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Rob:
Welcome to our podcast, All about the car, brought to you by Schierl Tire and Service. I'm your host, Rob Hoffman, an auto service specialist with over 46 years of industry experience. On the ride with me today, our regular guest Bryan call a 42 year veteran of the automotive industry. Hello Bryan.
Bryan:
Hey Rob. How you doing today?
Excellent. And Bill, a guy that's logged a lot of miles behind the wheel and always comes back with a lot of great questions. Welcome back, bill.
Bill:
Thanks Rob. Glad to be here.
Good to have you. Today we have a special guest on the drive. John Harry executive director of Portage County Historical Society. Man, that's a long name and we are on site outside at heritage park in the village of Plover. Welcome John.
John:
Hey, thanks for coming out and seeing us here.
It's good to have you back. As a matter of fact, the last time we got together, we were digging deep into the history of the Stevens Point Brewery and you brought a lot of good information. Well, let's hop in, buckle up and hit the road. The history of the Stevens Point Brewery turned out to be one of our most popular episodes. So we thought we'd go historical again and talk about the history of automotive repair in Portage County. From the global side, the late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds brought many new drivers to the ruddy roads. When something broke, they had to fix it themselves. Many bicycle mechanics started to do automotive repair and in many cases had to make their own replacement parts sounds like a lot of work.
Do you think that there were horse at buggy people as well, who got out of the business? .
I'm thinking. So if, if the smart visionaries saw an opportunity and got into the automotive part, classes were even held at the YMCA on how to repair your car. So it took a while to get the bugs out. Henry Ford's vision changed the world by bringing affordable automobile ownership to the masses, which eventually streamlined every aspect of automobile ownership. The automotive repair industry continues to evolve today as cars and trucks become more complex, it's becoming more difficult to work on them at home. So let's bring the history closer to home central Wisconsin, specifically Portage County. So I mentioned Portage County and that's where we're sitting today. Pretty much a hub for automotive and repair from the research that I did, but I'm not the specialist. John's our specialist in Portage County finding out that he and I both kind of dug some information out of the 1920/21 Stevens point directory. What did you find John?
Well, you know, it's interesting when I was asked to do this podcast and then I went around to the people at the historical society, just for some guidance on like, Hey, I'm doing this on cars and auto repair and, and whatnot. The history of that. And they're like, oh, there's nothing. , I'm sure there's not nothing it's unwritten, But it's, you know, it's of all the books that we have, this is an area that hasn't been dug into yet. So it's kind of exciting to get a start on it. And so I brought some of the resources that we have for research. And one of them, like you said, is the Stevens point city directory and...
Do you mean directory being like, this
It's a phone book,
A phone book. Okay.
New Speaker:
Yep. So this is...
There were phones then?
There were, there were phones, right. 1920, but they had directories previous to phones too.
Right.
Because you know, you still, I mean then it, they just published your address.
So people could find you, but that was pretty normal too. If, if Bill Schierl had an event where you had family in town, they would, let me say, Bill Schierl at this address had his in-laws in town for the weekend. And you know, so there was just a different way of doing this...
In the newspaper.
Yeah in the newspaper.
cross talk:
That's so funny now, cuz I would not want people to know my address.
Times have changed.
Which makes things a lot easier when you're doing history. Cuz you'd be like, oh, that person lived in this house. So yeah. So I looked at the same directory you did. I actually looked at other directories previous to this too. So what we had on hand that was easily accessible for me cuz the archives are in a transition at the university with the move of the library. So I, I had some that I could access and I went as far back as 1900.
Oh my.
And then I, then I skipped ahead to 1908, 1912, 1918. And it wasn't until this 1920 directory that like something stood out to me. Oh there's cars. Now, before that, I'm sure there were things to do with automobiles. And I did some newspaper searching on a database we have subscriptions to, but that nothing, nothing was actually in the directory as far as like here's a business with a, it
Was kind of a free for all before maybe before this.
