GLADWIN, Michigan
 
Since I spend part of my summers here in the middle of the Michigan mitten, I’ve become a regular visitor to the Gladwin County Public Library, where my laptop can access the Internet. (Charter Communications assured me -- and more than once -- that I could get cable Internet access at the house where I stay, but then it reneged on that promise when it discovered the cable ends some 900 feet short of the house. Of course, I finally was told, if I’d like to pay $2,300, the company would be happy extend the cable.)
 
O.K., I got that off my chest for the moment. Back to the library...
 
I’ve found two other places in this town where I can access free wi-fi -- the McDonald’s restaurant and a delightful coffee shop called Northern Expresso. I’ve been to both, but my first choice is the library, where I don’t have to buy a cup of coffee or lunch to use the Internet, but primarily because I’ve made the delicious discovery that the library also is the hub of the community, in part because of its terrific staff, its well-stocked shelves, perhaps the best children’s library I’ve ever seen, and because it provides for free a fleet of computers to anyone who wants to get online for a hour or so.
 
A bonus for me has been the library’s movie collection.
 
Last year, I watched all the Humphrey Bogart movies, with and without Lauren Bacall. I’m not sure what genre I’ll explore this summer.
 
Last year, I noticed but never attended the library’s monthly Booked for Lunch lectures. But this year I’m going to as many as possible (and not just because of the great food from Grand Affair Catering. Hey, I have to eat lunch anyway. Why not spend $10 on a meal and expand my knowledge as well as my girth?).
 
Booked for Lunch for May featured videographer Ric Mixter, who specializes in exploring Great Lakes shipwrecks. In addition to being a former news videographer who has done shows for the Discovery and History channels, Mixter is an accomplished scuba diver.
 
As Mixter told us, seemingly everyone in the country -- and, thanks to Gordon Lightfoot, well beyond North America -- knows about the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. But, Mixter said, there have been 6,000 shipwrecks on the Great Lakes, and while 20,000 sailors have lost their lives to the lakes, there are dramatic stories of rescues that have yet to be told. Mixter’s mission is to share those stories, when possible by finding those who were aboard and were saved.
 
And thus is focus for us on the Cedarville, a 558-foot-long that primarily carried limestone quarried at Rogers City, Michigan, north up Lake Huron, through the Straits of Mackinaw and then down Lake Michigan to the U.S. Steel mills at Gary, Indiana.
 
In May of 1965, the crew of 30 and a brand new and first-time captain left Gary to return to Rogers City. The Cedarville was following two other ships as they made their way through dense fog beneath the Mackinaw Bridge. The rookie skipper assumed the other ships would turn in the usual direction, but they did not. His mistake led to a collision. That and a series of mistakes he made after the collision would cost 10 of his crew their lives, Mixter said.
 
Mixter also told us that only 1,000 of those 6,000 Great Lakes shipwrecks have been found. One of the most unusual of those discoveries occurred when Michigan State Police divers were searching for the driver of the Yugo that had been blown off the Mackinac Bridge in 1989. While looking for the car and its driver, those divers discovered the wreckage of the William Young, a 140-foot schooner that sank in 1891.
 
Isn’t it amazing what you can learn at the library?
 
-- Larry Edsall

TUCSON, Arizona
 
“Gasoline?!” it says on the ove-rsized postcard Eva Hakansson handed me. “That’s so last century!”
 
The postcard shows photos of Eva, her crew -- which includes her husband, Bill Dube --and their KillaJoule, the 19-foot-long, streamline-bodied motorcycle she designed and they’ve built.
 
Oh, and if you think electric-powered vehicles are merely fancied-up golf carts or no-pedal bicycles, you need to think again. Eva and Bill designed and built the KillaJoule around the goal of exceeding 400 miles per hour on the Bonneville Salt Flats! And that’s without using any of that last-century gasoline or jet fuel or any other petroleum-based propulsion source, just batteries and electric motors.
 
Why? “To convince people -- the typical person or the board member of a major car company -- that electric vehicles are not merely golf cars but that they are fast cars,” Dube explains.
 
So why a motorcycle instead of a four-wheeled car? Because of the bike’s exciting power-to-weight ratio and because of the bang-for-the-buck when it comes to expenditures.
 
“We have a very limited budget and we want to go very fast,” Eva says. “A motorcycle is the way to do it.”
 
