Well, a quick add of a couple of photos from my camera of the inside
of my minivan turned into a big 26-photo update of the Chevrolet
Venture page.
Which makes this a good a time as any to remind folks of the mission
of The Crittenden Automotive Library: preserving automotive history.
Really, photos and (the real thing) of Chevrolet Corvettes can be
found anywhere, anytime. They'll be around for a long, long time.
But how many of us really drive around in Corvettes? You're more
likely to see minivans on the roads, minivans like the Chevrolet
Venture. Which is why it's worth preserving here, because even though
it's not cool at all, it's historically important and hardly anyone
else is doing it. So that's why it was "Chevy Minivan Day" here at
the Library.
By the way, I actually own a Chevrolet Venture myself. The dark blue
one with the license plate WALZAK4 in the pictures.
Okay, I know not a whole heck of a lot of people really care about
minivans. So there's 19 photos of a very unique Plymouth GTX that I
took Sunday. As well as 10 photos of the 1970 Chi-Town Hustler drag
car. I don't have a whole lot of drag racing on the site, so I went a
little nuts this weekend in a garage full of drag racing cars. More
of those photos to come later this week.
--CARS & LIGHT TRUCKS--
Chevrolet Lumina APV (8 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/l/luminaapv.php
Chevrolet Venture (26 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/v/venture.php
Plymouth GTX (19 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/g/gtx.php
--DRAG RACING--
Chi-Town Hustler (10 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/c/chitownhustler.php
Well, there are two major components to the Update today:
First off, there are 18 more photos for the 2001 Tropicana 400, taken
by my wife Heidi at
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/t/tropicana400.php Coming
soon are over 70 more photos from the 2002 edition of the race.
Second, and most interesting (I think) is more material from the very
beginning of automotive history. Check out the 1899-2005 page of the
Articles Index at
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/articles/articles02.php and
you'll see that all types of articles on all sorts of topics of
interest from the early days of motoring. New today are articles on
Eddie Rickenbacker's racing career before he became a war hero, an
article informing motorists of the first ever deductible-policy
insurance plans, and an electric car company started in 1899. For
the folks local to northern Illinois, two of the articles are about
road racing in Elgin.
As always, feel free to comment on these photos, articles, or any
other Library material in our newly remodeled Forum at
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/forum/index.php
It's not exactly part of the Library, but it's part of the overall
website of CarsAndRacingStuff.com. The Forum wasn't working very well,
so I updated the software, and in the process was unable to recover the
old material. But the new software is too good to pass up, so
basically the Forum has been relaunched from scratch.
It's at http://carsandracingstuff.com/forum/ , and when you register
I'll have to approve your membership before you post, so as to help
keep the spambots off the boards.
I've spent quite a bit of this weekend working on this, so there's no
likely no new material going online this weekend. But I did scan some
things while the Forum software was updating, so some sort of progress
was made on getting new material online.
Well, now I can see why the Berne Amendment is so important to the
concept of copyright these days. Basically, from 1989 on you didn't
have to put a copyright notice on anything, protection was automatic.
Before 1977, though, forget that little c in a circle and it meant
public domain for your creation.
There's another little catch, I found out. Copyright notices for
"collective works" (magazines, newspapers) don't cover the
advertisements (http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ03.html). So I
pulled out an old National Geographic and scanned in a few of the ads
that didn't carry notice. Nice stuff, from 1959. I'm going to have a
bit of fun with this in the next few months, in combination with other
unprotected works of the era between 1922 (when everything's in public
domain) and 1977, when the rules for notice changed.
Again, not the biggest update I've ever put out, but then I think it's
one of the most interesting.
--BUSES--
Trailways (1 advertisement)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/t/trailways.php
--CARS & LIGHT TRUCKS--
Chevrolet Bel Air (1 advertisement)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/b/belair.php
Chrysler (1 advertisement)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/c/chrysler.php
--CAMPERS--
Airstream (1 advertisement)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/a/airstream.php
--FUEL--
B-A Gasoline (1 advertisement)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/b/bagasoline.php
Actually, this update's material went online Saturday and yesterday,
but I'm typing this out at 12:32 AM U.S. Central time so it's the
January 7 update.
