A 1976 Triumph Spitfire.

“It's Always the Guys in the F-150s”

I've had a fascination with all things mechanical for as long as I can remember. It's not just automobiles, that's just what I limit myself to here and I still feel overwhelmed by the volume of information available. Cars are accessible, culturally relevant, and politically important. My dad took me to Rockford Speedway. My brother-in-law inspired me to go to auto technician school when I could have started an apprenticeship at a machine shop. My father-in-law inspired me to create this website instead of building an online library on a different topic.

My interests could have easily all gone in a slightly different direction, but I had influences nudging me in this direction. Influences don't always work, though.

No matter how hard I tried I couldn't keep my kid from losing their childhood interest in cars. They grew up watching the Speed Racer movie on repeat and had red socks to match the movie character. They went to car shows with me. The Ford Mustang was their favorite car. Kyle Busch in the M&M's car was their favorite driver, of course.

But as the teenage years set in, and computer games started taking up more of their life, they lost interest. None of their games were racing games. I'm sure it was a product of the pandemic, but they had no interest in getting their driver's license when they turned 18.

Recently their interest in cars has come back, but in a much different and unexpected way.

They still don't like to drive, they still have no interest in the car they inherited. But they've worked a year pushing carts and bagging groceries at the local Jewel and they've taken in interest in seeing how the customer's behavior corresponds to what they drive.

“It's always the guys in the F-150s,” they'll say as they roll their eyes while telling me about a particularly difficult jerk or a racist comment made at the checkout line.

It's mostly a sociological interest, but it's also made them a bit more outgoing. A few days ago a Triumph Spitfire in British Racing Green caught their eye. It was a pretty small car when they were made, even more so compared to the average crossover nowadays, and Eli wasn't around to see how it looked in traffic in the previous automotive eras.

I knew Eli had talked to the owner because they said it was a 1973 and there was no way they were going to tell that just by looking at the car. So it was no surprise when they described it and I called the color British Racing Green they responded, “that's what the owner said!”

We spent the rest of the ride home talking about old school international racing colors and how you can still see their influences in European cars today. They were rather amused at how Germany switched from white to silver.

I guess you just never know if or how or why someone's going to develop an interest in cars. Or where it will take them.

History Beyond the Bumpers

The Crittenden Automotive Library includes information from all aspects of automotive transportation and competition. This section highlights topics related to automobiles other than vehicles themselves.

Early last month one of our less illustrious members of Congress stated “If you think gas prices are high now, just wait until you’re forced to drive an electric vehicle.”

The quote made the rounds because it was just about the dumbest soundbite possible. If everyone is forced to drive electric, gas prices are a moot point. But a more serious line of thought is wondering what will happen to gasoline prices and availability as electric vehicles become more popular on their own while people are still driving around internal combustion engines.

Electric vehicles still account for less than 8% of vehicle sales. What happens when this approaches 50%? As electric becomes the majority business will start to shift their focus. Gas stations might become even more like mini cafés where you could easily spend twenty minutes, and hopefully some money, waiting for your car to charge. Maybe McDonald's will invest in chargers to get customers into their stores since electrical is a lot cleaner and lower maintenance to have around food than petroleum pumps, and McDonald's is already shown a willingness to place locations within gas stations anyway.

As the gasoline supply chain shrinks, the fuel might become more expensive instead of less. It's not entirely about supply and demand. As we saw during COVID, it's a highly efficient system that's dependent upon a steady high volume to spread the base costs across a large number of gallons sold. Even at negative oil prices, gasoline wasn't free. Keeping that system running with less fuel flowing through it might jack up prices. There may be fewer stations maintaining their gasoline fuel pumps as periodic tank replacements become too expensive with fewer gallons sold, resulting in less price competition.

So, if we reach higher levels of electric adoption and you're still driving on gasoline because for some reason electric doesn't work for you (cold weather, off grid, classic cars, etc.), you might actually see gas prices rise.

