An old Chevrolet truck used as a firewood display at the Woodstock Jewel-Osco.

Last Link in the Supply Chain

After a delay due to COVID and then finishing high school, my kid has finally joined the workforce. Their first job is a decent paying union job at a grocery store.

We're used to seeing “no farms, no food” and “if you're wearing it, eating it, driving it or sleeping on it thank a trucker.” But retail is another important link in the supply chain.

Retail workers don't just put cans on shelves, that's just the part of it we see and what people focus on when they want to look down their noses at the working class. Retail also makes sure that those shelves don't go empty by anticipating needs and preemptively reordering, unloading the trucks, unpacking the pallets, and putting things where you expect to find them to minimize your time spent searching the store for what you need.

This applies to automotive retail, too. That filter you bought from O'Reilly, the jug of oil from Walmart, the wrench you bought from Menards and picked out of the toolbox from Harbor Freight, it got off that truck and into your hands because of retail.

Even if you get your supplies from Amazon or Rock Auto, most of the same principles apply except you select your items on a computer and they're dropped off at your doorstep. You just don't see the shelves.

The point is, retail workers are an important part of the supply chain and you should be nice to the folks bagging your groceries or finding you an alternator.

And don't make fun of the “counter guy” at the parts store just because he doesn't know some obscure detail you've learned spending years under the hoods of cars. Everybody has a role to play in making the world run based on their own particular experiences and expertise. If you had to do his job, you'd probably make some beginner mistakes in the inventory & ordering systems from lack of experience.

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.

It's been said in various ways over the years that the first race happened the day the second car was built. While not literally true, people will race anything with wheels if there are at least two comparable vehicles: trucks, buses, lawnmowers, toy cars with motors, toy cars without motors, motorized rickshaws, a-n-y-t-h-i-n-g.

They don't even have to be in the same place at the same time as speed record chasers at Bonneville compete against years-old records.

This past weekend I was excited to find a documentary on camper trailer racing. I've seen a boat-on-a-trailer race in person at Rockford Speedway, and destroying things pulled by beater pickups is a bit of silly fun for the folks who want to do something competitive out on the racetrack but maybe can't afford a decent stock car and all the equipment to go with it.

And it takes place at Lake Geneva Raceway before it was closed down, which was one of our local tracks! There's a really old Lake Geneva track champion's trophy in John's old stuff in the basement, but I can never remember what year or class it was from.

629.2

The Dewey Decimal System's designation for automobiles falls within the 629.2 range. This section is about The Crittenden-Walczak Collection.

After last month's jackpot trip to Palatine I had to calm down a bit. Not that I could bankrupt myself with $2 books, but I have a backlog on inventorying and shelving them!

Still, when you're out & about...

I picked up this copy of Death of a Princess from 1998. People probably classify this more as a celebrity or political event because of who it happened to, but it is probably the most investigated car crash in history not counting motorsports incidents.

Setting aside the notoriety of the passengers, it's the story of unsecured passengers in a Mercedes-Benz S 280 whose driver lost control while evading paparazzi at a high rate of speed at the east entrance of the Pont de l'Alma tunnel in Paris, France.

On the surface there was the issue of blame: were the paparazzi responsible for starting a car chase, or were they goaded by a limo driver who was also found with drugs & alcohol on his system?

Given the controversial nature of the Princess, conspiracy theories emerged. Was the driver purposely kept awake the night before? Where did he get the money he was carrying? Were the driver's positive alcohol & drug tests faked or botched?

Further investigations would take place, then investigations into the investigations, and book is a snapshot of where they were at the beginning of a long slog through every excruciating detail of the accident.

Mile Markers

Notes on the progress in building this collection of automotive history.

Online Collection: 357 new articles, almost all Federal Register notices, is a 0.65% increase for the articles collection and more than the rest of the year combined.

Offline Digital Collection: More files were downloaded but not yet sorted and counted.

The Crittenden-Walczak Collection: Not counting the backlog there's are now 1143 books inventoried and various stacks on my desk and work table.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

We lost a few months' statistics in a major changeover in Google Analytics, but that prompted me to take a look at CarsAndRacingStuff.com's sitemapping, ad code, and security certificate. The site's had a major overhaul that isn't really visible to the regular user, but between this and the new perspective I have on building the Library, I'll start tracking the rebuilding of our Google rep & site views now.

The new Google Analytics stats aren't as exact as the previous reports, but we had 4.6K visitors rack up 7.9K page views. 3.3K of those visitors were from the United States, with China accounting for a surprising 161 of them. I didn't know we broke through the Great Firewall!

The Top 5 pages for the month of July were...

Article: The tricks to resetting a Dodge Grand Caravan Computer

Home Page

On This Day in Automotive History

Topic: Federal Transit Administration

Topic: Lincoln Zephyr/Mercury Zephyr

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 1,020 different book volumes, more than 1,631 unqiue periodical issues and over 740 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 229 hours of video.