Yeah well...
Carriage builders that...
Transitioned or...
So the first automobile in Steven's point was sighted in 1900, January 12th, which would've been not the time of year. I would've brought...
No.
The car with very little. So Stevens Point journal announced that the Saturday afternoon at two o'clock the automobile. They basically, it was like a, it was a car on parade.
Oh my gosh.
So people lined up the streets to see their first car.
Horseless carriage.
Yep.
And this is 19...
1900.
So Saturday afternoon at two o'clock, the automobile will start from the current house, which is just past like where sunset point winery is. It's not there anymore. It's it's in the middle of water street now, but would start at current house and run east back to the normal school, which is now...
UWSP main.
UWSP right.
And then it's gonna go down Strongs to Division street and back to Main street. So it just did a big loop. And so it said it would do it several times.
Ooh... that's a road trip!
So that's grab a drink and sit back and, and watch this thing happen. But in 1900 there are only 8,000 cars in America.
Wow.
Speaker 1:
So to have one right here...
To have one right here...
In Stevens Point was a pretty big deal.
Yeah.
So then I was like, well, okay. So again, nothing in the directory until 1920. So I did some more searching in 1911 Steven's point hosted its first automobile show.
Ooh.
So, in the newspaper accounts was like Milwaukee had theirs a few years ago and ours was better
of course it was.
But they had makes from Cadillac, Rambler, some I'd never heard of Stoddard Dayton, Overland Buick was there and a couple others. So they had the United States Tire Company was the host of that. So in 1911 there was a tire outlet here in the area and it was a big deal. You know, this was, would've been as big as any exposition or fair in town today. So other than that, I didn't, you know, find a whole lot.
That's pretty cool stuff though. That's pretty deep.
Yeah. Well the first, so here's, you know, when you just do keyword searches, some interesting stuff pops up 1907 was the first automobile wedding party. So somebody had a wealthy relative that had a car and the bride and groom got to drive off in a, in an automobile.
I wonder if there were the, cans and just married on the back
Right, right. Well, and then, you know, and then you find some other things that are a little more salacious. I mean, 1921, it was the first jail sentence for somebody driving under the influence.
Oh.
So that this stuff was reported on. Now is that specifically this area? Portage County.
That's Uh well Steven's point.
Really?
Yeah
Okay. So we started way back then.
Right. So the guy's name was Frank Flatoff.
Oh
My gosh.
Interesting.
That name is still around, but he was a resident of Mehan, which isn't really a township anymore. It's out near like out 54 kind of near club forest. So he was in town and drinking and somehow got in an accident.
There's a Mehan road out there.
Okay.
So that's, that's where that's from. That's what kind of, what you find when you try to advertise or when you try to research something, that's kind of obscure like this.
I wonder if they had drunk driving for horse and buggies, like, could you drive your horse intoxicated?
I don't know.
Or you like, if you ran your horse on, you know, another, I mean buggy off the road or
Speaker 3:
Getting the horse to drink the beer is half of the issue so...
Speaker 2:
The first autonomous cars, right?
Yeah. right.
The horse knows how to get home.
The horse knows the way.
I would just think that was pretty common place. Back in the day, there was some drinking going on and, and riding in the buggy.
Well, so this guy got 10 days of hard labor at the county jail and a fine of $20.
Ouch.
Wow
So that's...
That's pretty bad. Pretty steep.
I wouldn't like the hard labor.
Yeah, the hard labor. Well, I mean, yeah so...
But 20 bucks is what that's today in today's money. It's a lot of money.
That's a lot of money.
It is
For a town that where people got shot and they'd be like two weeks in jail. yeah. Yeah. So the directory is a great source of information. And in 1920, all of a sudden you just see stuff start to pop up in the advertisements. It's hard to do research when you don't know when these stuff isn't text searchable.
And so that's a goal that we have is to make more of this text searchable. So because you can't look up the automotive companies...
