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Tail Lights: Perspective, Pride, and Progress Publisher: The Crittenden Automotive Library Byline: Bill Crittenden Date: 1 July 2023 |
 Elgin Police Department 2023 Pride Month Ford Explorer |
As I've hit the milestone of 1,000 different book volumes (1,138 total books counting duplicates), it's been interesting to compare collections to see where I stand compared to the bigger, more established automotive libraries. The oldest item in my physical collection is from 1919, which honestly isn't impressive at all. Most of it is from the 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
I haven't been collecting that long, and even John's collection was a sort of “Version 2.0” after a flood destroyed most of the first one. But I have some oddball corporate histories that were not publicly available when they were printed, and some items published by small regional publishers, so I probably have a few books that bigger libraries don't. Bill Nye has his famous quote, “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.” Well, every library has something that other libraries don't. That's why there's more than one!
As fun as it's been to go on little adventures and surround myself with nicely organized old books, where The Crittenden Automotive Library will continue to stand out is the online collection. And after years spent rebuilding my office, doomscrolling through the pandemic, trying to rediscover the motivation to build something permanent as the world feels like it's falling apart most days, dealing with the after affects of our family loss, and starting another overhaul of the site code, I'm finally getting more content online.
It's starting with catching up on the baseline daily materials like the Federal Register. Hopefully by year end I'll have a better scanner and get some content not seen elsewhere online uploaded to the site.
I've also been updating a few pages per day of old content so that it's easier for Google to find and a little easier to navigate around at CarsAndRacingStuff.com. The home page features a new batch of Subject Pages that have been started and will be added to as the articles & publications are re-indexed to the new updated style.
It's taken a full year to go from 54,000 articles to 55,000, and I'm hoping that 56,000 comes much more quickly. I'm also still hoping to reach 1,000,000 pages of documentation sometime soon. Maybe this is finally the year.
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 automobile industry is large enough that its top executives have enough money and connections to influence the world outside of the industry, in ways that have nothing to do with the cars they produce. Robert McNamara joined Ford in 1946, became its President in 1960, served as Secretary of Defense from 1961-1968 (during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the beginning of the Vietnam War), and then was President of the World Bank for 13 years. Lee Iacocca was politically active, including a planned & abandoned a run for United States President in 1988, and declined an appointment to the Senate in 1991. Henry Ford's name still adorns six hospitals in Michigan that operate under a non-profit founded in 1915 called Henry Ford Health.
Aside from his hospitals Henry Ford infamously owned the Deaborn Independent where he pushed anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and gained the admiration of Adolf Hitler himself. He saw jazz music as a moral decay pushed by a Jewish conspiracy, writing in 1921: “Many people have wondered whence come the waves upon waves of musical slush that invade decent homes and set the young people of this generation imitating the drivel of morons. Popular music is a Jewish monopoly. Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes, are of Jewish origin.”
To counter this Henry promoted country music and square dancing. Due to the forgotten origins of this tradition I had to learn to square dance in high school in the mid 90s.
Pride Month 2023 was a rollercoaster. Elgin held its first Pride parade, and that's where this month's image comes from. Eli and I marched with my day job's corporate group.
One of the downward slopes has been on Elon Musk's Twitter. It should be obvious to everybody but the disingenuous that his slogan of “free speech” only referred to far right wing and transphobic speech. His public image has gone from being compared to “Henry Ford, the manufacturer of the Model T” to being compared to “Henry Ford, owner of the Dearborn Independent.”
I'm hoping that Elon's obsessive transphobia won't embed itself as deep into our culture or last as long as Henry Ford's anti-Semitism has.
629.2
The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.
A new record has been set. $61 is the most I've spent at a single book sale, coming home with more than 25 of UMI's NASCAR yearbooks and a few other items from Palatine. One of those other items was The 57 Bus, a book I had just discovered in April and mentioned in May's Tail Lights. That day was another one of the upward slopes on the Pride rollercoaster since the book sale trip brought us close to an Ikea where I picked up a couple of Blåhaj with my nonbinary kid.
Eli is following along at book sales now after discovering that some of my sources are good for their interest in historic horror books. I often come across interesting resources that would be really helpful to someone doing something similar in a different field, like football or politics or the military or airplanes. It would be great if more people were doing human-organized historical collections like this one that we could share sources and operational knowledge. Maybe after a few years in college we might have our first mirror of The Crittenden Automotive Library in an entirely new field!
Mile Markers
Online Collection: I finally rolled over the 55,000 article mark, 0.22% increase for the articles. CarsAndRacingStuff.com also received a major update in our Google tracking and ad codes.
Offline Digital Collection: Nothing was added this month. Files were downloaded but not sorted and counted.
The Crittenden-Walczak Collection: Due in large part to the Palatine Library book sale, books had a 3.45% increase to 1,138 total books across 1,017 different volumes. Another major milestone reached! I'm just not sure what the next one will be.
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 55,000 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 physical collections of John Walczak & Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 1,017 different book volumes, more than 1,628 unqiue periodical issues and over 740 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 229 hours of video.