In 1915, Lithuanian immigrant Israel Warshawsky founded the company that became the mighty JC Whitney & Co. in -- where else? -- Chicago. JC Whitney is still a great place to buy your car parts these days, but its hard-copy catalogs were as indispensible as phone books in the pre-Internet era; if you worked on your own vehicles during the period between about the end of World War II and the rise of the Internet, you definitely had a few dog-eared copies of the pulpy, tiny-print JC Whitney catalog knocking around among your duct tape and socket sets. Here at Autoweek, we're going to celebrate 100 years of JC Whitney by having our writers (the ones who are old enough, anyway) share some of their favorite memories of sending in those order forms to 1917-1919 Archer Ave. We'll start with the story of my very first JC Whitney catalog.
My ’69 toyota corona sedan, with its 90 horses, seemed like a hot rod next to the alameda unified school district's rabbit diesel.< p
I bought my first car -- a 1969 Toyota Corona sedan -- for 50 bucks, when I was 14 years old. I scavenged up some metric tools and started messing around with my new car, with the idea that I'd have it nicely fixed up when I got my driver's license at 16. I lived near the greatest car-parts store in the country, but I still wanted to know what all my options for weird modifications and upgrades were. This being 1981, I couldn't just make a few mouse clicks and have anything I wanted shipped to my door. My dad, who had driven the world's hooptiest '40 Ford coupe while a teenager in small-town Minnesota, remembered buying parts from JC Whitney: "I'm sure they're still around," he told me. "Just send them a postcard and they'll bury you in catalogs."
Here’s what jc whitney catalogs looked like in 1981.< p
Thing is, there was no easy way to look up JC Whitney's address. My dad was from southeastern Minnesota, which is more in Chicago's cultural orbit than in Minneapolis', and he figured that the U.S. Mail employees in The Most Important City In the World would know where JC Whitney lived. "Just send a postcard addressed to JC Whitney, Chicago, Illinois," he suggested. "It'll get there." Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, here comes my first JC Whitney catalog … and the world of ill-advised car modifications opened up for me in miraculous fashion.
Gauges. Gauges! GAUGES!
Oh, sure, I bought tuneup parts and wheel cylinders and other boring stuff, but what I really lusted after was gauges. I wanted every possible gauge in my Corona, from altimeter to fish-finder. Hell, I wanted a radar screen. The '81 JC Whitney catalog offered page after page of cool-looking gauges, and some of them were even digital!
It wasn’t until i got this extremely terrible '58 vw beetle that i could order lots of gauges and lights from jc whitney.< p
The problem with my '69 Corona was that it was a good-running 13-year-old Toyota that didn't need anything once tuned up and with working brakes. What I needed was a blank canvas, something I could hack up without worrying about ruining my transportation, and that arrived when I invested 50 bucks at an Oakland wrecking yard for the '58 Beetle that became known as Hubert the Hatred Bug. This car had been half-assedly converted into a Baja Bug (i.e. someone had chopped off most of the fenders and all of the body behind the rear window) and had a Type 3 Squareback engine sticking out the back like a big shelf. No seats, no interior, no instruments -- just a rusty steel shell with an engine and four wheels.
Here’s the first thing i bought for hubert the hatred bug.< p
Back then, you could buy a piece of flat aluminum shaped like a 1950s Beetle's dash opening, so I did that. I picked up a VW speedometer at the now-defunct Oakland U-Pull-It, attacked my new instrument panel with a universal hole saw (which I'm pretty sure I bought from JC Whitney), and there was my first gauge. Then I agonized over those catalog pages for weeks, trying to choose out the other gauges I'd need. A voltmeter, a cylinder-head temperature gauge, oil pressure … but the tachometer was most important. Finally, I settled on this one: an elegant flush-mount unit with white numerals and a 3-inch face. It was beautiful!
After gauges, there were wild off-road lights that I needed for my Beetle.
The kind of money you earned as a 16-year-old making 1982's minimum wage wasn't so great, so I wasn't able to branch out into all the crazy off-road and fog lights offered by JC Whitney. But I imagined how great my Beetle would look with every single light in the catalog (including the several types of opera lights JC offered), and I ended up getting a few of the cheaper lights to bolt to the bumpers and fender tops.
Years later, my JC Whitney catalog gauge obsession led me to build this instrument panel for my 1965 Chevy Impala.
A decade later, I was inspired by my Beetle-instrument-panel-building experience to build an even more elaborate panel for my 1965 Chevrolet Impala sedan, and of course I ordered some of the gauges from JC Whitney (and grabbed the rest at various junkyards).
In spite of all the
I was online reasonably early, early enough to have been on The WELL and to have been excited when the first proper Web browser came out, and so I abandoned ink-and-paper catalogs quite some time ago. I've ordered stuff from JC Whitney since then, of course, via their website; in fact, JC Whitney sponsored my team's first 24 Hours of LeMons car with a free Wink mirror, thanks to a helpful JC Whitney employee who liked my writing. But still, in the same way that we miss-without-really-missing the phone book, I miss the old paper JC Whitney catalogs. Perhaps I'll order one now.
Love your car? With that scarf and those tea shades, you’d better!< p