There's a lot of information in that directory though, in regards to all of the companies that did repair and sales, maintenance and sales.
Well, a lot did, I mean, like you said, too, so this auto sales company on the corner of Clark and Strongs, they did cylinder reboring, truck tire service and battery service. You are seeing the birth of the modern automotive repair industry kind of around that time. Stevens Point got its first gas station in 1919.
So like as an actual service station, before that there was what they called curb pumps. So there would just be pumps on the side of the road,
Just random pumps.
Yeah. And my guess is you had to have some sort of subscription, so you would get billed kind of, of like you would, if you had like your dry cleaning.
Sounds like some technology in there for back in the early 19 hundreds.
Right. Yeah.
I'm sure it was a handwritten on a ledger somehow. Like you, you know
Yep. And one of the things that I saw that popped up in there too, is the word vulcanizing, which kind of reels it back to the tire business that we're in. And vulcanizing was something that Charles Goodyear actually invented way back in the 18 hundreds. A lot of the shops did vulcanizing Bryan, what would they do on a local level? What's vulcanizing? Do you remember?
It's introducing heat to the rubber and the, the rubber mixtures to make it stick together and cure. So that it's a usable product. So that's, what's involved in vulcanizing it was probably repairing the tire.
With a patch to cover a big cut in the tire. You'd vulcanize that patch to the tire itself to make it one unit.
So really today we do that kind of thing. We just don't call it vulcanizing.
We just use certain types of adhesive and...
It's chemically based now.
Repair material
Vulcanizing sounds cooler.
It does.
I like that... Star Trekish.
And livery service... What's that?
A lot of times livery was with stable stables. So it has to do with the readying of a horse to ride that kind of stuff.
Bunking them down at night.
So that might been part of the transition from the carriages and the horses to the automobiles where...
Some of these companies were also running livery service as well.
Well, and you see, when you think about not just these services that you need to upkeep a car, but the fuel that you need to put in it, it usually it was the first pumps might have been outside of a pharmacist because they had a kerosene stove inside.
Ah.
And so they already had a relationship with an oil company. And so that's why it was not seen as something urgent for them to suddenly have a gas station, cuz they're like, well, somebody else is already doing kerosene, so they will get the oil. And what differences does it make if I have a gas station? So...
It makes sense. It makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. And we, you know, we talked about I mentioned, I should say earlier about all the roads were rutty and full of holes and not really pavement, just a lot of ruts and rural stuff. So...
They weren't really roads.
They're not really roads they're paths.
Really in today's terms. But...
And we complain about potholes.
You know...
They had some holes Even like if you were lucky enough to be on a cobblestone street, that's not a smooth ride.
Oh my god.
So a lot of these shops. We're doing welding too. So it just kind of tells you from a historical standpoint that there was a lot of repairs being done, frames, being welded, fenders being welded back on, I'm assuming really a lot different back in those days than it is today.
Was the in Portage county. Were there a lot of cobblestone streets? Did we go through that era?
Yeah. So downtown was cobblestone.
It was?
Yep. And so, and then, I mean that was replaced boy, fifties, forties.
So I'm not familiar with the rest of town, but Stevens Point was a pretty happening place. So I'm sure that we got around to some sort of pavement or cobble stones.
So then what happens, this is totally off the, the topic.
But on cobble stones, which is transportation and automobiles, that the communities that have kept cobble stones have tho that was a choice. You know, I just think of Boston and some of the historical areas...
There's a lot of cobblestone.
Cobblestone
So if you even like you go down to Milwaukee though, and you can still see that they just paved right on top of it in a lot of places and where the pavement is wearing thin, you can still see the cobblestone, they replaced the cobblestone, like I said, downtown, and I wanna say the fifties, forties, fifties to get even further off topic. So where the children's museum is downtown.
Right in front of, there was the, city's the sidt of the city's first cemetery in 1847.
