The Crittenden Automotive Library

Tail Lights: 25 May 2016

Opinions expressed by Bill Crittenden are not official policies or positions of The Crittenden Automotive Library. You can read more about the Library's goals, mission, policies, and operations on the About Us page.

Tail Lights
Automotive History from a Different Perspective

Volume 5, Issue 3
One Grade "A" Collection

Bill Crittenden
25 May 2016

My dad is a retired engineer who spends his extra time now at auctions, estate sales, and flea markets. He's found quite a few oddball items that have made their way into The Crittenden Automotive Library. I scanned the local dealership ads from a vintage Bears-Cardinals football game program, I've picked up a couple of Oldsmobile rate time books from the 1930's from his online store, he's loaned me programs from the big Soap Box Derby in Dayton from the 1950's, and recently he bought a large box of car magazines, newsletters, and programs from an estate sale.

The collection appears to have belonged to Bob Hanselman of Arlington Heights, Illinois, owner and once-active Ford Model A enthusiast. Based on papers I've found in the box, he owned both a 1929 Business Coupe and a 1931 Tudor Sedan in the 1970's.

The vintage Hot Rod and major name-brand magazines sold quickly, but I couldn't post those online anyway. What was left is what I'm really interested in: newsletters from obscure old Ford car clubs, event programs from Ford car shows, and odd locally published car enthusiast magazines. The collection dates from 1949 to the late 1970's, and even includes a copy of the program from the 1949 Philadelphia Auto Show. Many are out of copyright, and I've got my scanner cleared off and ready.

Not only are these documents, newsletters, and obscure magazines more useful due to their lack of copyright, they can be really interesting if you just happen to be looking for that obscure, local topic that hasn't been posted elsewhere online. I've gotten quite a few emails from people who have found information about older generations of family members, and that's something that motivates me to keep going and keep looking for the odd stuff that isn't on Wikipedia or other automotive sites.

I'll see what else I can find about Bob's cars from his collection, because I appear to have found everything except the cars themselves, and now I'm wondering where they might be today. Hopefully I'll find a VIN and post it in the next edition of Tail Lights, along with a list of new material posted online.

Follow us on one of our social media accounts for upcoming frequent additions from the collection!

Financial

With a huge new bundle of information available, financial contributions and advertisers are the key to getting this information digitized and online. It takes a lot of time to scan, edit, and upload, and I've never had this much to process all at once. Help us by contributing at https://www.gofundme.com/df3mos.

Every $100 in contributions allows me to take a night off of the "regular job" and put more time into building The Crittenden Automotive Library.

PayPal address: admin@CarsAndRacingStuff.com
GoFundMe link: https://www.gofundme.com/df3mos

Major Additions

Time for posting new material was cut short by working a lot of overtime at the "real job" and getting Library Intern Eli ready for backpacking with his new Boy Scout Troop.

This month has seen a bunch of new recall-related documents added to the Library. As I've been going through the Topic Pages and combining the recalls into the Document sections, I've been adding the associated documents that come with each recall. Usually 10-15 documents per recall, they provide background information on the automaker's communications with NHTSA and their recall progress report filings. While not interesting to the average gearhead, these documents can be useful in legal cases involving these recalls. Just a reminder that The Crittenden Automotive Library serves all audiences in need of automotive information!

Library Personnel Manager Heidi's pictures from the Studebaker National Museum are online, and along with that most of the Studebaker pages have been cleaned up.

Unfortunately, that's the only photo set I've got so far this season, because the weather here in northern Illinois hasn't been very summery yet. That's okay, because that means I'll be spending more time with Bob's Ford collection.

History Beyond the Fenders

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights some new material added to the Library about a topic other than vehicles themselves.

This issue's HBtF entry is press releases from outside of the automotive industry.

Thanks to PR Web, we've been able to post a great number of press releases on CarsAndRacingStuff.com, but instead of going to their standard "automotive" section I've been browsing the entire site's collection. Outside of the traditional auto parts, repair service, and legal services for drivers there includes automotive-relevant information from all sorts of fields I hadn't considered searching into before. Here are some examples:

Art: Big Statues Called to Bring Car Designer Alan Leamy to Life
Logistics & transportation software management: Macropoint Partners with the No. 47 JTG Daugherty Racing NASCAR Sprint Cup Series Team
Construction: Gilbane Completes Auto Technology Project at Evergreen Community College
Education: Ten Arizona High Schools Participate in State Auto Technician Competition
Financial research: Hanover Research and Auto Care Association Index Reveals Automotive Aftermarket Industry More Stable Than S&P 500
Professional organizations: National Association of Professional Women Inducts Lorena Lee, HR Management at Daimler, Into its VIP Woman of the Year Circle
Firearms: Nevadans Show Support for 2nd Amendment License Plate
Political advocacy: LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), General Motors Foundation Open New Technology Lab at the University of Texas at Arlington

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles, trucks, motorcycles, and driving fall within the 629.2 range. In addition to the online collection, Library Owner Bill Crittenden's personal collection of books, magazines, and miscellaneous papers is available for reference, and this section highlights new materials available on the online Library's Reference Desk.

We're still way behind on inventorying and indexing, and the McHenry and Crystal Lake library book sales added another box worth of stuff to the pile in front of my office entrance. Which is now a pile of tote boxes, because there's so much there.

The Reference Desk's list of materials is being reworked again, to condense each entry down. Instead of the full book's information appearing on the RefDesk page, the titles will be links taking you to Topic Pages with more information.

Since each entry is shorter, the Reference Desk page's entries will be copied to relevant Topic Pages as separate sections rather than only appearing by name as a sub-topic in a Topic Page's navigation box. This will clean up the site navigation, especially for topics with a large number of available Reference Desk resources.

I did manage to get a few new items listed online this month:

Road Rage by Ruth Rendell (2007)
Wheels by Arthur Hailey (1971)
The Antique Studebaker Review (2 issues from 2015)
Turning Wheels (2 issues from 2015)

Current Library Statistics (since Apr. 6)

Articles: 31,343 (+199)
Images: 34,150+ estimated (+50)
Publications: 711,670 pages in 8,764 documents (+399 pages, +128 documents)
Video: 1 week, 12:25:57 (same)
Audio: 2 weeks, 5 days, 9:43:23 (same)
Event Photography: 182 sets (+1)

April 2016: 13,070 page views from 7,167 total users for month, daily average of 435.6 views from 238.9 new users.

Page views and user information provided by Google Analytics.

Current Social Media Statistics (since Apr. 6)

Facebook: 419 Likes (+10)
Instagram: 474 Followers (+36)
Pinterest: 11 Followers (+5)
Tumblr: 148 Followers (+5)
Twitter: 1,216 Followers (+141)

About The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is an online collection of information relating to not only cars, trucks, and motorcycles, but also the roads they drive on, the races they compete in, cultural works based on them, government regulation of them, and the people who design, build, and drive them. We are dedicated to the preservation and free distribution of information relating to all types of cars and road-going vehicles for those seeking the greater understanding of these very important elements of modern society, how automobiles have affected how people live around the world, or for the general study of automotive history and anthropology. In addition to the historical knowledge, we preserve current events for future generations.

The Library currently consists of over 711,000 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 31,300 individual articles, more than 7 days of video and 19 days of audio, more than 34,000 photographs & other images, and a Reference Desk with more than 225 book volumes and thousands of advertising brochures & documents kept available for the information they contain but can't be copied into the online Library for sharing due to copyright.

Tail Lights: 25 May 2016