Oh, and it’s not just “a” motorcycle. Bill also created a more conventional-looking bike, the KillaCycle, which competes on the National Electric Drag Racing Association circuit, where it has covered a quarter-mile in 7.82 seconds at 168 mph.
 
Oh, and the KillaCycle, equipped with batteries that generate some 500 horsepower, consumes only 7 cents-worth of electricity per run. (For 7 cents, you can buy about two ounces of gasoline.)
 
Oh, and KillaCycle can make 14 runs on a single charge of its battery pack. But, Eva says, “why carry more fuel than you need?” Besides, the bike’s batteries can be recharged in just four minutes.
 
Bill and Eva and other NEDRA competitors -- most, including a DeLorean, a Pontiac Fiero and a Datsun 1200 sedan known as the “White Zombie,” with four wheels -- were here in Tucson for the inaugural Bookman’s Spring Thaw, an EV racing weekend at Southwestern International Raceway. (While rain would rein in the speeds achieved on the Tucson track, just a few weeks later, a rival bike -- the Orange County Chopper Rocket -- would become the first electric vehicle to break the 7-second barrier, touring a quarter-mile track in Virginia 6.94 seconds at 201.37 mph.
 
Among those making runs on the Tucson track was Bob Oldfather, Bookman’s founder who also is a former GM EV1 owner and who collects early (pre-World War I) American electric vehicles, including-- as seems fitting for someone who owns several used book stores -- a 1912 electric truck that the Curtis Publishing Co., publisher of the The Saturday Evening Post, Ladies Home Journal, Jack & Jill and other titles, used as a delivery vehicle at its Philadelphia headquarters until 1959.
 
Eva and Bill met at an electric car show. He’s an mechanical engineer who built electric cars and used them as daily drivers and for drag racing. More than a dozen years ago, he helped found the NEDRA. Learning quickly the challenges of converting an existing vehicle from gasoline to electricity, he launched a purpose-built EV project, the KillaCycle.
 
Eva is from Sweden, where she grew up in a family of engineers and racers. Her father raced motorcycles -- sometimes building their engines from scratch -- but during the oil crisis in the 1970s he began developing electric-powered alternatives.
 
Eva won awards for her schoolgirl science projects, which included using electricity to purify water. She earned business and environmental sciences degrees and worked with her father to build Sweden’s first street-legal electric motorcycle.
 
While writing a book about electric and hybrid vehicles, she contacted Dube to obtain a photograph of the KillaCycle. They later met, and married. In addition to building and racing electric motorcycles, she’s completing her master’s degree studies at the University of Denver.
 
And getting ready to return to Bonneville, where she and KillaJoule already have set one world record: .Because what appears to be an outrigger on the bike technically is considered a sidecar, the KillaJoule already is the world’s fastest electric-powered sidecar motorcycle because Eva rode it to a speed of 138.586 mph on a shakedown run at Bonneville last year.
 
-- Larry Edsall
 
 
 

Remember playing cops and robbers when you were a kid? I got to play something like that recently when I was invited to ride along on the inaugural Radar Rally. The rally pitted make-believe speed enforcers against those who believe speed limits are set too low and are established not primarily for safety on the highways but for generating income for various municipal, county and state coffers.
 
The rally equipped three vehicles with the latest in speeder-detection technology (the same equipment used in police cars) and positioned those vehicles alongside an 80-mile route driven by a group of vehicles equipped with state-of-the-art “counter measures,” including radar detectors and laser jammers.
 
The idea wasn’t fast driving, but to discern which of the detectors and jammers were the most effective in identifying speed-enforcement equipment and warning the driver, and not only about equipment in the enforcement vehicles but of stationary speed cameras as well.
 
“In a few hours we’ll have six months’ worth of data,” said rally organizer Craig Peterson, who also is the founder of RadarTest.com.
 
Peterson, a former municipal police officer, has been actively testing speed-enforcement equipment and various counter measures for more than 20 years. After leaving law enforcement, Peterson worked as an executive recruiter. He also starting writing about his speed-enforcement and detection equipment tests for a national automotive magazine. In 1999, he launched his website, which both evaluates and sells such equipment. His passion includes extensive speed-enforcement research work, which has involved him as an expert witness in several court cases.
 
“People driving perfectly safely find themselves in violation,” Peterson contends.
 
“Traffic engineers don’t set speed limits,” he adds, “Legislators do... and no elected official wants to be accused of ignoring safety.”
 