And they moved the cemetery in the 1880s because that became suddenly a very nice piece of real estate. And so they moved that all the graves to union cemetery. So that's where you can, they got reintered. But when they took up the cobblestone, there was a lot of concern about that, that they were gonna find a grave and they luckily did not. So.
That's fascinating.
That is fascinating.
Wouldn't it be nice if main street was cobblestone sort of, you know, for the historian in all of us?
Right. Yeah. To the property value of it, but it's probably a little more easier to deal with pavement. So...
plowing.
Yeah. Right.
So some of the addresses I saw in that directory for 1920, like I had mentioned earlier, that just seemed to be all really centrally located right. In what we see as downtown Stevens point now, which is just crazy. It was like one in every corner, from what I understand.
Well, you have to remember that cars were new and so you weren't driving over to crossroad commons to get your...
You know, anything, you know, there wasn't anything there. So like third street was a huge business district and you know, I'm seeing like, so this auto sales company is on the corner of Clark and Strong and all of them were kind of near there.
And so it probably was advantageous for them to be somewhat centrally located, but the whole city was much more centrally located cuz the hub had all of the commercial activity and the residences radiated out from there rather than today where we can drive somewhere further away.
So you can almost imagine that all the people that own automobiles back in the day that live out of town, all that traffic, well maybe Or used to, with all that traffic of the day coming in to get their cars serviced or to shop. I mean, it's just a different world.
I'm sure that it was like the invention of the internet for some people. So it was that jarring to probably people who were probably older in age in, you know, the 19 teens and twenties that the world had changed so fast and these noisy cars are coming into town and things like that. So...
Makes sense. A lot of people were afraid of them with the noises and yeah.
Spookin' the horses they'd take off and run.
Yeah. It was known as a bad mix. I think in some cases, other than Schierl Tire and Service, we came on the scene in 1962. That was our first tire and service location. Young kids... That was right downtown in Stevens Point...
Correct.
As well.
Where was that Bill?
It was kind of on the location where now I'll say the park south of the lullaby apartments and to the west of south of EMMY J's and at main grain bakery, somewhere that all got reconfigured, but it was in that range and that there was a car dealership next door to it.
I don't remember which one.
So you were located close to the river kind of a nice area.
Yeah, It was originally, it was an old fire station that
Oh, was at the north side fire station.
Yes. That was what, because the pole was still there. And we as kids, we would slide down that pole.
Oh, I've heard those stories.
Yeah. And then cuz in 1971 was when my father had moved that to where the Stevens Point tire and service center where it is in front of Copps at the time the Copps family had developed that whole project and where Pineries bank is and things like that.
Well as with every all about the car podcast, we always break away and hop back in the vehicle and head off to a popular destination or a not so well known destination in Wisconsin. And today we're hopping back in and we're taking a short trip right here in town in Stevens point to the PCH, Historic Firehouse #2, Did a little research on that and actually drove by it. And what a amazing little place, little history there sitting right in the back, just off of water street really.
Yeah. Well, so it's on Strong's avenue. So 1949 Strong's avenue it's so it's firehouse number two is built in 1885 and it's the oldest surviving municipal building in Stevens Point. And so it was the Southside fire station and jail. So the back, the back was...
Being the south side of the city.
Oh it was...
Where it's located now most people would not qualify that as really the full south side.
No, but I mean right at that point, it didn't didn't extend quite as far as it does now.
So yeah. They had the holding jail there. So for the drunks.
In that same building?
I don't know how the police got away with shoving those people onto the firemen, but... ,
That's another podcast.
You're right. Exactly. So that was the south side one. And then in reference to what Bill was talking about about the, the fire station where the first Schierl building was that was the north side one, that one no longer exists. So we're lucky to have the, the south side one. And so in 2000 is when no 2005 is when the historical society took possession of it because it was gonna get bulldozed and so...
Glad they saved it.
