1. Pick your favorite number between 1-9.
2. Multiply by 3, then...
3. Add 3, then again multiply by 3. (Go ahead, get your calculator.)
4. You'll get a 2 or 3 digit number.
5. Add the digits together. With that number, check the list below to see what your FAVORITE CAR is . . . . . .

1. Oldsmobile 2. Lincoln 3. Dodge 4. Edsel 5. Chrysler 6. Volkswagen 7. Mazda 8. Pontiac 9. Ford Model T 10. Hudson Was there ever any doubt?

From Texas Touring Ts (December 2008)

I. Thou shalt not store thy cars out-of-doors, except for the wife's modern iron.
II. Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's car, nor his garage, nor his battery charger.
III. Thou shalt not love thy cars more than thy wife and children; as much, but not more.
IV. Thou shalt not read thy Hemmings on company time, lest thy employer make it impossible to continue thy car payments.
V. Thou shalt not despise thy neighbor's Edsel, nor his DeSoto, nor even his 1947 Plymouth.
VI. Thou shalt not allow thy daughters nor thy sons to get married during the holy days of Hershey.
VII. Thou shalt not deceive thy wife into thinking that thee is taking her for a romantic Sunday driven when, indeed, thou art going out to look at another car.
VIII. Thou shalt not tell thy spouse the entire cost of thy latest restoration, at least not all at the same time.
IX. Thou shalt not promise thy wife a new addition to the house and then use it to store cars; thou shalt not store cars in the attic.
X. Thou shalt not buy thy wife a floor jack for Christmas.

Terry Plata has furnished us with the above Car Nut's Creed, which he adheres to faithfully each and every day without deviation.
(Come on now, Renée, what's the real story? Does he practice what he preaches? Lone Star Ts Newsletter, 19XX

YOUR AUTO I.Q.

Of the 2200 automobiles once made, only a few remain in our memories, and a mere handful are still manufactured today. The memory quiz below is essentially for the "old-timers" among us, those who grew up with the industry and like to be reminded of the early horseless-carriage days. And for the young ’uns among us who think the past is worth preserving.

1. What eight cars were named after United States presidents?
2. What car borrowed the name of an American flower?
3. List five cars that were named after animals.
4. Eight cars, all defunct today, once had the names of states. What were they?
5. What three cars had the names of pictures on playing cards?
6. What car had the same name as a garden shrub?
7. What car borrowed the name of a heavy firearm?
8. What car had the name of a chirping insect?
9. What two cars had the names of birds?
10. What car had the name of a Victorian synonym for couch?
11. What car had the name of an imaginary reptile?
12. The car did not have fins, but it was named after a water creature. What was it?
13. What car had the name (slightly misspelled) of a man who clips hedges?
14. What two cars were named after breeds of dogs?
15. What two cars were named after United States generals, both of whom became presidents?
16. What car had the name of a very long race?
17. An English statesman and an Australian city had a car named after them. What was it?
18. What car had the name of the winner of the Battle of Austerlitz:
19. What car had the name of an American aviator and auto racer?
20. What car was named after the title given 96 of our elected representatives?
21. What car had the name of a famous Dutch painter and a type of beard?
22. What car had the name of a bed on wheels (and tracks)?
23. What three cars had the names of famous universities?
24. What car name was a synonym for windstorm?
25. What four cars had names that were the same as state nicknames?
26. What car was named after the head of an Indian tribe?
27. What car had the name of a tree about which Robert Frost wrote a poem?
28. What car had the name of a breed of small chickens?
29. What nationally famous St. Louis brewing company once built an automobile bearing its name?
30. What car was know as "Old Porcupine" and why?
31. What early and prominent make of steam automobile was designed and manufactured by twin brothers?
32. What make of car won the first Indianapolis 500 mile race?
33. What car has the same name as a rock famous in American history?
34. When was the first Model A Ford car built?
35. What car was named after an Indian tribe in New York State?
37. What car had the name of a famous detective in fiction?
38. What car had the name of a term of endearment?
39. What car had the name of a waterfall many people have seen on their honeymoon?
40. What car had the name of a kind of cracker?
41. What car had the name of a large American steel town and also a famous town in Palestine?
42. What car had the same name as a famous newspaper editor who ran for the presidency of the United States in 1872?
43. What car had the name of a New England poet and essayist, one of the Transcendentalists?
44. What cars had the names of two of our best-known wartime Secretaries of the Navy?
45. What car had the name of the second largest city in Pennsylvania?
46. What car had the same name as a best-selling novel by Lloyd C. Douglas?
47. What car had the name of an extinct bird? (Hint: the word is used today to describe someone who is not quite right in the head.)
48. What was the first name of the General Motors building in Detroit


