From many Muntz ago

An attempted biennial desk clear yields some real bounty here. We came up with a manually typed, affable letter sent by Hemmings Nation Northwest citizen Al Hanson, of Eugene, Oregon. Back in the 1950s, it turns out, Al was patrolling the broad byways of Los Angeles, armed with his Argus C3 rangefinder camera and shooting […]

1960: The smog war begins

If the 50th anniversary of the nation’s first automobile smog bill hasn’t been overly memorialized, well, we’re not surprised. Between emissions regulations, safety oversight, insurance premiums and OPEC, the law enacted in April of 1960 was the first, and maybe most important, factor in ushering the almost 20 years of low-performance Seventies and Eighties.
With the […]

If it weren’t for insurance…

If you’ve ever lived in an apartment, or in some other arrangement where you didn’t have access to a space to work on your car, you’ve likely had the same idea that Ray Woolley had: a self-service garage, where the garage owner provides the space and tools for rent, while you provide the labor. Woolley […]