A screenshot from the 1950 short safety film “Last Date,” produced by Wilding Wilding Picture Productions for Lumbermens Mutual Casualty Company (commonly known as the Kemper Insurance Companies).

Hidden Automotive Jobs

It's been a frustrating couple of months at my “day job.” That has had me working harder than I have in years at getting content onto CarsAndRacingStuff.com, and hoping for a day when my livelihood isn't tied to other peoples' issues. It's also been on my mind every waking hour, so it's prompting this month's topic.

I can't talk about my current job, but my previous employment has had an automotive component that I can talk about. I spent a number of years in private security where I spent countless hours patrolling an office complex's parking lots, writing accident reports, and watching the snowplows work. I've also met with automotive marketing companies who were among my building's tenants, spent some time in a Toyota dealership service department after a customer threatened them, and took a self-guided tour of the NTN bearing factory in Elgin when it was closed.

I spent about eleven years at the Lake Zurich headquarters of the original Kemper Insurance. I was there as they went out of business and the name was purchased & resurrected by a life insurance company in another state. The headquarters was purchased and turned into a multi-tenant set of office spaces for lease.

Kemper was originally founded as the Lumbermens Mutual Casualty Company in Chicago in 1912 by James S. Kemper, it quickly expanded into other lines of insurance and became a leading innovator in the automobile insurance market. Wikipedia...

Kemper also founded the Central Automobile Safety Committee and the Northwestern University Traffic Institute, and was influential in creating the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. He co-founded the Hemispheric Insurance Conference and was the first chairman of the Council for Latin America. Kemper was also the chairman of the American Motorists Insurance Co. and a board member of S.C. Johnson & Son. Kemper resigned from his company in April 1979.

While I was driving around their parking lots in a beat up Chevrolet S-10, there were insurance adjusters, claims managers, and actuaries who specialized in automobile insurance. Others, working in marketing or the call center, spent a significant part of their job on the automobile insurance segment of the company's business.

So there are a lot of people with a lot of stories and knowledge and experience in all aspects of automobiles who don't never worked for any automotive company, and even more people whose job is completely unrelated to automobiles but have some experience working with some aspect of them.

Banking, insurance, retail, and software are the first industries that come to mind where people can have entirely automotive careers without having an automotive company on their résumé. And just about any occupation can have an interesting automotive story every now and then.

I've managed to add quite a few items from these non-automotive companies, such as Kemper Insurance's 1950 safety film “Last Date” and a bunch of press releases from various distribution services. There are also Federal Register notices from almost every department of the U.S. government, not just the Department of Transportation.

But no specific stories from my own employers, past or present. Sorry, but there's nothing particularly interesting to see there. Those experiences formed who I am, but they're pretty routine and ordinary.

629.2

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

It's been an outstanding month for finding new scannables, adding a 1957 Buick shop manual, a 1962 Rambler shop manual, and two 1940s editions of the Chevrolet Master Parts Price List for Six-Cylinder Models to the shelves.

I've also spent some time clearing and organizing piles of stuff downstairs in preparation for bringing my metal desk from the old office to the new basement and setting up a scanner on it.

The plan is to get a real professional flatbed book scanner for Christmas and finally start spending those gray winter days digitizing all of the books and other items I've collected that are out of copyright.

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.

Jimmy Carter made it to 100 years old today. He is a humble peanut farmer who gave up his family's plot to avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest while in office, but his presidency would largely be defined by his speech during the 1979 energy crisis. It would later be called the Malaise speech despite the word not being spoken in it. Later that word would come to define a decade of poor automobile performance we now call the Malaise Era.

Carter's negative association with the era isn't fair. It started with the Clean Air Act that was signed into law in 1970 and continued on to the mid 1980s when technologies like better catalytic converters, fuel injection, and advancements in computers controlling the engine had developed enough to produce power more efficiently than the carburetor. It was necessary to help clean up our cities' air and keep us on par with the rest of the world's automotive industries.

Before it was called the Malaise Era, the technician teachers in the auto repair school I attended in 1999 called it the Dark Ages. It was about more than lack of horsepower, it was a time when there were all sorts of oddly rigged systems were added to engines, like air pumps pushing clean air into the exhaust to complete the burning process in the catalytic converter. Many of these systems were vacuum-controlled, leading to a spaghetti-like mess of vacuum tubes that sometimes leaked, and tracing those leaks was difficult.

My first car was a 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera with the carbureted 3.0L Buick V6. It was supposed to make 110 horsepower, if I remember correctly, but it never did. The computer was too slow to properly control the carburetor, resulting in it not being as efficient was a well tuned carb or a computer controlled fuel injection system. Despite acquiring it with very low mileage, it was missing the air pump, and the open hose to the exhaust was rusting. Unable to find replacement parts, I had to let it go when I received my emissions test notice.

There's this myth about the Malaise Speech that it was all about how America sucks and can't get itself out of a rut that President Carter put us in and wanted the country to get itself out of to make himself look good in the upcoming 1980 election. The myth about it started when it was labeled the Malaise Speech. But after his presidency Jimmy Carter has shown the country that he was always earnestly dedicated to public service, and the speech is still relevant today. Ultimately, Carter's message was one of “here's a problem, and here's how we overcome it.” People seem to have forgotten the second part of the message, if they ever heard it to begin with.

I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy...The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation. The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our Nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else--public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We've always believed in something called progress. We've always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom, and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we've discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We've learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world. As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning. These changes did not happen overnight. They've come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate. We remember when the phrase "sound as a dollar" was an expression of absolute dependability, until 10 years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our Nation's resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.

Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our Nation's life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our Government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests. You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don't like it, and neither do I. What can we do?First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this Nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.

One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: "We've got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America."

We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women who shaped a new society during the Great Depression, who fought world wars, and who carved out a new charter of peace for the world.

We ourselves are the same Americans who just 10 years ago put a man on the Moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem and in that process rebuild the unity and confidence of America.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I've warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path, the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our Nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

The rest of the speech are declarations of policy positions to handle the energy crisis, much of which was about oil and OPEC...the conditions that led to long lines at gasoline stations across the country...but also about committing money and effort to energy independence.

We will protect our environment. But when this Nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.

History isn't repeating itself right now, but it is rhyming. We've suffered the shame of the Second Iraq War, the January 6th insurrection has us worried that a violent faction might seize power and end 225 years of democracy, but we are also looking at our nation's founders with fresh eyes and realizing how limited our democracy was for more than half of that history. Gasoline isn't rationed anymore, but prices are still an issue. Our money isn't worth as much as it used to be, while the national minimum wage hasn't risen in a generation. The climate crisis is changing our lives already and we're split between those who want to party until the Earth's closing hour and those who are struggling to build a society that can survive for future generations.

The benefits of living through this new Crisis of Confidence is that my truck has 250 horsepower & 277 lb-ft of torque, unrationed gasoline costs only $3.30 a gallon, and the 55mph National Maximum Speed Law is gone.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

Slightly down but stable for September.

The Top 5 pages for the month of September (not counting basic index pages) were...

Article: The tricks to resetting a Dodge Grand Caravan Computer

Topic: Chevrolet C30

Topic: General Motors Acceptance Corporation

Topic: Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight

Topic: Pontiac Grand Am

About The Crittenden Automotive Library

The Crittenden Automotive Library @ CarsAndRacingStuff.com, based in Woodstock, Illinois, is a free 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 56,800 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 1,368 different book volumes/editions, 2,470 unqiue periodical issues and 862 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 371 hours of video.