Therefore, Peterson says, instead of listening to traffic engineers, who say the speed limit should be based on whatever speed the 85th percentile of drivers typically -- and safely -- travel a given stretch of roadway, those limits are set by politicians with votes and ticket income in their eyes.
 
For example, Peterson says that while red-light cameras may reduce the speed at which intersection accidents occur, traffic engineers tell him that an even more effective -- though not money-generating system -- would be simply extending the duration of yellow lights by one second, thus providing an inexpensive and yet effective way of clearing an intersection before the red and green lights glow!
 
One piece of evidence Peterson offers for his statements is that nearly all cities include fines from speeding and parking violations in their annual budgets, counting in advance on such income and thus depending -- and putting pressure -- on law enforcement personnel to provide those funds.
 
I divided my Radar Rally day into two halves. For the first half, I rode in an enforcement vehicle equipped with radar, laser and even old-fashioned VASCAR technology (VASCAR is short for Visual Average Speed Computer and Recorder, a system created in the 1960s).
 
Peterson explains how the various enforcement equipment works, and says that because it employs only a time/distance computer and the operator’s hand-eye coordination, VASCAR is the only detection system that cannot be defeated by electronic counter measures.
 
So why isn’t it used more? Because it takes time to measure out the roadway reference points and operating the aged equipment requires a lot more concentration than simply aiming and pointing a laser gun or flipping the switches on a radar machine. VASCAR is the system used when highway speeds are checked by aircraft.
 
Oh, another thing Peterson said is that those tinted license plate covers really don’t hide your registration numbers from law enforcement equipment. He explained how it has to do with refractive and reflective angles that may shade the plates from eye view but not from roadside camera equipment.
 
“The sheer volume of erroneous online information on the subject of speed-measuring technology is astounding,” Peterson recently wrote on his website. “And just about everyone, it seems, is confident that they’re well up to speed on this stuff.
 
“They’re not, but try convincing them of that. Worse yet, I’ve got sitting on the shelf two new laser guns that can neither be detected nor jammed. Once their numbers grow, they’ll become a tangible threat, further turning upside down the clueless driver’s tenuous grasp of the technology.
 
“But seeing is believing and there’s one way to illustrate how the latest radar and laser are used against speeders... [so] we’re hosting the first Radar Rally.”
 
For the second half of the day, I rode along in a car equipped with three different counter-measure systems, including one that links similar model radar detectors from various cars and thus shares up-to-date entrapment warnings by talking to you through your smart phone.
 
Once upon a time a few decades ago, I tried driving with a radar detector. However, I quickly quit using it because if was constantly offering up false warnings -- some units are sensitive to garage door opener frequencies -- and, well, because of worry -- I found it was much less nerve-wracking to drive at or just beyond the speed limit rather than risk my license on the capabilities of a cigarette pack-sized box suction-cupped to my windshield.
 
Peterson said -- and my Radar Rally ride showed me, however, how some -- but not all -- modern devices very effectively screen out false warnings and provide a clear alert at a substantial distance before mobile or stationary speed-detection equipment comes into view.
 
Should you be interested in such things -- provided, of course, you live neither in Virginia or Canada, where such devices are illegal -- Peterson will be posting the results of the Radar Rally on his website.
 
Oh, and the second Radar Rally is scheduled for 2014. Why wait two years? Because that’s when the next generation of detection equipment and counter measures are scheduled to roll onto the roads.
 
-- Larry Edsall

Flashing a photo of the Pontiac Aztek onto a big screen, car designer Ron Will admitted, “We don’t always come up with winners.”
 
 Admitting one’s mistakes in very public forums is part and parcel of surviving in the highly competitive world of car design. Though design studio successes far outweigh failures, one mistake can have far-reaching consequences for both the designer and the brand.  
 
Will, a former stylist for General Motors and Subaru, organized a forum on the subject for the Phoenix Automotive Press Association’s April meeting. Joining him on the discussion panel were fellow designers: 

• Bob Ackerman, who worked for 10 years for General Motors and for 27 for Chrysler, where his work included iconic 1960s muscle cars;
• Allen Flowers, who worked at GM, helped launch Nissan’s U.S. design office, and taught design at the Academy of Art in San Francisco
• Bob Marcks, who worked in Raymond Loewy’s heralded Studebaker studio, did highly successful 1964 model year vehicles at Ford, and then worked on the west coast before joining Chrysler, where he suggested the “big rig” look for the Dodge Ram pickup truck;
  
• Gary Smith, long-time senior designer at GM, where his work included many performance-oriented show cars;
  
• Robert Q. Riley, a freelance designer whose work includes not only cars but dental product design, watercraft and fitness equipment.

