President George W. Bush touting energy efficient cars at the Fairfax Assembly Plant in Kansas City shakes hands with millwright, Bob Cooper, on the assembly line. White House photo by Eric Draper. The plant is represented by UAW Local 31.

Labor Changes Tactics

Earlier this year the United Auto Workers union held its first election where a President was chosen directly by members' votes and not through delegates. Shawn Fain, a Stellantis worker from Kokomo, Indiana, won by a narrow margin in a contested runoff.

In the past the union would pick the strongest of the Big 3, negotiate with (and possibly strike against) them for the best contract, and take that contract to the other two as a baseline for their expectations.

Under Fain, the UAW is more than two weeks into a strike against all 3 major American automakers at the same time. President Biden became the first sitting POTUS to join a picket line, as far as historians can tell. Records from 100 years ago aren't as thorough as they are now, but photos of “Scranton Joe” in a UAW cap giving a speech through a bullhorn are crystal clear.

Former President Trump tried a similar visit, speaking at a non-union parts plant Drake Enterprises in Michigan where journalists had a hard time finding actual autoworkers, let alone UAW members.

They're demanding to share in the the record profits that the companies they work for are making off of their labor, particularly as they also shared in the sacrifices made during the recession. But when UAW was at its strongest and most aggressive, there weren't a ton of nonunion auto factories on American soil. Hyundai-Kia, Toyota, BMW, and Tesla are just the biggest names that come to mind.

This resurgence in UAW power also comes as the Hollywood strike came to a conclusion that was successful for the writers, more Starbucks stores across the country are fighting for unionization, and Amazon warehouse workers are agitating for representation.

Being one of the most historic and well-known unions, the UAW's success or failure here will ripple across the wider pro-labor movement. Success could lead to a push to get representation for the aforementioned nonunion American autoworkers. Failure could embolden more businesses to ride out labor strikes and punish union participation.

Years from now, millions of American workers will be affected by what happens this month, and Shawn Fain's name will be etched in labor history. We just don't know yet what the rest of the Wikipedia entry will say.

Currently they're not even sure if he was born in 1968 or 1969. But there will be plenty of time for biographies later.

629.2

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

September was a big month for new books. There was beautiful weather on a few of the weekends and lot of great book sales that gave me the excuses I was looking for to go for a ride.

I picked up a trunkload's worth, but my favorite is Alfred Sloan's 1964 autobiography. Too bad it's just one year too new to be out of copyright (assuming it wouldn't have been renewed).

The Nethercutt Collection: The Cars of San Sylmar is especially interesting because it's from a car museum with a library attached to it. Too bad there's only a blurb about the library and not photographs.

I've also found a stack's worth of books from the folks who published Automobile Quarterly, but no issues of AQ. That just seems odd.

But I guess weird randomness is what happens when taking a stroll through the orchard of books and only taking the low hanging fruit.

Jim & Nancy Schaut's American Automobilia is of particular interest. Aside from the books, I can collect a lot of random little bits of things relating to cars at a local antique shop. Could I someday open a car museum that doesn't have any actual cars in it? Aside from my own books & magazines I can find antique auto club pins, uranium glass ashtrays from tire shops, toys, models, signs, and promotional materials all older than I am.

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.

I've been putting together a list of the family's DVD collections. We have a bad habit of repurchasing ones we already own, so having an inventory in all our pockets will help us save some money.

Being the nerd I am, I'm copying the top stars & short descriptions from IMDB into the spreadsheet. Y'know, it helps in case there are multiple movies with the same name.

Anyway, it's through this process that I discovered one of the main characters of the 2003 film Seabiscuit is Charles Howard. He bought the horse after its two year old season for $8000 (over $175,000 in 2023 dollars) and assigned a new trainer. The rest, as they say, is history. In this case a 2001 book would be turned into a seven-time Oscar-nominated film starring Tobey Maguire in between his first two Spider-Man films.

But the automobile connection here is portrayed by Jeff Bridges. I'll let Wikipedia take it from here...

In the early 20th century, as America enters the automobile age, Charles S. Howard opens a bicycle shop in San Francisco. He is soon selling automobiles, becoming the largest car dealer in California and one of the Bay Area's richest men. In the wake of the Great Depression, Canadian John "Red" Pollard's family is financially ruined, and he is sent to live with a horse trainer. Years pass and Pollard becomes a jockey, but amateur boxing leaves him blind in one eye.

After their young son is killed in an automobile accident, Howard's wife leaves him. He obtains a divorce in Mexico, where Pollard is struggling to make his mark as a jockey. Howard meets and marries Marcela Zabala. When he acquires a stable of racehorses, he hires itinerant horseman Tom Smith as his trainer. Smith convinces him to buy a colt called Seabiscuit. Though a grandson of the great Man o' War and trained by the renowned James E. Fitzsimmons, Seabiscuit is viewed as small, lazy, and unmanageable. Smith witnesses Pollard's similarly temperamental spirit, and hires him as Seabiscuit's jockey.

Jeff Bridges previously starred in 1973's The Last American Hero, loosely based on Junior Johnson's career, and played Preston Tucker in 1988's Tucker: The Man and His Dream.

Mile Markers

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

CarsAndRacingStuff.com Collection: I spent most of this month's sparse online work time indexing what I had mentioned last month.

Offline Digital Collection: This was another month for mostly offline work, nothing was added to this collection in September.

The Crittenden-Walczak Collection: The aforementioned big month for book sales has pushed the total to 1,253 books! That's already a quarter of the way between the first thousand and the second thousand.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

This month's stats bounced back from August. They're still down from where they were in September 2022, but given the upheavals in Google site indexing & site analytics I'm at least glad to see the numbers moving in the right direction again.

The Top 5 non-index pages for the month of September were...

Article: The tricks to resetting a Dodge Grand Caravan Computer

Article: We Know Who Tax The Rich 100 Is And Here's The Proof

Topic Page: 1979 Ford-Lincoln-Mercury Public Relations Photographs

Topic Page: Roland Leong's Hawaiian

Topic Page: Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight

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 870,000 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 55,800 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 & Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 1,111 different book volumes, 1,741 unqiue periodical issues and over 799 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 264 hours of video.