And so it was basically the city said you wanna deal with it? so we're absolutely. But that's an interesting building cuz it was not only a fire station, but then after it went outta service as a fire station, it became the YMCA.
I went there as a kid.
That building was a YMCA. So like a lot of people remember it as that because they weren't around in the turn of the century for fires. So, you know, a lot of people are like, yeah, I went to teen dance nights at the Y at the fire station. So yeah, it's a really neat property and we have really exciting stuff going on there right now. We're working on revamping some of our exhibits and it is open this summer through labor day on Saturday mornings from 9:30 to1:00.
Oh, good to know. Good to know.
The really exciting stuff is, is we have a 1933 fire truck in there. American...
I did peek in the window. I saw the front end of that thing.
Yeah. So that, thing's pretty awesome and massive. And it still actually belongs to the firefighters union. So we have an agreement with them to store it, which is great, cuz it's a really beautiful piece of machinery, but it has a cracked engine block. And so we were thinking, well, we're never gonna get this thing outta here. And, and I would also, as the director would like to use the space a little bit more flexibly.
Yeah. You're not just pushing that in and out, are you?
No, no. So, but we found a guy. So the, in the around the first motorized fire engine in the entire city was a captain somebody's potato barn, which is a very Stevens Point thing to do.
Uhhuh .
Ubut a local mechanic named Ray Ockshuda. He got that one up and running and that's a 1917 fire engine.
And so we took that in the 4th of July parade this year, which was a lot of fun. And then he's kind of, one of those guys who sees something that has a problem, he goes, I can fix anything. And so he got the 1933 running.
Awesome.
So you gotta keep a lot of coolant in there because it just leaks out right now, but he's like, I can weld that. So the good that's great news to see that that'll be up and running, but the state firefighters convention was in town this summer and both those fire engines were outside the Holiday Inn for that convention, which is a pretty cool thing.
That's great.
So exciting things happening there.
So really what this gentleman's been doing, kind of goes back into the automotive repair history. I mean he's, he's welding. He's right. I can do that and he's fixing it himself. That's really cool. So yeah. You mentioned that open on Saturdays from 9:30 to 1:30 so we can tour that.
Which is a really cool building.
Yeah. It's a really neat space and you know, I'm looking forward to having different events in there. We had a talk coming up there this week, but then looking forward to doing other things with that space too, that it beyond just having exhibits to try to get people to come out and see it.
Well, and also being at heritage park here in Plover talking about road trips. What other parks and things of historical groupings are there in the state? I'm familiar with one in Green Bay cuz I keep driving by.
So there's Heritage Hill down over in Green Bay and then there's Old World Wisconsin down like kind of near Milwaukee, south of Waukesha. And I think we are probably one of the only others that is fully operational for a large portion of the year anyway.
Stonefield down in Cassville
Has a...
Small town,
18 hundreds village. Right off of the Nelson Dewey state Park.
Okay,
Cool. Something to research, you know like as, where are the places to visit in Wisconsin?
Sure.
It's just a great opportunity for a little road trip.
Absolutely.
Let's extend our road trip and let's bring it back to Heritage Park in Plover. Tell us a little bit more about where we're sitting here today, John.
Yeah. So there's 11 historical structures that are surrounding us right now and this park is open. So if anybody just wants to come out and picnic, you can come do that here too. Like it's not you know,
Oh cool.
Not like a closed,
We have close benches.
Yeah. You can't get into all the buildings all the time, but you can always come and take a look around. So on the corner is the old Plover Methodist church and that structure is from 1857 and that's the only original structure on this property.
So that church has been there.
So that is on the national register of historic places.