Their discussion covered how designers set goals for themselves and the constraints, including cost, safety regulations and manufacturing capabilities, which they must overcome in bringing their ideas to production.  

Despite such challenges, “Designers always are trying to stretch the limit,” said Will. Their ultimate goal is see automakers and car buyers embrace their personal visions of the future.  

Some other notes and quotes from the evening:  

• Bob Ackerman: “Three things in design are important: Proportion. Proportion. Proportion. If you get the proportions right, you can deal with the details. But if the proportions are wrong, you can’t save it [the vehicle] with details.”
  
• Allen Flowers also offered three key elements in vehicle design: “Beauty. Appropriateness. Originality.”  
• Bob Marcks offered another key to good design: “Make it look like it costs more than it does.” He offered the example of the 1970s-era Chrysler Cordoba and Dodge Charger. “The body didn’t know what it was until it was halfway down the assembly line,” he said. “The Charger looked like a Chevrolet. The Cordoba looked like a Rolls-Royce or Jaguar. People were trading in Continentals and Eldorados for the Cordoba.”
  
• Asked how much “bean counters” interfere with vehicle design, Marcks noted that was not a problem during the dark days of the late 1970s at Chrysler. “We didn’t have any beans to count,” he said.
  
• On the other hand, Ron Will said that at one point, designers had created Ferrari-like tail lamps for the Chevrolet Vega, “but they cost 50 cents more so we ended up with tail lights that looked like sardine cans.”  
  
• Several designers were perplexed by the popularity of retro design. “That’s not right,” said Ackerman. “Things need to move on.” He also noted the influence of the 1969 Chevrolet Camaro on the newest iteration of the car, and the high dollars original ‘69s bring at classic car auctions. “The ’69 Camaro was just something we did before the ’70 1/2 [redesign], but everyone goes nuts over them. That’s puzzling to designers. Now, the Monte Carlo, Eldorado, Riviera and Toronado, those were very good designs but aren’t pulling in the big bucks [at auctions].”  
  
• Ron Will explained that “the magic in design is in the corners, in the transition from one surface to another. How do the surfaces flow together, or do they? What’s the surface development?” And then he shared a secret: “Some of the best ‘designers’ weren’t designers but the modelers [who translated those designs into full-scale clay models and] who knew how to make it flow."
• Will also suggested that the the Infiniti Emerge-E electric sports car concept (see drawing) shows the design cues that we'll be seeing in a lot of cars in the coming years.

“Good design,” added Ackerman, “transcends trends.”

 -- Larry Edsall  

LAS VEGAS -- “I thought about it when I drove through the tunnel last night,” said NASCAR racer Greg Biffle, who was reminded immediately upon arrival at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway that the last time big-time drivers were here, one of them did not walk away.
 
The Kobalt Tools 400 is the first major event at the Vegas track since two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon was killed in a multi-car crash during an Indy car event here last fall.
 
“What we do is a dangerous sport,” Biffle said. “We know what can happen. But you try to be the best prepared you can be anytime you get in the car. That’s what I concentrate on, on being prepared.”
 
It’s been more than a decade since NASCAR’s top series lost one of its drivers, in fact its very top driver, to a crash, seven-time series champion Dale Earnhardt dying after hitting the wall just before the finish of the Daytona 500 in 2001. Since Earnhardt’s death, NASCAR has made cars and race tracks much safer. And yet, Wheldon’s death and the drivers’ arrival here even such seeming daredevils that things happen very quickly at 200 miles per hour.
 
“Sliding down the middle of the track [last month] at Daytona, knowing I was going to get hit in the door, there was fear running through my veins,” said Jimmy Johnson, a multiple NASCAR Cup champion who was involved in a crash early in the most recent Daytona 500.
 
Johnson said he’d wondered if enough had been done to protect the drivers after a direct hit on their side of the car, “but after Daytona, I know how strong the changes have made that side of the car.
 
 “We do take a lot of risk because we know the cars are safe,” said Johnson. “One area for us to visit in the future is the area above the driver’s head, from an intrusion standpoint, and especially at the [restrictor] plate races where we [can] tumble.”
 
