|
|---|
|
About Us Page Sections: What Is The Crittenden Automotive Library? · Our Own History · Principles · Collection Size · Supporters & Contributors · Graphics Social Media: Facebook · Instagram · Pinterest · Post · Threads · Tumblr |
 John Walczak in his 1964 Ford Galaxie
 David Crittenden at The Milwaukee Mile
 Heidi Walczak with Tucker #46
 Bill Crittenden taking a picture of a 1965 Rambler Classic, photo by John Walczak
|
Bill Crittenden writing this in the first person...
Before The Crittenden Automotive Library
Dave Crittenden is a retired Signode tool engineer with his name on several patents, graduate of the Milwaukee School of Engineering, longtime resident of the Chicago suburbs, and my father. He taught me about blueprints & how mechanical devices worked in between trips to Wilmot Speedway & Rockford Speedway, and funded my diploma from Universal Technical Institute, planting and nurturing the seeds of automotive enthusiasm that would eventually provide the background knowledge upon which the Library is built.
John Walczak was born in 1949, grew up in Chicago, lived in McHenry County after serving in the army in Vietnam, and his second daughter is Heidi Walczak. After stepping out of the driver's seat to raise his family, he got involved in about every automobile-related hobby that exists, including selling memorbilia at Rockford Speedway where I first noticed Heidi years before we would actually meet.
As a teenager I passed my time watching Star Trek reruns, reading an old copy of the World Book Encyclopedia, and hanging out in one library or another. The ideas of Star Trek's Memory Alpha & Library Computer Access/Retrieval System fascinated me, and I wished I could be a part of making them real.
Computers are amazing not only for their ability to store gigantic volumes of information, but their ability to search, link, and sort information which I'd been trying to do manually even before my family had their first home computer. Using an electric typewriter, I created a cheat sheet of periodic table elements re-ordered alphabetically for my school work. Finally with my own computer late in high school, I worked with friends on compiling a searchable and sortable database of our Magic: The Gathering cards.
I worked in a few dealerships as porter, then a Jiffy Lube, and changed tires & batteries for Sears Auto Center. This is when I discovered that my Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Asperger's Syndrome (which wasn't widely diagnosed at the time), didn't make me a good fit for the shop. But that education and experience wouldn't go to waste.
Heidi and I finally met in 2000, married in September of 2002, and Elijah was born in December 2004.
I settled into my first real career when simple free webpages from Angelfire & Geocities were a popular, and I created a list of resources for private security professionals since any post-9/11 Google search with the word “security” was flooded with anti-terrorism Homeland Security results. My first scratch-built website was for scrapbooking resources so that my wife and I could have a hobby in common.
The Crittenden Automotive Library is Started
In December of 2005 John Walczak was now my father-in-law, and I we were doing the model car show circuit together. I registered CarsAndRacingStuff.com (it spells CARS, get it?) to create an online store and inventory for his scale model car dealing. While waiting for him to put an inventory together, I started posting commentaries I'd written, photos from the Chicago Auto Show that my wife had taken, and started a list of available scale models. In September of 2006, when it became clear that it wasn't going to become an online storefront, I combined all of the information resource sections I'd created into The Crittenden Automotive Library. It would take another few years before that became the entire purpose of CarsAndRacingStuff.com.
A Hobby Gets Serious
In the early 2010s the “Great Recession” would necessarily turn a casual hobby into a serious attempt at creating a second income, and so many hours were put into getting something online that would please Google's search algorithms and help my family survive. Unfortunately that also left the site littered with half-finished projects, unchecked broken links, and some questionable organization that's finally being addressed a dozen years later.
I'm still cleaning up from this era. In between adding new articles & photos I've been redoing all the old pages to update the layout & add new organization features, as well as removing projects that I'll just never have the time to properly maintain.
The Lean Years
Our family's life situation changed for the better in the late 2010s, and I spent some years catching my breath and catching up on life after so many years frantically trying to stay afloat. My new career gave me new perspective and new skills that I could apply to The Crittenden Automotive Library, but it didn't give me the downtime to search patent records & read the Congressional Record that night shift security gave me.
It's the beginning of an odd period in my life watching my family's situation improve with all the doom and gloom in the daily news. Politics & social media became more toxic than ever, the pandemic was spent rebuilding my office to accomodate working from home, and I far too much time resting and doomscrolling while not spending enough time working on getting new content online.
