As I feed hundreds of strips of my old 35mm negatives through a film scanner, I keep running across interesting automotive stuff. Last week it was this 1988 image of then-new cars in California's Grapevine, and now I've found these 1990 shots of a friend shopping for air tools in the J.C. Whitney catalog while we work on a stereo installation in my just-purchased 1965 Chevrolet Impala sedan.
I don’t have a 1990 j.c. whitney catalog, but my 1987 catalog shows similar pages.< p
As I recall, I'd found a halfway decent Sony cassette deck at a swap meet, and we'd spent the evening fabricating brackets to fit it into my Impala's dash (which got completely gutted and rebuilt with many junkyard gauges soon after). We had a bunch of clamp-on work lights rigged up inside the car, which made for suitable conditions for my trusty Canon AE-1.
The headings at the top of the page are recognizable from the 1990 photograph.
Contrary to the romantic view that film photography is always far superior to digital photography, the resolution on a Tri-X 35mm negative image isn't very good. Still, it is possible to make out the distinctive air-tools section of the J.C. Whitney catalog in my photos; this image from the 1987 catalog looks very similar.
Taking my newly-equipped-with-non-AM-tunes Impala for a drive on Bristol St in Santa Ana
Soon after, I got this panoramic shot while driving my Impala on Bristol Street in Santa Ana, not far from where Philip K. Dick lived for the last decade of his life. This intersection looks much different today. 100 years of J.C. Whitney, 129 years of Santa Ana.