Answers

1. Washington, Monroe, Lincoln, Grant, Jackson, Johnson, Harding, Roosevelt 2. American Beauty 3. Badger, Panther, Buffalo, Colt, Lion, Mustang, Jaguar 4. Ohio, Indiana, California, Texas, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois 5. King, queen, Jacks 6. Bush 7. Cannon 8. Cricket 9. Crow, Eagle 10. Davenport 11. Dragon 12. Fish 13. Gardner 14. Greyhound, Whippet 15. Grand, Washington 16. Marathon 17. Melbourne 18. Napoleon 19. Rickenbacker 20. Senator 21. Van Dyke 22. Pullman 23. Harvard, Columbia, Oxford 24. Gale 25. Keystone, Empire, Bay State, Lone Star 26. Chief 27. Birch 28. Bantam 29. Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis in 1905 30. The Waterless Knox, because it had hundreds of small projections extending from the cylinder casing to radiate the heat (it was air-cooled) 31. Stanley Steamer by the Stanley twins 32. Marmon 33. Plymouth 34. 1903 35. Iroquois 36. Michigan 37. Holmes (air-cooled) 38. Darling 39. Niagara 40. Graham 41. Bethlehem 42. Greeley 43. Emerson 44. Daniels and Knox 45. Pittsburgh 46. The Robe 47. Dodo 48. Durant. The letter "D" was on many of the doorknobs when Durant lost control of General Motors while the building was still under construction.

From the Calgary Foothills Model T Club

1. Farm implement: Model T engines were used to power farm machinery, butter churns, vacuum cleaners, newspaper presses and more. In this 1917 verse, the Ford is both tractor and hired hand.
2. Railroad car: Ford archives show photos of a Model T on rails transporting passengers to Chilean nitrate fields, and in the U.S., a man who fitted a rail car around a Model T chassis and engine.
3. Fishing vessel.
4. Pumper truck protected Wayne County General Hospital west of Detroit, and another Model T put in decades of service as a ladder truck in Annandale, N.J.
5. Mountain climber: A Model T was driven to the top of rocky Ben Nevis, at 4,406 feet the highest point in the British Isles in 1911. Not to be outdone, a party of Americans drove a Model T to the top of Pikes Peak (14,108 feet in 1913).
6. Stair climber: A Model T climbed the steps of a YMCA in Columbus, Neb., in 1910; to win a $100 bet, another traveled up three flights of stairs at a Duluth, Minn., courthouse; another climbed 66 steps to the Tennessee State Capitol in 1911.
7. Chapel: The Rev. Branford Clarke, a New York City preacher, made a chapel out of his Model T, including gothic stained-glass windows, organ, and folding steeple. Clarke died in 1952, and his chapel died in the 1960s after it was hit by a plane.
8. Taxi cab or a precursor to the phone booth: Dealers sent Ford photographs with the little car bristling with full-grown men. One 1914 photograph showed 28 men piled into one.
9. Snowmobile: The Mailman's Special, a Ford fitted with caterpillar treads on its back wheels and skis in lieu of its front wheels may be the first recorded photograph of a snowmobile. Northern farmers and loggers also made use of it.
10. RV:A 1921 "house car" mounted on a Model T truck chassis drove from Connecticut to Florida and back six times by 1929 before it was acquired by a Maine couple, who lived in it for 34 years.

Author Unknown

The Best Seller List was dreamed up in 1895 by editor Harry Thurston Peck. What was on that list in the days of the Flivver? Following is a sampling:

1911 THE BROAD HIGHWAY by Jeffrey Farnol: This spicy epic of love lost and love regained in early 19th Century England was said to combine "the spiritual type of swashbuckler adventure with the idyllic tale of the open road."
1912 THE HARVESTER by Gene Stratton Porter: In her tale of life in the swamps of Indiana, the author  created a hero pure of mind and heart "in the hope that a likeness will be seen to Henry David Thoreau."
1913 THE INSIDE OF THE CUP by Winston Churchill: St. Louis born Mr. Churchill related the story of a priest's struggle to comprehend the complex problems of modern life. 
1914 THE EYES OF THE WORLD by Harold Bell Wright: Supposedly a righteous protest against "patrons of the arts" and artists who prostitute their talents, this work was labeled "pornographic" by the Boston Transcript."
1915 THE TURMOIL by Booth Tarkington: The spokesman for adolescent America turned from light-hearted fare to produce a deeply-felt indictment of a ruthless businessman and "any city, every city, that makes Bigness its god."
1916 SEVENTEEN by Booth Tarkington: Back in the world of awkward adolescence, Tarkington told how it was "to be a boy, and seventeen, and in love, and to have a small sister who eats bread spread with apple sauce." 
1917 MR. BRITLING SEES IT THROUGH by H.G. Wells: After losing a son in the war, Mr. Britling was compelled "to look beyond personal love, beyond the borders of nationalism to find a meaning which would justify the sacrifice."
1918 THE U.P. TRAIL by Zane Grey: The joining of East and West by rail was told on a "big canvas, a canvas lurid, volcanic, burnt with human passions at their best and their basest and human energies strained to their tensest." 
1919 THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF THE APOCALYPSE by V. Blasco-Ibanez: As war, conquest, famine and death laid waste the earth, wealthy ne'er-do-well Julio Desnoyers tangoed his way through life in the bistros of Paris. 
1920 THE MAN OF THE FOREST by Zane Grey: The theme this time was - can a poor young man accustomed to the solitude of the mountains find happiness as the protector of a young girl of property newly arrived from the east?

From: This Fabulous Century, Volume II  (Time Life Books 1970, page 115)
Contributor Unknown

COTTER PINS
A Model T uses a total of ninety-five cotter pins to help keep it together, and a cotter pin 3/32" in diameter will fit sixty-nine of the places!
THE FIRST RACE
The first official motor vehicle race in which any contestant finished was held in 1895 in Chicago. The winner was Frank Duryea in a Duryea Motor Wagon. He averaged 7.25 mph over a 55 miles course.
THE FIRST USED CAR DEALERSHIP
The first used-car dealership opened in 1902 in New York City.
THE FIRST GAS STATION
"FILL 'ER UP!" The world's first drive-in gas station opens for business in Pittsburgh, PA on December 1, 1913. Up to this date, motorists bought gasoline in livery stables and garages and continued to until the "gas station" caught on. For the record, they sold only 30 gallons.
THE FIRST GAS GAUGE
The first gas gauge appeared on cars in 1922.
THE FIRST FREE ROAD MAPS
Free road maps were first offered by Gulf Oil in 1913.
THE FIRST NATIONAL AUTOMOBILE SHOW
The first National Automobile Show was held in 1900 in New York's Madison Square Gardens.
TOURING VS. PHAETON
The SAE standards committee met in 1922 to adopt nomenclature for automobile bodies. The name "touring" had been used by most car manufacturers to indicate a four or more passenger open sedan. The SAE chose the word phaeton to replace the touring, so in 1928 Ford called their open sedan Phaeton. Phaeton is a Greek word meaning the son of Helios, reckless driver of the chariot sun.
WINDSHIELD WIPERS
The inventor of the windshield wiper was a woman. Mary Anderson came up with the idea in 1902 after noticing that a street-car motorman had to keep his window open on a wet day to see the road. In 1903, she was awarded a 17-year patent for a hand-operated wiper that moved in a fan pattern.  In spite of the practicality of her idea, some time went by before windshield wipers became popular. "Automatic" fold-down wipers were first featured on some cars in 1910. It was not until 1916 that mechanical windshield wipers became standard equipment on American cars. Mary died in 1953 at the age of 87.

"It is not the employer who pays wages - he only handles the money. It is the CUSTOMER who pays wages."

Customers like to do business where they are treated right. When they're neglected, or get a raw deal, they take their business somewhere else. They also spread the word among their friends. That's why employees who are customer conscious are so valuable to their company. Their good work helps protect everybody's paycheck.

Many employees never meet, see or speak to a customer from one year to the next. Some of them lose sight of the customer completely - the only important things in their lives are their own department, their own particular jobs, and their own convenience. They forget that the cusomer, in the final annysis, pays the bill for every bit of work done by everyone in th company. Each employee, by doing his or her job well, has an opportunity to give the customer good value for his money. If he doesn't do a good job he gives the customer poor value.