But Johnson and others were reminded again just how strong their cars have become when his teammate Jeff Gordon’s car tumbled over and over again later in the Daytona race.
 
“You hold on tight and hope it will end soon,” Gordon said as he verbally replayed that crash. “You brace yourself for any impact that may be coming.” The problem, he added, is that you don’t know what’s coming, because while the car is flipping, what the driver sees is only “sky and track and sky and track...
 
“There were only a few split seconds through that whole experience when I was nervous,” Gordon said. “One was sliding on the [driver’s side] door, wondering if those sparks turn into fire, how am I going to get out the other window?”
 
Gordon said he pleaded, “please don’t land upside down,” which, of course, is what his car did.
 
“How am I going to get out?” he wondered. “The longest part of that entire wreck was waiting for them [the safety crew] to get to the window and deciding whether to flip it back up before I got out. I wanted to get out in a hurry. They wanted to flip it over. I was stuck inside the car.”
 
Gordon was freed, and really no worse for it. That wasn’t the case for Wheldon, driving a different kind of car at a different kind of track.
 
Those differences, Johnson said, make “it easier for us as drivers to say that was a different kind of car and then go out and do our jobs.”
 
But, Biffle speculated, that likely wouldn’t be the case for Danica Patrick, who is racing full-time this season in NASCAR after launching her career in Indy cars. Patrick was still racing Indy cars last fall and was among those on the track when Wheldon crashed.
 
“There won’t be a time when I come to Las Vegas and won’t think about Dan and the family,” she said here while preparing for her NASCAR race.
 
“As race car drivers, our job is to drive the race car. We need to be able to do that with our whole heart and mind,” she said. “I went out there and drove just like any other day [in the first NASCAR practice session of the weekend]. But it’s in the moments when you don’t have such a singular focus, like walking up here to the media center, where you have time to think about multiple things, and it gets to you, and you’re reminded of those moments.
 
“It doesn’t completely escape you while you’re in the car,” she admitted, “but you have one thing, one singular thing to focus on out on the race track, especially when you’re trying to get the car to its very limit.
 
“But,” she added, “the thoughts outside of the car are when you remember so much.
 
“Time is a healer, for sure, but there won’t be a time that I come here and won’t think of it and all of the different things I did that week, whether it was driving up and down the Strip in our race cars or seeing other things. That’s what tragedy will do to you.”
 
 -- Larry Edsall

LAS VEGAS -- Sitting here in the deadline media room at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, you’d think the 2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup series season has yet to really begin, that the Daytona Fireball 500 and last weekend’s desert dash at Phoenix basically amounted to stock car spring training.
 
Oh, sure, the victories are recorded securely and the points count toward making the post-season Chase for the Championship, but the drivers paraded onto the podium here today were pretty ambivalent about trying to project any significance based on what’s happened so far.
 
“It’s an important weekend for all of us to prove our mile-and-a-half prowess,” said Brad Keselowski, Daytona on-track tweeter and driver of Roger Penske’s No. 2 Dodge. “This [weekend] is a pretty good indicator of what teams are going to have, at least for the short term. Whoever runs here seems to run well at Charlotte and the other key places. It’s a pretty good indicator of strength.”
 
“How deeply into spring does it take to know where we are?” Greg Biffle, driver of Jack Roush’s No. 16 Ford repeated the question.
 
“You can answer that question when you leave here,” he answered, explaining that success on the long, steeply banked Daytona track and the flat mile at Phoenix are all well and good, but that Las Vegas provides a true reality check.
 
Why? Because this track measures one and a half miles around, the same as 10 other NASCAR ovals, tracks that together account for one-third of all Sprint Cup races, including five of the 10 Chase events, including four of the final six that determine the championship.
 
“The mile-and-a-half stuff is the most important thing we come across for the year,” said Kevin Harvick, driver of Richard Childress’s No. 29 Chevrolet. “It’s important to see where you are on this type of track.”
 
“This is the first mile-and-half of the year and we all know how many we have in the season,” said Jimmy Johnson, five-time champion and driver of Rick Hendricks’ No. 48 Chevrolet.
 
Sure, the drivers said, those mile-and-a-half tracks are different. Different in banking. Different in track surface. Different in the number of laps run between the green and checkered flags.
 