This update is pretty thin on quantity, but the quality of what's
online and the potential for the future here makes it worthy of
sending this out.
First of all, the second Special Collection page is online. I had
that Hurricane Katrina page just sitting out there unclassified until
I figured out how to handle certain topics I wanted to do that
weren't automotive topics. Now, groupings of photographs and
material centered around a non-automotive theme defines a Special
Collection. The second Collection on the site is DHL, and it's
dedicated to Chuck Stephens, who before becoming my manager at my day
job was a longtime manager for the company. I'm learning a lot about
the delivery business in the little downtime we have at work. Just
another aspect to my never-ending automotive education.
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/special/dhl.php
The second is a car brochure. It's actually the second car brochure
on the site, the first one dating back to the pre-1920's era, when
just about everything is in public domain. What makes this piece
interesting is the year - 1973 - long after the traditional 1923
public domain cutoff. Thanks to John Walczak I've finally figured
out the vagaries of copyright notices, and thanks to Ford for not
bothering with trivial things like copyright notices on marketing
materials, I've got my 1973 Pinto brochure on the site. It's bigger
than a regular scanner, but it's all stitched together and
everything, so it took a long time to get it ready to upload. Why
the Pinto? Because it's the only thing in my collection that
qualifies, and it's in my collection because I have a soft spot for
what a lot of people consider to be substandard cars. More to come
soon! http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/p/pinto.php
Well, this update is just a great big end-of-the-year (really, it's
9:45 PM here) cleaning out of a bunch of little things I've had going
lately throughout the course of December.
The first new part, and the one I'm most proud of, is that we have a
new photographer - Heidi Walczak. Okay, she's my wife, but she took
the pictures when we went to the Cup races in Joliet in 2001 and 2002,
so she's the new source, as I've scanned the photos from the Inaugural
Tropicana 400 and put them on the site. 2002 is coming soon!
Early in December I announced that there were more than 1,500 articles
on the site. There are now more than 1,830 articles on the site.
There's also some material from Cepolina back on the site. Cepolina
was actually the very first source of photos (not counting myself) for
CarsAndRacingStuff.com, and most of those got lost in the shuffle when
the old Photos section was folded into the new (at the time)
Encyclopedia, which eventually became the library. So there's new
stuff from an old source.
Also, the 2007 NASCAR season (Cup, Busch, Trucks) wins have been added
to the Calendar and drivers' pages' Win Lists.
Two more newsletters from GTR, a model car club in northern Illinois,
have been added.
There's another new section to the Library - a guide of automotive
acronyms. You can find it at
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/acronyms.php Feel free to
e-mail me and suggest any additions to the list.
The best part, however, is an August 1903 report from the New York
Times detailing the first ever automobile trip above the Arctic
Circle, in the article Automobile Topics of Interest. It's interesting
to think that 104 years ago a trip to a town in the north of Sweden
would be so newsworthy, and so difficult. Real historic stuff, and
part of the reason this Library exists, to preserve that information
and present it to as many people as are interested in seeing it.
Thanks to public domain, I am able to. So please remember how useful
this simple and often overlooked principle is when it comes to those
interested in history.
--CARS & LIGHT TRUCKS--
Ford Thunderbird (2 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/t/thunderbird.php
Hot Rods (4 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/photos/hotrods.php
Automobile Topics of Interest (1903 article)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/articles/1828.php
--HOBBIES--
GTR (2 newsletters)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/g/gtr.php
--ROADS & STREETS--
Road Signs (10 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/photos/roadsign.php
--STOCK CAR RACING--
Kevin Harvick (3 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/h/harvickkevin.php
Tropicana 400 (13 photos)
http://www.carsandracingstuff.com/library/t/tropicana400.php