They also forget that you don't have to meet cusomers face-to-face to please or displease them. A late or mixed-up delivery, a poorly typed letter, a faulty or slipshod piece of work, a mistake in billing - things like these can make customers a thousand miles away flow their top.

CUSTOMERS bring us their needs and wants. Our job is to fill them profitably - to them and to us. CUSTOMERS are affected by the way each of us does out work no matter how far away they seem. CUSTOMERS' good opinions of us and our work are our most valuable assets. Anything that we can do to improve their opinions of us is important. CUSTOMERS' good opinions cannot be bought - they are given freely in response to good value and good service. CUSTOMERS' expect value for the money the spend with us. If we don't give them good value, they'll go elsewhere to get it. CUSTOMERS are the bosses behind our bosses. If we serve them well, they'll be glad to pay s well. If we don't, nobody's paycheck is safe. A CUSTOMER conscious employee is always a better employee. He or she recognizes what the business if all about.

Q. Why do Americans drive on the right side of the road and the British on the left? (E.H.F., AZ)
A. Some historians theorize that the ancient Greek, Egyptian and Roman generals ordered their chariots to be driven and heir armies to march on the left side of the road so that their men could more readily draw their swords if attacked by opposing traffic on the right. It was Napoleon, some say, who arbitrarily broke with tradition and decreed that his armies would march on the right and all traffic in France would do the same. Each country he conquered was compelled to adopt his drive-right rule. The British, however, continue to drive on the left -- as do drivers in most former British Empire countries - and their steering wheels are on the right.

In the U.S., according to one theory, we drive on the right because Henry Ford refused to build his popular Model T with anything but left-hand drive, and by 1915 most U.S. automakers had followed suit. Others say the practice began with the covered wagons of our pioneer days, whose drivers sat on the left on a perch called the "lazy board."

From the Spark & Throttle, July 1990

Soybeans originally traveled to the United States by ship when Samuel Bowen smuggled them from China in 1765. But it was Henry Ford who put them in cars. When the Great Depression hit, it hit farmers especially hard. Huge farm surpluses meant low crop prices and dwindling income. All of a sudden Henry Ford’s best customers, American farmers, could no longer afford his cars, trucks and tractors. Ford knew that "If we want the farmer to be our customer, we must find a way to be his." He put his chemists to work determining what products could be developed from plants. After testing numerous crop plants, they narrowed their focus to soybean. Experimentation was soon rewarded with the discovery of soybean oil which made a superior auto body enamel. Soybean meal was converted to plastic used to make over 20 parts including horn buttons and gearshift knobs. By 1936, Ford was using a bushel of soybeans in every car that rolled off the line. But Henry Ford didn’t stop there. While his chefs developed a variety of tasty and nutritious American-style foods from soy (including ice cream) Henry invented soybean "wool" a fiber half the cost of sheep’s wood. Soon a fabric containing 25% soybean wool was being used to upholster many Ford autos. And on special media occasions Mr. Ford would sport a suit made of soybean fiber.

From the Cowtown A

THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
OOGA HORNS
I'M DREAMING OF A BRASS CHRISTMAS
Words by Rocky Wheat of the D/FW Chapter MTFCA
Click Here

• You can't build a reputation on what you are going to do.
• You say I started out with practically nothing, but that isn't correct. We all start with all there is. It's how we use it that makes things possible.
• You can take my factories, burn up my building, but give me my people and I'll build the business right back again.
• Failure is the opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.
• Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twnety or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young.
• Why should I clutter my mind with general information when I have men around me who can supply any knowledge I need?
• Before everything else, getting ready is the secret of success.
• This idea of service in business is the biggest guarnatee of success that any man can have. It is not the employer who pays wages - he only handles the money. It is the product that pays wages.
• The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar instead o fhow little he can give for a dollar is bound to succeed.
• Even when I was young I suspected that much might be done in a better way.
• Time and money spent in helping men to do more for themselves is far better than mere giving.
• Chop your own wood, and it will warm you twice.
• Success is a matter of adjusting one's efforts to obstacles and one's abilities to a service needed by others.
• Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is the probably reason why so few engage in it.
• Don't find fault. Find a remedy.
• Whether you think you can or think you can't - you are right.
• The highest use of capital is not to make more money, but to make money do more for the betterment of life.
• There is one rule for the idustrialist and that is: Make the best quality of goods possible at the lowest cost possible paying the highest wages possible.