But success on the 1.5-mile tracks definitely shows in who sits where at the NASCAR awards banquet.
 
“This race is important to everyone in the garage,” said Carl Edwards, driver of Roush’s No. 99 Ford. “It’s the first mile-and-a-half and you have a chance to see what you’ve been working on to see who’s strong on this type of racetracks for the entire year.”
 
Edwards won this race a year ago and the momentum helped him share the season points lead with Tony Stewart, who took the title on tie-breaking criteria.
 
“We’re going to know where we stand after this race weekend,” Edwards continued. “You might not get the result you deserve and the points might not represent your speed, but if you have a good strong run here it will give you a lot of confidence going to the other tracks that rely on this type of setup.”
 
Hmmm, who knew: NASCAR measures success a mile-and-a-half at a time.
 
-- Larry Edsall

Not that an auto enthusiast would ever hang such a thing in his or her car, but The New York Times Magazine, in its most recent “Who Made That?” feature, profiles the creation of the tree-shaped automotive air freshener.
 
The inventor was Julius Samann, a chemist who fled Nazi Germany and studied Alpine tree aromas in Canada. As the Times tells it, one day the milkman was complaining to Samann about the foul smell split milk left in his delivery truck, so Samann invented the tree-shaped auto air freshener and launched Car-Freshner Corp., which since 1954 has sold billions of the things, which now are available in 60 scents.
 
So, I wonder, as a car enthusiast, would you ever hang such a thing from your rearview mirror, or are you so meticulous that you’d never let something befoul the smell of your car’s interior in the first place?
 
You might think that Hot Wheels Classics is about small, die-cast toy cars, but it’s actually a new and periodic report from the National Insurance Crime Bureau, which annual products its “Hot Wheels” listing of the 10 most-stolen vehicles in the United States. Hot Wheels Classic is the bureau’s new report, one that takes a long look at thefts of a single vehicle.
 
The first of those vehicles is the Ford Mustang.
 
“Since it was first introduced to the public at the 1964 New York World's Fair, nearly eight and a half million Mustangs have been sold, making it one of the most popular and enduring vehicles to ever grace a dealer's showroom,” the bureau reports. “Unfortunately, over the years many Mustang owners have had to deal with the theft of their pony cars.  Aside from the hassle of losing their transportation and all that entails, a Mustang loss can be overwhelming given that many owners form an emotional bond with their machines.  You would probably have to own one to understand that.”
 
The bureau reports that between 1964 and 2011, 611,093 Mustangs have been reported stolen. The most thefts occurred in 1981 (20,708) and the fewest in 2011 (4,347). 
 
If you’re interested, since 2001, the most stolen Mustang has been the 2000 model (7085 reported stolen).
 
The NICB says it has been in the business “of identifying and recovering stolen vehicles since 1912.”
 
For example, it offers the case of a 1965 Shelby GT350 stolen from a young Marine in 1982. Twenty-five years later, despite the car’s VIN being altered, Maryland State Police and the bureau discovered the car, which had been sold with the altered VIN and fraudulent title.
 
“The duped owner was contacted [and] was absolutely dazed when they informed him that his prized possession was, in fact, stolen property,” the bureau reports. On the other hand, the former Marine, now a professional airline pilot, “was overjoyed when he was notified that his dream car had been recovered and was in excellent condition,” and soon would be returned to his possession.
 
The vehicle I own, my Nissan Frontier crew cab 4x4 pickup truck, just turned 12 years of age. According to Polk, the Southfield, Michigan-based company that tracks such things, the average length of ownership of vehicles purchased new has risen to a record 71.4 months, or nearly six years.
 
Those who buy their vehicles used instead of new keep them 49.9 months, says Polk, which notes that the combined new/used length of ownership has increased 23 percent since late 2008. Polk says vehicle durability and the weak economy are factors in the longer ownership trend.
 
So hold long have you owned your car?
 
NASCAR’s stars won’t be the only stock car racers competing at the Daytona International Speedway next February. The track plans to build a new .4-mile oval along the backstretch of the 2.5-mile high-banked track so competitors from three short-track series can compete during SpeedWeeks 2013.
 
“This is all about the stars of tomorrow vying for glory at Daytona International Speedway,” said George Silbermann, who oversees the K&N Pro Series, Whelen Modified and All-American series for NASCAR. Top drivers from NASCAR series in Canada, Mexico and Europe also will be invited to the “Battle at the Beach” events, which will be staged under the lights and televised by Speed.
 