Every year it seemed Google made it harder to make money off of advertising alone, and I reached the age of 40 feeling further from my dream of being able to spend full-time hours building The Crittenden Automotive Library than I was at my 30th birthday.
The Revival
2023 has been a pivotal year in our family. In February we lost John. I've inherited a lot of books, magazines, and brochures, and now I feel responsible for someone else's legacy as well as my own. I've begun calling my accumulation of printed materials “The Crittenden-Walczak Collection” on the site, and it's grown to over 1,000 different book volumes.
The background hum of bad news hasn't gotten any better. It feels more insistent and personal as we enter a period of book banning, rank propaganda having more influence than real news, and an alarming summer heat wave. That's made me question the theme I've dedicated two decades of my life to...maybe I could have had more positive influence if I had built a website more relevant to political history or climate change? But other people with far more expertise in those fields are already working on it, and it hasn't improved the situation.
So I've come to find that sitting at a computer surrounded by probably a quarter million physical pages of automobile history & ephemera is my own “first, best destiny.” Wikipedia is perhaps the closest thing we have to an LCARS. There is no Memory Alpha yet, and even if there were it would take millions of subject matter experts a lifetime to build as it's taken Wikipedia tens of thousands of people decades to build.
So this is my chosen subject, this is what I'm best at, and The Crittenden Automotive Library is my contribution to the preservation of history. Outside of that all I can do is be a positive contribution to the world, set a good example while speaking my values, and hope for the best.
Over the years we've developed a few main principles that set us apart from most other automotive internet sites, including other historical libraries.
Preserving all of automotive history There are already plenty of books and websites covering on the most popular muscle cars and supercars. That's because they're the most interesting cars to the most people, but they've been well covered and there are so many other people looking for something different. While a lot of automotive history preservation is based on marketing cars that are the most interesting to the widest group of people, that can paint a narrow and distorted view of that history. We're here for everybody, including engineers, racing fans, anthropologists, sociologists, designers, local historians, and casual auto enthusiasts of every type. Another aspect of this is presenting an all-encompassing view of automotive history that includes roads & highways, the auto industry & labor, every aspect of repair & aftermarket work, legislation, litigation, regulation, cultural works inspired by all aspects of the automobile, various hobbies including scale models & video games, and the people involved in all of these areas at every level.
Preserving the present for future historical research Did you know that in some very early histories of auto racing that Henry Ford wasn't even worthy of mention? Of course any decent history of the automobile published today has to mention the 999 because it helped launch one of the world's most notable automakers, but before the Model T put the world on wheels it wasn't nearly as important. Now we see the early 1900's with the hindsight of the last 115 years. Seeing history without the benefit of additional hindsight is important, but that's only possible if someone saves the original sources.
What happened yesterday, what happens today, and what will happen tomorrow are likely not historically interesting. They might be, someday, but the events are still too current to be "history" just yet. However, without people preserving records of current events and photographs of current automobiles, historians of the future will not have the proper resources with which to work. Every historic document that is available today is only available because someone before us preserved it, including all of the public domain information I've published from the very earliest days of automobiles going back into the 1890's. We would have so much more had people of the past been able to preserve more than they did, and we're trying to assist future historians by saving all that we can now.
Organizing automotive history We're a bit old fashioned for an internet-based service. We've kept our design and programming simple and mostly unchanged since 2006 to focus our limited time on adding more content, and the Topic Pages & Subject Sections function a bit like an old library card catalog. They're all manually compiled and edited, and the entire library is browsable without digging through search results. A site-specific search tool is available, as it is a valuable tool to find minor mentions of terms and phrases even in articles that are about other topics, but I believe it shouldn't be the only way to access a resource. This attention to indexing slows down the pace of adding new information to the library, but I hope the result is an organized and useful library rather than picking through a giant "data dump" with a tool as imprecise as a search engine. This makes it easy, for example, to find something on the Mercedes-Benz 911 without it being buried by information on the much more popular Porsche 911.
