Tag: automobiles

“Their Wives Wind Them Up While Asleep”

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

A line of about half-dozen men, bundled up against cold, affix bolts and assemble magnetos for Ford's Model T. The image shows the first assembly line created for Ford's car assembly line in 1913.
Workers on the First Moving Assembly Line Put Together Magnetos and Flywheels for 1913 Ford Autos, Highland Park, Michigan. 1913. https://catalog.archives.gov/id/1633486. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ford_assembly_line_-_1913.jpg.
Rights: Public domain

Restoration of my old car took well more than a decade before it again powered itself along US Highway 501. With time and experience, differences between a craftsman and me would continue to diminish, as my inexperienced hands layered their actions into bodily remembered history and embodied knowledge. My hands remained bumbling and hesitant, though in time a little less than when I began. A craftsman’s hands would be effective and confident, mastering both tools and materials. The craftsman’s eyes, hands, and mind work in concert—far better tuned than mine. But despite the gulf of experience between craftsmanship and my labor, the years hunched over the car opened or, better, finely textured my understanding of how work helps to fulfill human life. That seemingly basic understanding was, paradoxically, obscured by the automobile itself.

A common element that the craftsman and I shared throughout the process amounted to the perspective of the whole project. Even when the car’s parts were contained in Ziplock bags, its chassis stripped to bare metal (much rusted through, too), my mind saw the product that my work, bumbling or not, could bring forth. Mine was an unjustifiably sturdy and very hopeful vision; the same would go for the craftsman, though he had skills to justify the hope. That hopeful perspective, justified and not, formed the strongest bond tying the craftsman and me.

A stripped down chassis of a 1963 Jaguar E-type with badly worn light brown "sand" paint. The chassis has no engine and is stripped bare. It stands on jackstands.
Barely a bolt remains on the car chassis a week after it was pushed into the garage. The rest of the car’s parts were stored in Ziplock bags or boxes. Putting it all back together took about fifteen years, and a lot of learning. Digital photograph by Mark DeLong, September 20, 2002.

In the mid-nineteenth century, William Morris used hope to draw the distinction between “useful work and useless toil.” “What is the nature of the hope which, when it is present in work, makes it worth doing?” Morris asked in Signs of Change (1888). “It is threefold, I think—hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself; and hope of these also in some abundance and of good quality.” Morris along with William Blake and John Ruskin nostalgically revered craft, and Morris particularly romanticized it. Yet, if nostalgia and idealism colored his vision of work somewhat, Morris understood the special qualities of craft work: its connectedness to meaning, its close tie to qualities of uniqueness, beauty, and durability—its reverence for things and the making of them.

Blake’s “dark Satanic Mills” loomed in the factories of the time. The three men yearned for the good old days of craftsmanship as a reaction to the indifferent brutality of the Industrial Revolution, though what they desired—a pleasantly medieval fantasy, really—may never have supplied the needs of their own time. Read more »



Palpable Knowledge Of Things: A Meditation

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

Human beings thought with their hands. It was their hands that were the answer of curiosity, that felt and pinched and turned and lifted and hefted. There were animals that had brains of respectable size, but they had no hands and that made all the difference. (Isaac Asimov, Foundation’s Edge)

Eugene Russell, a piano tuner interviewed by Studs Terkel in Working, said with satisfaction that the computer wouldn’t be replacing him anytime soon, even though he mentioned electronic devices—“an assist,” he said, that helps tuners. Eugene’s wife Natalie felt otherwise, saying at one point in their conversation, “It’s an electronic thing now. Anyone in the world can tune a piano with it. You can actually have a tin ear like a night club boss.”

Eugene mixed elements of beauty and delight with the technical complexity of piano tuning, recalling how he would “hear great big fat augmented chords that you don’t hear in music today” and that he would come home and say, “I just heard a diminished chord today!” Once he was tuning a piano in a hotel ballroom during “a symposium of computer manufacturers. One of these men came up and tapped me on the shoulder. ‘Someday we’re going to get your job.’ I laughed. By the time you isolate an infinite number of harmonics, you’re going to use up a couple billion dollars worth of equipment to get down to the basic fundamental that I work with my ear.”