Yeah. You look at that foundation that wasn't just unreasonably picked up and moved,
Yep. That is an actual on the spot historic structure. So you think about weddings, funerals, celebrations, and mourning. It took place on this site over the years and that is our exhibit space at the moment. And so we have our exhibit running this year is Portage County and world war II that's in there. And then so in 1977, the historical society took possession of this land and the church and opened it up in 1978 then. And then over the years, these other buildings have kind of appeared here. We've we've the society has gone through great pains in some ways to get a lot of these historic structures saved. I mean, when you talk about Plover, the history post road doesn't look anything like it used to look right. They used to have a downtown now it's all strip malls and business like that, but they widened the streets so much that they had to take down what we could would consider like a downtown type of main street. And so a lot of the buildings that are historic in Plover are here and then just around the county too. So the schoolhouse was out near the Waupac/Portage County line near Amherst. And then
So they've been saved and then moved here.
Yep. And we resurrect them. A lot of these buildings were gutted or being used for other purposes. Even the church had no religious context. By the time we got it, the congregations had moved on 10, 15 years prior and a developer tried to make it duplexes. And so that's why we're okay using it as an exhibit hall cuz we're like, well we're not, we're not gonna be able to bring it back to exactly what it was anyway. So we're gonna use it for what we needed to, but the school was abandoned. The train station had a tree growing up through the middle through it and that's from Bancroft. So like a lot of these structures, we literally saved them and rehabilitated them so people can learn from them and used them for enjoyment too. So,
So is that train track that runs right next to that church. Has that always been here?
Yeah. Mm-hmm
So that church was right next to a train track.
Exactly. Yeah. right. Yep. Exactly.
So, and then the, the Depot that we have is from Bancroft. So not natural or not original to that there, but was part of the P line of the Soo Line. And so it was called the P line cuz it extended from Portage to Plover to Point.
Oh neat.
So there was a very small stop on the, you know, Bancroft's not a huge metropolitan area, but yeah, it's pretty neat that we have a little piece of that history stuff.
Now our listeners can't see us sitting here on, on the picnic table in heritage park, but right behind us, there's a interesting structure. I'll call it a house.
It is a house.
Give us a little history on that.
It's one of the oldest houses in the county it's it's we call it the Engford house. It was built in 1850 by a judge lawyer guy named Minor Strope who was a pretty big, heavy hitter in the county, early on one of the few people in the state bar, in the, the area. And then it was later owned by two families involved in the circus industry, the Barnes Dales, and then the Engfords and Portage county has a pretty illustrious circus past this area does. So they were pioneers in motorized circus equipment. So getting from town to town, not using a train or a horse and buggy. And so we luckily have one of their caravans where the whole family of four would sleep and so you can peek in there, right?
It's like a camper isn't it?
It is. Yeah. And they built that on a Model A chassis in the twenties. And so we're really lucky to have one cause there are three of 'em and the other two are at circus world in Baraboo, which is a state historical society museum. But we have the other one here, which I'm all for keeping local history local
And we should have it.
Mm-hmm .
So it's pretty neat to be able to have that on display and people you can look in there and go, oh my God I can't believe that this is how they lived. But yeah, the house is interesting because they were a circus family that was their profession. They were not what you would call like a particularly wealthy family. And a lot of times middle class homes are the first to go because we tend to save the big mansions or the big houses or, you know, the things that are really opulent. But most of us would've lived in a structure like that.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, that's a really great slice of everyday life. And then the other house that we have here is the Franklin Calkins house, which is a wealthy farmer's house. So, and that would've been over near lake where Mark Toyota is near the freeway.
And the guy who built that house was named Benjamin Washington, Franklin. So there's a name
That sounds really high end.
So he...
A lot of presidential connection there .
He was a, it purported to be a great grand nephew of Benjamin Franklin. And so, and he made his money selling potatoes to the union during the civil war. So it's interesting though, cuz that's a very wealthy person's house for that time period. And then you go to the Hanford house and you're like, this is a middle class house.
So we, we kind of have the dichotomy between the two where we're saving all parts of historic value, not just wealthy parts.
Cool.
It's all gathered right here in Plover.
This is awesome.