The “Battle” will be sponsored by -- get this -- a college, the University of Northwestern Ohio, a 91-year-old private but not-for-profit college that offers, though its college of applied technologies, a degree in high performance motorsports and owns Limaland Motorsports Park.
 
After naming its previous sport utility vehicles after a hot chili pepper and a dangerous South American reptile, Porsche will call its third and smallest such vehicle the Macan, which, it says, is the Indonesian word for tiger. By the way, Porsche prefers that we refer to its SUVs not as SUVs but as “off-road cars.”
 
The Macan, which we assume is named in honor of the four-legged animal, not the two-legged golfer or the four-tired, bygone British sports car, is to go into production in 2013.
 
This has nothing to do with cars, but I find it fascinating nonetheless: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “While everyone knows that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in major league baseball in 1947, it is largely forgotten that the groundwork for that event was laid more than 40 years earlier.  In 1903, the Ohio Wesleyan baseball team played an away game against Notre Dame.  The team's catcher was a young African-American, Charles Thomas.  When he was denied lodging at the team's hotel in South Bend, Indiana, the Ohio Wesleyan baseball coach, Branch Rickey, had Thomas share his room.  Years later, Rickey said the racist incident was his inspiration to sign Jackie Robinson with the Brooklyn Dodgers.”
 
-- Larry Edsall

Ah, spring! Everything is fresh and green, ready to bloom and full of promise.
 
It’s the same with spring training, that annual rite of optimism for baseball teams and their fans. Every team is a potential pennant winner. Every player is a potential All-Star. No pitcher’s arm is weary. No batter is mired in a 12-game hitting slump. Why, things are so upbeat that no managers are fired during spring training (that doesn’t come until at least a few weeks into the regular season).
 
Spring training this year also brings the release of Patrick James O’Connor’s first novel, The Last Will and Testament of Lemuel Higgins.
 
Advance publicity for the book includes an oversized if faded Lemuel Higgins baseball card:

 In his first appearance for the Yankees, Higgins struck out All-Star Red Sox Outfielder Jorge Arriaga on five pitches

as well as a photocopy of Higgins’ obituary from the East Angler (N.Y.) Courier News.
 
The obit informs that Higgins, East Angler “hometown hero and former pitcher for the New York Yankees” has died at the age of 26.
 
Cause of death: “complications associated with the AIDS virus,” which, the obit reports, the young athlete reportedly contracted “as the result of blood transfusion after injury suffered on the field.”
 
But read the novel and you learn the injury was not suffered on the playing field, but in a barroom brawl.
 
At times, I felt like I was wasting my time as I struggled to stick through the middle chapters in which Higgins’ alcohol-fueled errors aren’t merely wasting his talent and letting in runs, but ruining lives. But I found rewards for staying in the game, and there’s a rally in the late innings you don’t want to miss.
 
Just like a young pitcher’s curve ball, spring training may be full of promise, but what matters is performance during the regular season, during real life itself.
 
O’Connor’s novel takes the form of Higgins’ last will and testament, written to this estranged wife and young son, written from his deathbed, each chapter a bequeathment that starts with leaving an item to someone but then unfolds with another and often so-sad saga summarized by Higgins’ young attorney as he tells the town about “your very own prodigal son, a boy who had lost his way and now comes back to you for a second change.”
 
This novel is not about baseball any more than it is about life on the dairy farm where Higgins spends his off seasons. It’s about a man and his mistakes, wasted talents and wasted relationships, and his struggle for redemption. And not just one man, but all of us men.
 
All worthy but perhaps rarely discussed subjects at book clubs or on bullpen benches.
 
-- Larry Edsall
 
The Last Will and Testament of Lemuel Higgins
By Patrick James O'Connor
$12.99 paperback / $5.99 e-book
Blackbriar Press, Inc. (www.blackbriarpress.com)
 

In an article about the writer’s craft written 13 years ago for The New York Times, E. Annie Proulx laments doing research on the Internet and she admits she doesn’t use libraries for such work as had been her habit.
 
“Libraries have changed,” she wrote. “They are no longer quiet but rather noisy places where people gather to exchange murder mysteries. In bad weather homeless folk exuding pungent odors doze at the reading tables. One stands in line to use computers...”
 