The piano tuner feels and practices the tune, which is hardly reducible to formulae, perhaps because it is one of those things in life that’s approximated, but not unambiguously achieved. At best, tuning a piano is a compromise: “The nature of equal temperament makes it impossible to really put a piano in tune,” Eugene explained. “The system is out of tune with itself. But it’s so close to in tune that it’s compatible.” Read more »

Tuesday, August 13, 2024

How The American Way Traveled By Car

Posted on by Mark DeLong

by Mark R. DeLong

The photograph shows the corner of a room where an unmade bed stands, the headboard occupying most of the left half of the image. One the bed are newspapers and pillows. From the center of the photo, a number of images of cars and trucks, cutout from magazines and newspapers, emanate in roughly a triangular shape. The wall is unpainted insulation board.
Rothstein, Arthur. Room in which migratory agricultural workers sleep. Camden County, New Jersey. October 1938. Photograph. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. Click source URL for enlargement: https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/518bdec0-b97b-0138-ebbc-059ac310b610. See footnote [1] below for information about the title of the photograph.
Gullies had deepened, though puddles—some pond-like—had seeped into the ways, so that the challenge of driving was a matter of keeping axels clear of the swell of ground between tire tracks. Never really good, the roads still showed wounds from September’s hurricane, now known as The Great New England Hurricane of 1938. It had blown by New Jersey, a bit out to sea, but still whipped the coast with hundred-mile-an-hour winds. The state’s tomato crops were ruined, and angry winds and downpours had bitten a chunk out of the apple harvest. Potatoes, at least, nestled snugly under clotted soil, protected from the winds.

In October 1938, 23-year-old Arthur Rothstein drove the roads on assignment to document the lives of the nation as part of his job in the Farm Security Administration (FSA). This time, his assignment was New Jersey, and in Monmouth County he was interested in where potato-picking migrants slept, usually in shacks near the fields they worked. He took lots of pictures of ramshackle buildings—ones you would easily assess as barely habitable: a leaning frame taped together with tar paper, a “silo shed” that sheltered fourteen migrant workers, a “barracks” with hinged wooden flaps to cover windows—in fact merely unscreened openings, one dangling laundry to dry. Rothstein, like his colleagues at the FSA during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, documented the need for the government programs. Squalid housing matched the dirt and brutal labor of migrants, many of them cast into their situations by the disaster of the Great Depression.

Amidst such architectural photographs, one sticks out. Actually it is one of a pair of photographs, both taken indoors of sleeping quarters—no one would comfortably call them “bedrooms.” One shows a narrow unmade bed near a window shabbily curtained with a frayed and loosely hung blanket. In the other one, more tightly framed, the image draws close enough to reveal a carved headboard, a rumpled newspaper open to a full-page ad for Coca-Cola (“Take the high road to refreshment“) and other papers pushed to the corner of the bed. Neatly cut pictures of luxury cars from newspaper advertisements decorate the flimsy particle board wall that served as meagre insulation.[1]

When I saw the picture with the cars, I noticed a change in visual tone. The image felt hopeful. Read more »

Monday, January 26, 2015

Remembering Old Friends: Cars I have known and loved

Posted on by Carol A Westbrook

by Carol A. Westbrook

My DeSoto Detroit copyNew Year's Eve, 2014. Time to ring in the New Year, to reminisce about good times, and remember old friends that have left our lives. No, I'm not referring to relatives who have passed, or ex's that have moved on, I'm talking about … cars.

Now, I'm not a car person like my husband, who has cars like Imelda Marcos has shoes, one for every season, in both of our houses. I like to drive only one car at a time; I grow attached to my car, give it a name, and when necessity demands “out with the old, in with the new,” I shed a silent tear on losing a good friend.

I've not yet taken a picture of a favorite car, though at times I wish I had, unlike my husband, Rick, who has photographed every car he has ever owned, and some he has rented. Rick's first car was a 1957 DeSoto HemiHead V8, shown here.

MGBThe next picture shows him as a young assistant professor in 1968, with his powder-blue, 1965 MGB convertible.

He has even photographed some cars that he has rented, such as the memorable black, 100 series BMW hatchback that we drove on the Autobahn in Germany, as you can see in the picture. We even drove this delightful car through the “autos verboten” square near the 500-year-old cathedral in Strasbourg on market day–quite by accident–after bad advice from our GPS.

I searched my photo archives to see if I could find pictures of my own favorite drives, but they exist only incidentally, at the periphery of a family photo, or near a landmark on a vacation trip. I don't need a picture, though, because I remember them all well, every car I ever called my own. I rarely remember the model and the year, but I remember its make and color, “like a girl,” Rick would say.

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