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Tail Lights: Crossing Over Publisher: The Crittenden Automotive Library Byline: Bill Crittenden Date: 2 May 2023 |
 A two-box 1934 Ford. |
The once humble sedan is now automobile enthusiast counterculture.
In the 90s & 2000s, as we watched station wagons die off, oddball car guys like me began to gravitate towards the family trucksters as a sort of automotive counterculture.
Lots of folks love the R-34 Nissan Skyline, but just to be different how about a Stagea with a GT-R drivetrain? What if we swapped wheels & engines to create Impala SS wagons? If we couldn't afford to build the real ones, we could have artists' renderings and plastic scale models.
My favorite dream machine was the Chevy SSR panel wagon, of which I have a base kit & resin body to one day build it in 1:25 scale.
On the more realistic end of the scale we're actual production station wagons. For fourteen years I drove the best Corolla variant on the market at the time: the AWD Pontiac Vibe.
We said, "I wish every car was offered as a wagon!"
Now that almost every car is a crossover, and car guys are saying “that's not what I meant!” it's not as fun anymore. Now it's the odd sedan still making its way off the assembly line that gets attention. We wonder what NASCAR is going to do when there are no more 2 door coupe Camaros, Mustangs, and Supras. That Mustang Mach-E is seen as a threat to the established order.
It's not like this is new. The first recorded use of the word sedan in automobile body context was in 1912. Many 1920s sedans had a relatively flat back, and sometimes a literal trunk attached to a rack off the frame reminiscent of how one might attach a cargo carrier to a tow hitch today. It wasn't until trunks were integrated into bodies around the very late 20s and early 30s, and the cars lengthened and lowered in the postwar era, that we finally achieved the basic “3 box” shape and proportion that we are familiar with.
Since the average age of registered vehicles is around 10 years old, folks see older car shapes extremely infrequently unless they visit a museum or a car show. So for most adults over the age of 40, the 3 box is the standard car shape they've seen all their lives.
That makes them easy to see as "that's the way cars have always been and probably always will be."
So it's a bit of a shock to some that the American market has widely adopted the crossover. But the dominance of the 3 box was just an extended period of automobile design, and that period has come to an end.
And now, the sedan is counterculture. It helps their newfound enthusiast appeal that they outperform almost anything stock from the years I was growing up and dreaming of own day owning a quick car. The Toyota Camry TRD has stats on par with 90s pony cars. The Kia K5 is gorgeous and has available all wheel drive. The upcoming Hyundai Sonata redesign looks futuristic even in an age of EVs.
So I doubt that the sedan will completely die off. It'll remain a niche vehicle, opposite the days when the Bronco was niche and the Grenada was common. Only the best will survive, improving their image far more than, say, the last versions of the Dodge Avenger or Chevy Malibu.
And by virtue of their low slung engineering, they'll outhandle almost any crossover. Their lighter weight means the same engine will accelerate a sedan quicker than its crossover counterpart.
The fastest & quickest & most powerful cars will be the true sports cars and the pony cars. We still have the Corvette, the Mustang, and for a short while the Challenger. But those V8 coupes are expensive, and by virtue of their popularity, cliché.
Much like the fans of the Stagea or the Impala SS-Caprice Classic swaps mentioned before, some folks want something a little different.
Going forward, that will be a sedan. Until the market makes another major shift, of course.
629.2
The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.
I've spent a lot of time documenting the influences automobiles have on culture, and the influences automobile culture have on the world outside of it, but until now I hadn't found a banned book that belonged in this Library.
A library is a repository of knowledge. It should have the good, the bad, and the ugly. Of course there are limitations: classified materials, violations of privacy, and illegal pornography should not be accessible. But disagreement with a message should never be one of those limitations.
How would someone know how to recognize the signs of rising fascism if you couldn't check the government's statements against the original source materials? Historical accuracy depends upon original sourcing. I think a library should keep everything that it can afford to store and maintain, and most do. It's prioritizing these materials that the professionals are good at.
Even where there are considerations requiring limiting a collection, such as size, space, and target audience, there is an entire field of study dedicated to book selection and weeding and organization whose graduates are grossly underpaid. I'll leave that to the experts who dedicate their professional lives to the subject. I've never been through that education, which is also why I call myself the Owner of this Library and never refer to myself as a Librarian.