Hopefully it all happens a bit more gradually so that people have time to adopt to the changes. It'd be a shame if gasoline hit $11 a gallon at a time when we couldn't manufacture vehicles & install charging infrastructure fast enough.

We'll find out soon enough. At least Casey's has good pizza if you're stuck there for a half an hour.

629.2

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

Well, I wasn't expecting such a fun setback in creating the Bibliography when I wrote about it last month. “Setback” is a relative term, since I'm still moving forward but I'll be working on moving the books into the new office for a lot longer than I thought. In the end there will be many more books listed for Reference Desk availability.

I found a Subaru-load of mostly Ford and General Motors shop manuals being sold on Facebook for $50. Someone had bought them for $200 from a retired mechanic in his 80s and flipped what they could. I was getting the remnants. So the bundle didn't include any of the stereotypical “fun cars” like Mustangs or Camaros, but fun is also a relative term. I was excited to find manuals for Pontiac & Oldsmobile's dustbuster vans. I discovered that in 1988 GM had created an all wheel drive Pontiac 6000 STE. I have the AWD supplement on a new shelf in the basement.

I wish I had the real car in the garage, how fun would that be to show off at cruise nights backed onto ramps and with a mirror on the ground so people could see the rear axle? And it would be fitting after I spent a lot of my adult life in an all wheel drive Pontiac.

I needed a place to put the books, so I quickly painted an accent wall in a Menards stock color resembling Crittenden Library green and installed bright white new Ikea Billy bookshelves. The oak floors wouldn't have been my first choice but they look good with the green and white and warm white lighting.

It'll still need some touch ups from where I was in a hurry, but I'm really happy with and proud of this little spot. I'm still a little down about why this spot is so nice, though. My old office had been in an unfinished basement. I had only a handful of die cast cars & trucks.

Anyway, the Bibliography is almost ready to show off. Some annual lists are already posted in the Publications Index, and the main list consists of 164 book editions. That count doesn't include shop manuals, since there are so many of them and their titles are so unpredictably varied it would be impossible to list all that exist. So I'm just listing the ones I have for Reference Desk links.

I'm excited about this list, like the Film and Music lists, because there are so many books that tangentially relate to automobile history but aren't directly part of it. I picked up a couple of great examples at the McHenry Library book sale a few months ago.

Road to Purpose: One Man's Journey Bringing Hope to Millions and Finding Purpose Along the Way is Ken Behring's 2004 updated autobiography, which tells the story of how he took money from his first business to start a real estate development firm that would net him enough money to buy the Seattle Seahawks for a short period of time. That first business was called Behring Motors and he kept his love of automobiles throughout his life. Only about the first quarter of the book is directly about cars, but all of it is related in how his detours through Florida and Washington led to Behring settling down in Blackhawk, California. If that town is familiar to automotive enthusaists, it's because Behring was co-founder of the Blackhawk Automotive Museum in 1988 and his collection was donated to the museum.

Never Too Late For A New Beginning is Ken Cardone Sr.'s is the story of how Ken brought his religion into running his business and grew it through God's direction. It was a lot of fun finding this book. It was that it has a great 1980s corporate art style watercolor of him and his factory on the cover. Sometimes I'll pick up a business book by some long forgotten CEO just to see if it's about the auto industry but it usually takes a few seconds to see that it's not. It took flipping through the book to find the name Cardone Industries, and I had to go to Google to find out that Cardone Industries remanufactured windshield wiper motors. How's that for barely yet also completely related to the automobile business?

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

Yep, the stats are back. Not much has changed since before everything that started to happen at the end of last year, but that's understandable since not much of the site has changed since then.

The Top 5 pages for the month of May (not counting basic index pages) 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: 1979 Ford-Lincoln-Mercury Lineup

Topic: General Motors Acceptance Corporation

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 896,900 pages of books, periodicals, and documents, over 56,000 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 collections of John Walczak & Bill Crittenden provide reference materials for The Crittenden Automotive Library. The collection currently includes 1,218 different book volumes/editions, 1,996 unqiue periodical issues and over 861 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 371 hours of video.