However, she added, “I mourn the loss of the old card catalogues, not because I’m a Luddite, but because the oaken trays of yesteryear offered the researcher an element of random utility and felicitous surprise through encounters with adjacent cards: information by chance that is different in kind from the computer’s ramified but rigid order.”
 
Ah, the wood-trayed card catalogs of old. The weighty feel and delicate balance of a long, narrow drawer filled with alphabetically ordered with cards pointing you to a shelf otherwise identified only by a mystic range of Dewey decimal numbers. The serendipity of fingering along the top of those cards, looking for the book you seek, only to be waylaid by a fascinating title on a topic you may never have considered but now cannot wait to explore.
 
Ms. Proulx is right. On the Internet you simply punch in your title or subject and all you get is, say, Left-Handed PItchers pitchers with no opportunity to be stumble into Lee, Robert E., to be sidetracked to the Left Bank, or to be momentarily restrained by Leg Irons.
 
Reading the author’s lament got me thinking about another bygone opportunity for such happy happenstance.
 
A few months after Ms. Proulx wrote her essay, I left the magazine where I’d worked for a dozen years. As I was packing my personal belongings in preparation for a move some 1700 crow-flied miles to the southwest, the Editor stopped by my managing editor’s desk and suggested I not take my card-laden Rolodex with me. He tried convince me that the Rolodex wasn’t mine, but the magazine’s, that the contacts it contained belonged to the corporation, not to a mere corporal on the masthead.
 
My disagreement was strong. I’d brought the Rolodex with me from my previous place of employment, a daily newspaper, and I was taking it and its contents with me to my new address. However, I was willing to compromise: If he wanted someone to photocopy each card and then put it back in its place...
 
I’d been diligent (with help from my daughters, who'd paste on or staple in business cards I collected) in maintaining the information on those contact cards, and my Rolodex was much more complete and up-to-date than the one that resided on the editorial department secretary’s desk.
 
For weeks after I left, I’d get phone calls from former co-workers, asking me to check my Rolodex for someone’s telephone number.
 
Like those old library card catalogs, a Rolodex provides opportunity for exploration of unanticipated delights. I type a name into the Address Book on my MacBook Pro and the person’s phone numbers, email address and other information pop immediately to my screen.
 
But I start fingering through the cards on my Rolodex and if I overshoot Ken Squier by one card, there’s Lyn St. James, and for some reason I no longer remember, the Eureka Lodge in Palmer, Alaska is right there between Cary Agajanian and the phone number for Tim Allen’s secretary.
 
I’ve never been to Alaska, let alone to Palmer or its Eureka Lodge, but for some reason I have that business card in my Rolodex.

But enough of this detour. We need to turn back to our main storyline. I find it ironic that it was on the Internet, not letting my fingers wander through a card catalog or my Rolodex that I found Ms. Proulx’ article and the inspiration for this trip. I’d been reading the Sunday book review section of The New York Times, where the reviewer of Elmore Leonard’s newest work mentioned an essay the author had written that was part of a “Writers on Writing” series the newspaper had published.

I wanted to see what Leonard had written about writing, went to the Internet, found his article, read it, and then wondered which other authors had participated and what they’d written and that’s how I found Ms. Proulx’s road map for writers. I delighted that even the title of her piece encouraged detours: “Head Down the Back Road,” it suggested.

-- Larry Edsall

It’s Halftime in America Script
 
It’s halftime. Both teams are in their locker room discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.
 
It’s halftime in America, too. People are out of work and they’re hurting.
 
And they’re all wondering what they’re going to do to make a comeback.
 
And we’re all scared, because this isn’t a game.
 
The people of Detroit know a little something about this. They almost lost everything. But we all pulled together, now Motor City is fighting again.
 
I’ve seen a lot of tough eras, a lot of downturns in my life. And, times when we didn’t understand each other. It seems like we’ve lost our heart at times. When the fog of division, discord, and blame made it hard to see what lies ahead.
 
But after those trials, we all rallied around what was right, and acted as one. Because that’s what we do. We find a way through tough times, and if we can’t find a way, then we’ll make one.
 
All that matters now is what’s ahead. How do we come from behind? How do we come together? And, how do we win?
 
Detroit’s showing us it can be done. And, what’s true about them is true about all of us.
 
This country can’t be knocked out with one punch. We get right back up again and when we do the world is going to hear the roar of our engines. Yeah, it’s halftime America. And, our second half is about to begin.