Interview with Mr. White

William H. White, I did not ask for his age for I did not wish to offend him. He’s been my next door neighbor for about six years and when ever I see him outside watering his lawn I would never hesitate to wave hello. He grew up in Indiana and later moved to Glendale with his wife. He was in the navy and that’s how he got to travel around to different countries. Since Mr. White traveled often it seemed a good idea to speak to him about how transportation changes his way of life. The first modeled car to ever come out in full production was the Model T1 by Ford. And his experience with the great transportation boom made a great impact in his life.

My first car was the 1938 Oldsmobile. When I got it I was still in high school and the traffic rules were just about the same. Now I have a 1990 Oldsmobile, with automatic windows and automatic gear shift; the thing in the ’38 Oldsmobile was that you had a standard stick shift because the automatic gear shift hadn’t been invented yet. The car I have now I use mostly for traveling or doing errands around town. Driving the old car wasn’t difficult at the time because the cars were made at the time, and you automatically learned to drive with those cars. For my wife and I having a car liberates us, we can be able to go places and do things that we want to do. There was nothing difficult about having a car except maybe repair jobs.

Well, I know some about cars it may change to the point where I don’t really need to, I mean I use to work on my own car but they’ve changed the car so much that you have the electronic equipment to worry about. But when you take it to be repaired they put them on what they call a computer, the computer goes through the car and analyze what’s wrong with it. In the past to fix your car you just generally knew how the car was made and just by listening to the car you can probably tell what was wrong with it and you can go in and fix it. In my old car it didn’t have airbags, airbags hadn’t been invented yet not until two, three years ago. Other forms of transportation I used was to go by plane, we use to do a lot of travel by plane, last time we were on them I think was three or four years ago. There were no T.V. in them, it didn’t have anything it was just a regular coach class, if you’d go long distance you’d get your meal like us we did lots of travel over seas.

The roads seem to be the same, but it seems to be that their in need of repair.

When I went to Korea I went by ship, it was great. Well, in the army they used trucks, jeeps things like that and I was mostly in Japan so I traveled between Japan and Korea most of the time. Ships would dock in Japan and we’d go over to Korea then come back to Japan. It isn’t that far from Japan to Korea only a couple of hours.

I don’t remember many car accidents as I do today. Probably because back then when we drove a car we were focused on just driving that car and making sure the car was tuned and is getting to where we wanted to go. And all we had in the car was a radio.

Cars are a great form of transportation, in this country it’ll get you around to where you want to go, my particular interest is to travel through the country and see different things. Whether it’s a safe place to drive or not it depends on the driver, you drive right here in Glendale, like today we just went to the store to pick up some things and almost got into some accident because of someone coming out of their driveway and not looking at what their doing.

I grew up in the mechanical age where the car was just coming out and as I said it brought to my appeal where I could travel, see different communities, going into different cities and seeing different things, right here in the United States. Of course when I got in the service I was in the navy and went over to Japan, Korea, I was in Guam, and the Philippines. We did a lot of traveling then but as afar as the transportation, the advancement of technology in the transportation field has been tremendous and as suppose to when I was going to school we were just getting out of the horse and buggy stage. We’d have people, peddlers and hey would come around in their horse and buggy and sell things and it eventually evolved into automobiles and into airplanes. I’ve seen the transportation progress from the horse and buggy into jets. And not too many students back then had cars because they couldn’t afford it.

I’m originally from Indianapolis and back there they had what they called the 500 Race during Memorial Day, I use to go and see all that. The cars top speed would be 90 miles an hour, now it’s about up to 280 miles an hour. And that is evolution of the automobile right there because the track was a proving ground for the advancement of the automobile. Out of the race the cars where put through various stresses and tests, like Ford and GM, the cars that they support take that information and incorporate that into the automobiles that they manufacture. Ford was the first to develop the Poor Man, he came out with a cheap automobile that everyone could afford, make quickly, and make lots of them and that’s what got the Poor Man out on the road. Of course GM had the Cadillac, but that’s the evolution of the car and my association with it.

I think the hybrid cars is the real big step and I think it’s a good way to go and they will perfect it, its just like when the first cars came out the tires where made out of solid rubber and one day my dad told me that one of these days these cars will be riding on air and sure enough the tire came out where you put air in and you started riding on air, that was just the prediction he made. The advancement of transportation took root in World War II the advancement of transportation and everything to get men to the front lines real quick and get supplies to them. Every time technological advances come out improved, it improves the way of life we live now.