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Tail Lights: To Detroit and Back Author: Bill Crittenden Publisher: The Crittenden Automotive Library Date: 2 October 2022 |
 We did manage to snag a pic of a camouflaged test vehicle while driving across Michigan. Why is this Chevrolet Silverado camo-ed? If the changes are so subtle, why draw attention to them like this?
 Our hotel lobby decor.
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I'm writing this from a hotel room in a business park in Livonia, overlooking the Detroit regional headquarters of MPS. Among other electronics, they make AECQ (Automotive Electronics Council) grade motor drivers, LED drivers, and USB ports. Their neighbors were Infineon and ST Microelectronics.
Heading in to this city had a different feel than heading into Chicago as I've done so many times before. The buildings are smaller and older, there are more industrial buildings and fewer glass office towers. In the place of forgettable insurance and finance companies are names I recognize like Jtekt and Brembo.
We have a few spare hours, but we won't be stopping at any of the numerous shrines to the automobile that surround this historic city. How do I choose just one to only partially explore?
The real reason we're here is to fill a hole in my life that's been sitting empty for a quarter century: to see my beloved Detroit Red Wings on home ice.
Founded as the Detroit Cougars in 1926, the Red Wings adopted their current identity in October of 1932. To this day they carry on the tradition of wearing a winged wire spoke wheel on their chests as they have through 11 Stanley Cup championships, creating many of the hockey traditions we still enjoy, and adopting game-changing innovations that shape how the sport is currently played.
Coming from the northwest Chicago suburbs, I didn't skip over the Blackhawks and become a Red Wings fan because of the automotive connection. When I grew up the Blackhawks' ownership was hostile to anyone who couldn't afford forty bucks and a ride to the stadium to watch a cheapskate's budget roster lose games.
My brother-in-law, from Detroit, introduced me to the Red Wings in their 90s prime, and I've stuck with them ever since. Well, I wasn't really fond of seeing Todd Bertuzzi on the team, and it was hard to catch games when I was working evenings, but I've been back to watching on a regular basis since the pandemic started.
I've been to three Red Wings games in person, and I've seen them lose to the Blackhawks three times, twice in Chicago and once in Detroit.
*Sigh.*
The automobile industry permeates the culture here. Aside from the Red Wings, we had the rectangular Detroit style pizza, which was originally (and very literally) shaped by the parts pans that served in kitchens when pizza pans weren't yet cheaply available. The "Motor City" nickname has a prominent place in music history because of Motown Records. Little Caesars Arena, where the Red Wings play, is also home to the NBA's Detroit Pistons.
There are so many companies, current and former employees, museums, and university libraries with automotive collections that could be valuable resources for The Crittenden Automotive Library. Also, Michigan is just gorgeous as the leaves are just starting to turn in early fall, and Little Caesar's Arena is by far the best sports venue I've ever been to.
So there's a big temptation to someday pack up the family in Woodstock and find a place where I could drown in automobile references and Red Wings season tickets would be plausible.
Heck, I couldn't avoid collecting car stuff here if I tried. I know this because I really tried to not make our 20th wedding anniversary trip into an opportunity to add to my collection and I still found the instructions for a Tesla charger in the parking lot of a scrapbook store!
However, Detroit is also the well beaten path of automotive history. If you know anything about how I approach the topic, you know that's not how I like to do things. Other people with more money and better resources cover the popular topics ad nauseam. I'm here to fill in as many odd little details as I can in the time I have left in this world and hopefully leave behind a project worth continuing past that. There's less "competition" in finding an out-of-the-mainstream niche, and I'm contributing more to the overall field of automotive history by not duplicating someone else's efforts.
So in a few hours we head back to Illinois. We'll pass by the city that, for a very short time, was home to the Tucker Corporation. Depending on where Apple Maps sends us we may pass through Fred Lorenzen's hometown of Elmhurst. Just off our route lay the ruins of Meadowdale International Raceway, now a city park called Raceway Woods. We'll come home to a town where Jeep and Toyota have both filmed commercials in the past 3 years.
An hour west of us is Rockford Speedway, where Chad Knaus learned his craft on his father's race team. An hour northeast, the Kenosha home of American Motors. On Sunday we'll visit Milwaukee, which is the home of Harley-Davidson and the Milwaukee Mile, the oldest racetrack in the United States.
We loved Detroit, but Woodstock is our home, and it's going to remain my home for the foreseeable future. Solidifying this perspective on my place in the world is the end of a chapter that started the last time I wrote.
If you're browsing through the things I've written, you'll notice I've been quiet for a while and I left off questioning the value of this resource in a world that looked like it was falling apart. It's been a long, hard couple of years. Shortly after I wrote my last Tail Lights I caught COVID, which has had negative effects on my lung function that persist to this day. I lost a friend only a year older than me to heart problems, and my father-in-law has not been doing well, so my own mortality has been on my mind. More so than the usual potential for political violence that has become an ominous background hum for anyone who has been paying attention to the news here.
So I've been doing my best to calm or ignore my anxieties and enjoy the life I have. I've started playing CSGO, where I'm a slightly above average casual player. I've been spending more time doing yard work for exercise, swapped the angry music for some Florida Georgia Line, bought a few things I didn't really need but wanted (still no pickup truck yet), learned to grill properly, and made that pilgrimage to Detroit.
Yeah, maybe I could've picked a more impactful topic to spend 16 years covering. But this project was started by a different person living in a different time. And now this is what I know, and how I can best contribute to the world.
All I can do is to live as a good example, vote, use the little voice I have when I can, and hope that the rest of the world can work out its issues without killing us all.
629.2
The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about Library Owner Bill Crittenden's personal collection of books, magazines, and miscellaneous papers, much of which is available for reference if it's not directly available on CarsAndRacingStuff.com.
Since it's been more than a year, I don't even know where to begin with the new materials I've collected. So I'll start with something I haven't yet collected.
Among the things I wish I had saved from my childhood, even more so than my father's issues of Midwest Racing News, were a stack of books about different kinds of racing.
Something in my adult life triggered a memory and for the past decade I've periodically tried Googling them with every search term I could think of.
I'd started to think I'd Mandela Effect-ed myself into thinking these books existed when they didn't. Searches became fewer and further between.
I kept trying, hoping that as information is constantly added to the internet that what I couldn't find before might have been added since the last search. Then one night I finally found them: the Racing Wheels series by Anabel Dean.
"Indy 500" was my favorite. Someday soon I'll read it again.
History Beyond the Bumpers
The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights interesting topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.
The Detroit Red Wings are probably the world's most famous sports team whose identity is an automobile reference. I'd been a fan for almost 10 years before starting The Crittenden Automotive Library, so I've got a lot of hockey cards collected over the years.
I've been redoing my binders of them lately, and it's had me thinking about where exactly that borderline exists between adding something that's automotive-inspired and leaving it out.
A few major events in the team's history have already been added to the On This Day calendar. Their founding, their first game, their first Stanley Cup championship, and the day in 1950 when Ted Lindsay started the tradition of hoisting the Cup and skating a lap of the rink with the winged wheel on his chest.
Of course there's no way to write down a set of rules for this sort of thing, since it tends to change by mood and situation. So it won't be perfectly consistent, but I can guarantee it won't ever devolve into box scores and game film.
But I'd definitely include a general history of the team that includes how their logo was inspired, and a few photos as examples. I'm thinking a Special Collection page is coming eventually.
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 868,000 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 54,000 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images, and offline reference materials including 818 book volumes, over 1,000 magazines, and thousands of advertising brochures & documents.