On the 23rd of this month I will have completed 20 years in broadcasting, and this coming December will mark the 40th anniversary of my first job in the automotive industry. Today the automotive "experts" love to discuss how much the industry has changed in recent years, but they credit the Internet and so on for helping buyers decide what they want before visiting a dealer to buy their next car. Personally, I've never fully bought into that "expert" opinion.

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Elmer Apperson was born just outside of Kokomo, Ind., simply another potential future farmer, at the start of the Civil War. But, like many young men of that era, when he came of age he knew he would do something besides follow his father's occupation. A new age of machinery, no longer needing steam to operate as it had when the Industrial Revolution started, was dawning. And given the choice between building something of substance or plowing and planting the same field over and over again for the rest of his life - praying all the while that nature wouldn't ruin him financially - the teenage Apperson became a machinist's apprentice at the Star Motor Works in Kokomo.

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