Libraries with a wide variety of materials don't force agendas on patrons. Not even in the “hey, did you know we have these books you might be interested in?” displays in the lobby, unless it's accompanied by an overt political statement. Librarians do have and should have a wide variety of materials to support the community and can access almost any book through wider networks of libraries if you just ask.
A library is not is a classroom. There is an enormous difference between keeping a copy of Mein Kampf on a shelf should someone need to reference it, and reading aloud from it and reinforcing its message through classroom lessons. Even within the classroom, there's a difference between using a particular book to reinforce or to discourage behavior.
Similarly, those decisions are best left to professional educators: teachers and school administrators, with their own education and experience in educating others, decide public school curriculums within state and federal standards. Teachers who stray outside of that to promote their own politics can be disciplined.
What book bans are about is political groups outside of these systems, usually with no experience or only a few token educators & librarians, attempting to create an agenda where none existed before by making sure that only their side is presented on the shelves and in the classroom. It's inherently anti-freedom to make sure you can't read what you want at a publicly-funded institution, or to prevent a teacher from referencing what they need to.
I just discovered a book that I haven't yet collected on a list of most-banned books in America. The 57 Bus: A True Story of Two Teenagers and the Crime That Changed Their Lives by Dashka Slater is about the fallout from an incident that made national news back in 2013.
On Oakland's #57 bus, a nonbinary teenager named Sasha was wearing a white skirt and fell asleep. A group of teens on the bus lit the edge on fire as a prank. What they probably didn't expect was that the material, described as “gauzy” in the New York Times, would light up entirely in a flash and give Sasha second and third degree burns down their thighs to their calves.
I already have a growing collection of road trip books and books about conversations with taxicab drivers or passengers, and I've already posted press releases for books that were about the medical and emotional recoveries from serious traffic accidents. This is definitely within the established scope of The Crittenden Automotive Library.
It's on the banned book list because it's about a nonbinary teenager. My child is a nonbinary teenager just a little older than Sasha was at the time they were attacked.
It's ironic that this book would be banned anywhere given the warnings of the 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine: “Where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people also.” Despite being a Lutheran, he was born into a Jewish family, and had he lived a century later the Holocaust would not have spared him.
History is not being subtle about what some people are trying to do.
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.
Between absorbing & inventorying some of John Walczak's books, and an excellent book sale in Mount Prospect (what a pretty downtown!), the Collection now has over 1,000 total books with 961 different volumes. Following last month's appropriate find, The Constant Search by Charles Mortimer, is this month's Complete Handbook of Automobile Hobbies published by Automobile Quarterly in 1981.
The Crittenden Automotive Library started as a hobby, which was a good fit for someone with no garage space but a large basement struggling financially through the Great Recession. If you don't have the money to collect or race real cars, you can always build scale models, race slot cars, take photographs, write a blog, draw pictures of cars, play Gran Turismo, Pinewood Derby, read magazines, watch auctions on TV, make minor cosmetic modifications whatever car you happen to drive, and collect all sorts of things: books, movies, magazines, brochures, Hot Wheels, pictures, postcards, trading cards, and magazine clippings.
And those are just the ones I've done! Just off the top of my head (and the cover of the book) you can also race radio control cars, race Soap Box Derby, play board games, collect vintage car toys other than scale die cast, collect stamps, marshall at racetracks, track collector car values, judge car shows, and write automobile themed fiction.
So now a book about automobile hobbies is part of a big collection of car books because that's my hobby. 2023 is the year of finding strangely appropriate books about collecting car books, I wonder what next month will bring...
Mile Markers
Online Collection: A slim 0.09% increase for the articles was all that made it online this month. As is becoming the normal for 2023, most of the work has been done offline.
Offline Digital Collection: Nothing was added to the Offline Digital Collection in April, either. Sorry.
The Crittenden-Walczak Collection: Yet again programs has the biggest boost with 45.59% increase to 99 total, still low so each one means more percentage. Books had an 14.18% increase to 1063 total, with 961 different volumes.
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 54,700 individual articles, more than 18 days of video & 24 days of audio, more than 36,100 photographs & other images.
About The Crittenden-Walczak Collection
The combined personal collections of John Walczak and Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 961 different book volumes, more than 1,350 unqiue periodical issues and over 680 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 229 hours of video.