Well let's head back to our subject, automobile repair and Portage County, the history of, and we're gonna kind of bring it forward a little bit more, which is gonna probably allow you to talk a little bit more Bryan I'm I'm guessing at this point, but John, you've got a lot of information. So keep going. So obviously automobiles evolved things really started to change. You mentioned back when there was only like 8,000 automobiles in America, obviously that's changed. So a lot of things have happened since then. And then computers onboard computers became a thing back in seven...
Mainstream back in the late seventies,
Late seventies. And that really changed repair, I guess, for, for the most part,
It changed the industry dramatically. There was a lot of mechanics at that point that got out of the industry cuz they couldn't deal with the electronics. It was just so foreign to 'em that they couldn't jump in and work on them.
Is that the timeframe then? When we started to say you had to be a technician or you were a technician versus a mechanic.
Yep. That was in that time period. Cuz he replaced components instead of rebuilding them a rebuilding water pumps and fuel pumps and oh goodness, wheel cylinders and engines and transmissions, that was all commonplace back in the mid seventies. And prior to that, and then it got into component replacement cuz there's transistors and nothing you could do with them.
Wow. Yeah. So things have really changed. And you mentioned that a lot of the mechanics, so to say got out of the business cuz they couldn't handle the new age technology. Did it do the same type of thing to the small independent shops? Some of 'em just couldn't get on board with it.
They hung around longer. In my opinion, you get into the mid eighties, you still had a fair amount of the corner gas stations that were working on cars. But at that point it really started to change cuz the age of the fleets was now pretty much all fuel injection, no carburetors, things like that,
Not to mention then the imports started to become a thing. I mean they've always been there but on a really small scale, but that percentage really started the change back in the sixties and seventies, which brought a different culture to automotive repair because everything was a little bit different.
Yeah. You, you come into the early seventies with the fuel embargoes and the gas shortages that you had to have something that got better than eight miles for the gallon. So the imports started coming around and we're getting mid twenties for fuel economy, mid thirties. So that really changed the motoring industry.
Were those imports were the measurements and metric at that point
As far as the...
Actually yeah.
Engine displacement. Yeah. That's where that came from.
The metric bolts and nuts
Right. Yeah. I mean like you didn't even have that set of tools in your house necessarily to eork on your car.
Lot of these old mechanics refused to get those tools too. .
That the Dotsons and the Hondas and the Toyotas, the Fiats, those are all up and coming car companies back in the mid, early to mid seventies,
Dotson, there's a name you don't hear very often.
Anymore.
I don't Think people even know what a Dotson is
Exactly. What did that evolve into?
Nissan.
Nissan. Absolutely. And then the car started going faster, longer.
Longevity increased dramatically because of fuel injection, the oiling of the engine, the internal combustion part or the internal parts of the engine with the oil being able to stay there instead of the gas, washing all the oil down and taking out the cylinders and the valves and a hundred thousand miles in a car in the early eighties was it was pretty much wore out.
And yeah, that was its last birthday in many cases .
Yep. And now half a million miles is commonplace
And the faster they go, the more safety becomes important, which really, you know, you go from the lap belts to the shoulder belts and you know, on and on with everything airbags, all this kind of thing, which really then also did change and make the repair industry evolve even further. We had to know a lot more about repairing all of these important safety features that if the car came equipped with, had to keep
The ADA systems, the automatic braking, the collision avoidance is saved tens of thousands of lives over the years. The three point safety belt was actually developed was either by Volvo or Saab. And they had the patent on it, but they gave everybody the rights to that because they felt that the saving of of life was more important than making money. So they didn't charge any money for the right to use that patent.
Amazing.
That goes back into the sixties
And Saab isn't even in existence anymore. Is it?
I think they're gone.
I think they were bought a couple times.
And I believe they're gone.
My brother-in-law had a stick shift Saab and that thing was awesome.
Yeah. People really stand by 'em.
It was like built like an airplane,
Right, like a cockpit
Cockpit.
