheds connection is Auto Place in Whangamata: a building that puts a one-bedroom apartment above a full workshop, with enough wall space to finally get sixty sheets of plywood worth of memorabilia off the floor.