Clay Curts' Chicago Blackhawks Chevrolet outside of the Rockford Icehogs game on November 17.

Forty-Three

My forty-third birthday is one that that will stand out among the others for the rest of my life. Having had quite a few by now, I've forgotten most of them. This year's celebration started early by taking in a Rockford Icehogs game on “NASCAR Night.” They had a Salute to Rockford Speedway planned, and it seemed like a nice combination of two of my favorite things.

What I did not expect was learning that Rockford Speedway was being honored because 2023 was its last season. It's been a busy year, I've been reducing my time spent on social media, and I hadn't been keeping up. I've been to the National Short Track Championship with my father as a kid and with my father-in-law as an adult. I first saw my future wife there as a teenager, although we didn't actually meet.

The one thing I missed out on in life and am too old to do now is drive in a stock car race, and so after John passed I told my wife this year to take my ashes to Rockford Speedway and see if anyone would let me ride along in a feature.

My actual 43rd birthday, on Thanksgiving this year, was spent cooking the turkey for the first time and delivering a meal to the hospital for the family member who normally handles the big bird. At least it came out good for a first timer! Of course I had my wife walking me through my mother-in-law's process, but my mother-in-law was the hospital patient and my wife couldn't lift a 20-lb turkey after having back surgery.

So at the end of 2022 I had two in-laws and a small office in the dark corner of an unfinished basement. There was a war in Ukraine but overall the world seemed to be going in a positive direction after coming out of COVID. I had just discovered a great online cooperative game that helped me relax and feel better about the random strangers around me.

Now I'm looking at a 2024 with no in-laws, pavement-melting global warming, an upcoming office move that would give me a real space with indirect sunlight and incredible resources but has me feeling overwhelmed to the point of constant anxiety, in an election year that promises to bring out the worst in people, said election likely to be beset by AI generated misinformation while the best possible outcome is continuation of a declining status quo, surrounded by a world that seems to be spiraling into hate and choas and violence.

But I suppose this is a normal process in aging. “The world is going to shit” is something every generation feels. But it used to be said primarily by people who were displeased with progress in civil rights or technology, despairing at the loss of “the good old days.”

Knowing my anxieties are going to be there even if the world suddenly becomes a musical Coca-Cola commercial, I'll keep plodding forward. Just a little more slowly in the next several months as I move my office again.

This time what's coming is a full house move. It's not far, we'll still be in Woodstock, just on the other side of the duplex and two house numbers higher. It's a bigger space, with a mostly finished basement, and aside from moving the desk and connecting the internet my first prority is going to be scanning & photographing a lot of the stuff that isn't staying. So this seems as good a time as any to finally restart and redo the merchandise lists.

It will be a very time-consuming move, however. None of my previous reshuffles back and forth across the basement I'm in now required disassembling my desk or waiting for help moving bookshelves. But I'll stay busy in the waiting periods.

Back in 2005, before The Crittenden Automotive Library even existed, CarsAndRacingStuff.com was supposed to be an online store for John's model kits and die cast. To accompany the merchandise, I had started to post three things: articles I'd written, my wife's photos from the Chicago Auto Show, and I created an SQL database of model kits & die cast cars.

Over time that became static lists under the Merchandise heading on applicable Topic Pages. It's become a neglected area of the site, but once restarted, with images this time, it should become one of the more valuable features of the Library.

Of course copyright still applies to most everything produced after a certain date, and before then everything published with a notice on it. So most images will be low-res “representative” images under the Fair Use doctrine of “here's an example of the thing I'm describing,” like the low-res movie posters in Wikipedia.

Items out of copyright will include full high-resolution scans & photographs, items in copyright will have those archived offline and what appears on CarsAndRacingStuff.com will be shrunken to 500 pixels wide until the copyrights expire.

But, you know, slowly at first while I'm still cleaning and painting and moving and reconnecting and reorganizing. And also living life just a little more while I still can. I owe Wilmot Raceway a visit too while it's still around.

629.2

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

The holiday season is a pretty quiet time of year for book sales, even more so given all the personal issues keeping me from going and looking for one, so there's nothing new in the offline collection this month.

Where progress has been made, however, is in sorting & preserving what I already have.

Something that's not universal among collectors of automobilia is bulk magazine storage. One of the main problems is that they don't stand up on their own. I've seen a lot of different solutions, but the most popular seems to be the kind of half-box magazine files that sit on shelves and leave the top two-thirds of the spine readable if the magazine has one. They're great for frequently referenced materials. What they're not great for is preventing damage from dust, humidity, and handling.

Most used bookstore browsers and collectors of some kinds of media are at least familiar with comic book storage. Those are the long white cardboard boxes that hold a row of comic books in archival-safe plastic sleeves with archival-safe cardstock backing boards slipped in hehind them to prevent folding & bending.

I'm not sure when I discovered it, probably when acquiring a comic book storage box for small brochures, that the boxes, sleeves, and backing boards also come in 8½" x 11" magazine size.

They wont hold those wide issues of Collectible Automobile or thicker magazines like Hemmings Motor News, but for about 90% of my collection the boxes work just fine. Even if the magazines are slightly too big for the sleeves, they fit in the boxes just fine which at least protects them from dust.

Racing programs and large softcover books also fit into the boxes. A set of boxes and a heavy-duty metal shelf from the hardware store will keep thousands of magazines safe and organized.

It just takes a little more work to get to a particular issue, and you can't browse through them the same way you'd look through bookshelves of half-boxes. So whether or not you use this method depends on what you're storing, how old it is, how fragile the paper is, the humidity of the space, how quickly it accumulates dust, and how frequently you need to access it. And if you do, you're going to want a decent inventory in an Excel file.

I get my boxes locally from Modern Edge Comics in Algonquin for $9 each, and it's a great store worth supporting even if I only ever buy the one thing there. You usually have to either order a large bundle through Amazon or find a well-stocked comic book shop (probably why they're not universal among automobilia collectors) near you.

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.

Continuing from the main segment, I'll be restarting the Merchadise lists soon.

They won't just be a great resource for finding die cast or models of obscure cars, or unpopoular model years of popular cars, but they'll also be their own history-within-a-history.

As technology advances in building real vehicles, so too has it advanced in creating toys & collectibles. Some of the earliest scale cars were really rough. Single sheets of stamped steel in the vague shape of a car, without a bottom, painted to more resemble an actual automobile.

The earliest Hot Wheels and Matchbox 1:18 scale die cast don't have the same level of detail they do now, with more expensive brands in the past less detailed than the cheapest ones today.

And NASCAR die cast has had its ups and downs. Action started with some really roughly painted, thick metal body cars with wide gaps before introducing some top quality, highly detailed, well-put-together cars in the mid-2000s.

Some time after I stopped collecting them, the license went to Lionel Racing, and now NASCAR message boards are full of quality complaints. Missing details, incorrect wheels, mismatching paint schemes to bodies (Gen 6 paint scheme on a Gen 5 body, for example), scratches, decals not on straight or folded in the process, just everything that can go wrong has made it through any quality control process and into the hands of consumers. And it's not like we lost technology, if anything NASCAR die cast should have gotten better over the years. And it's also not like they're cutting corners because it's a cheaper product, the 1:64 scale are over $10 and the 1:24 scale are $75 on the official NASCAR store.

I just need to finalize a few details of the new design before I start mass-adding new entries.

Telemetry

CarsAndRacingStuff.com site statistics.

Stats were down this month, but I haven't been posting on social media or adding new content.

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 1,126 different book volumes/editions, 1,829 unqiue periodical issues and over 826 catalog issues, as well as booklets, brochures, comic books, hero cards, event programs, and 264 hours of video.