You can't can't kill 'em. You couldn't kill 'em. I don't think
I actually was like, dude, does Dave still have that car? Yeah.
Where was the key to start it?
It was a weird like key fob thing. Yeah.
Down on the center console,
Not anywhere close to the steering wheel.
And being in the tire business, we know that tire technology has changed as well. We had talked about in many previous podcasts, the TPMS, the tire pressure monitoring systems, which technicians also had to understand and be able to service as well. And we do that on a daily basis now, but that's just another evolution of tire or automotive repair. And a part of our everyday business was dealing with this low pressure electronic system.
Oh, that's been around
A long time,
Long time in the eighties with the Corvette and the run flat tires, but it became mandatory in 2007 for all cars and light trucks. So we've been dealing with it for a long time.
Hey, we have, you know, and in, in the news almost every day we hear about what's new and coming up in some of these vehicles, but in the automotive repair industry, we're dealing with cars on the average that are how old Bryan?
12 plus years,
12 plus years old. That's the average mileage or age of the fleet out on the road.
Yeah and it's continuing to grow every year.
So we probably, from a repair standpoint, won't see a lot of this brand new technology until maybe 10 years from now. Maybe.
I won't see the,
You won't see it.
So, you know, talking about that history of 12 years or 10 years from now, how do you perceive what is important to catalog track? I mean, I'm just, you know, it's interesting cuz these things are in our lifetime.
Sitting around the table, but give another 25 years. And that's not the case.
We typically don't collect things that are younger than 50 years old. Unless it's something that is obviously has like a local historical value, like something to do with trivia or point beer or you know, something like that
50 years old, huh?
All the way back to the seventies.
But now, you know, you say that now it's like, well we do see some things from the eighties and nineties that are like, well probably probably worth savings. And we're in the time of a historic moment right now after a pandemic.
And so there's things that you don't wanna have to wait to get because they may not last, that's kind of a change that's happening in the historical nonprofit industry as far as what do you collect because it's becoming more commonplace to actively be collecting when you know, something is historic now, so that you're not waiting for somebody to find something in their attic and then you hopefully have something. Right. But then we don't have unlimited space.
And so you have to be very to get to kind of what, what Bill was asking there's old and there's historic.
There are things that are, are just have lasted a long time and that's really great, but it's not necessarily something that's historic or relevant to the people of the county or specific to the people of the county. So we're cognizant of that as we're going through a cataloging process, trying to figure out what we have and making sure that we have duplications in the right places.
Well, John, if you would please start to collect some information now that way in 25 years, when we call you back for the next podcast, we've got some good information, right. From the source.
I'm gonna go back to this podcast as a source.
Remember back when?
Cause we all know we're very historic.
Yeah. And we keep getting more historical I don't know. I'm guessing you are doing best practice of your record keeping.
Oh, of course.
Yes. But those records have historical value and those get harder and harder to collect because now they're all digital in a lot of ways.
So there's a big thing there of, you know, a lot of these things I pulled today as a city directory, which is paper, we don't even barely have phone books anymore.
Exactly.
And a lot of these binders are full of different newspaper clippings, all that's mostly digital too. So there's an interesting thing happening in, in how you preserve history right now
And the future of automotive repair, who knows what that's gonna look like. I don't even wanna think about it, but you know, we've got electric vehicles coming around. It's a real common thing these days. And autonomous, you mentioned that Bryan earlier. Wow. So who knows what it's all gonna look like, but yeah, we're gonna be retired by then.
50 years from now. It'll all be gone.
Riding around in your self driving car,
Not having to worry about you fixing it. .
Well today we've learned more than we ever thought possible about the deep history about repair in Portage county. Thank you, John Harry for hosting another historical, all about the car podcast.
Happy that you guys came out.
As we sit right here at Heritage Park in the Village of Plover, we hope to have you ride along next time on all about the car. To listen to previous episodes, find additional resources or to simply send us a message head to all about the car podcast dot com. We'll see you next time.
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