Doing it "the right way" Much of the material on CarsAndRacingStuff.com that's been copied from other sources consists of government documents, a seemingly random selection of press releases & blog archives, and material found in The Internet Archive. The reason for this is that it's either in the public domain, available under a free license, or what we could get permission to copy. It's not as fun or popular as scans of the big name car magazines or streams of vintage race tapes, but uploading those without permission is not allowed under copyright law and we can't afford the licensing fees. It's only a matter of time before the sites that do blatantly violate copyright get taken down, and since The Crittenden Automotive Library was never intended to be one of those here-today-gone-tomorrow temporary projects, we're not going to risk our long-term viability (and our family's financial well-being) on intentionally violating copyright law.*
Assisting others in our purpose While one of the stated purposes of The Crittenden Automotive Library is to "preserve all of automotive history," it's just not physically possible for one person or even one group to do, even if a hundred people worked on it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Any project such as this is going to be limited by budget, time available to work, language, and the location of the office. Brick-and-mortar libraries form networks and assist each other because no one library has every book ever published, not even the enormous Library of Congress. We're willing to assist anyone who wants to start their own automotive history preservation projects with the experience we've accumulated over a decade of work.
Creating original content Aside from the value of collecting what's already available into one more organized spot, we add our own photographs & videos, write our own commentaries, contributing what we can to the body of "source material" for automotive historians.
* - Mistakes have been known to happen, either due to people misrepresenting their ability to grant permission or claiming to be the source of content, and if you come across an unintentional violation please email us for removal. We don't require any of the usual DMCA takedown hoops to jump through, because making the process of correcting mistakes easy is part of our "Doing it the right way" ethic.
|
Online Digital Collection
Articles: 56,800+ Images: 36,300+ Publications: 897K+ pages in 12.8K+ documents Video: over 2 weeks, 4 days Audio: over 3 weeks, 3 days Event Photography: 203 sets Some of the information "overlaps" in these rough counts due to images that are screen shots of videos, individual articles sourced from magazines, and repetitive advertisements in magazines. |
Offline Digital Collection
Articles: 152 Document Pages: 12.5K+ Images: 1,540+ Video (Films): 2:48:25 Video (Episodes): 2:00:37 Video (Racing): 326:19:50 Music Video: 20:40 Video (Misc.): 36:19 Music (Audio): 2:21:46 Podcasts: 148:39:21 This is a newer and less developed collection of digital information that can't be added to CarsAndRacingStuff.com due to copyright. There's a lot of information saved, but not much has been categorized and organized. Only the categorized & organized info is included in the counts. |
Of course we'd like to thank the thousands of people who have contributed content to The Crittenden Automotive Library, either through giving us permission to use their materials, licensing it for use, or dedicating it to the public domain. There are too many to list all of them, and we know this because we tried in the first years of The Crittenden Automotive Library. We can't list everybody but we'd like to thank in particular John Walczak for our first exclusive NASCAR photography, our first regular contributor Jeremy T. Sellers, and Chris Knight for being our first professional contributor and the inspiration he gave during the early years.
|
The following organizations have made financial contributions to The Crittenden Automotive Library. John & Shelly Walczak Spork Marketing Dr. Laurie Walczak & Aaron Schleicher Leslie & John Paul Spencer Dylan Barth |
The following organizations, companies, or agencies have contributed to The Crittenden Automotive Library via direct sponsorships or advertising. United Ads Turn 5, Inc./AmericanMuscle.com Cráneo Previlegiado/Mitula Cars SunTec Auto Glass/Arizona Auto Specialists Tech Market Media Volstead Media, LLC Bowman Marketing Webcreator iAcquire, LLC Tmart.com SISCOM Web Marketing Ltd. We Love Media Ltd. F1 Auto Car Workshop digitalpros, LLC Actualize Industries SeoOneClick Matt O'Rourke V2 Logistics Blue Buffalo Slater Skins Racing Team Zhejiang Subray Wheel Co. |
The following people have made significant material contributions to our office or our offline collection of books, magazines, games, office furniture, and other materials. Kemper Insurance Companies John & Shelly Walczak Dave Crittenden Dr. Laurie Walczak & Aaron Schleicher Leslie & John Paul Spencer Mark Grimmenga, Cruisin' Tigers GTO Club Coastal 181 Abel Mendoza Kevin Yeaton Rebekka Maier |
Most of the small icons used in the site design are from Mark James' Silk Icon Set 1.3 and corresponding Flag Icons set, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.