The Murder of Carol Jenkins Notes:

Header Image Source: Photo by Swann Mongenot on Unsplash

Other Images: Carol Jenkins (via Wikipedia)

“Carol Jenkins arrived in Martinsville, Indiana, on the foggy and damp afternoon of what proved to be nobody in that town’s lucky day. This was September 16, 1968. Although no one in Martinsville was able to get to know her well, thirty-three years later most of its adult population remains familiar with certain vital facts about Carol Jenkins’s brief and abrupt experiences there. She was twenty-one years old, a shy, polite, slender, and pretty woman. As the newspapers in Martinsville and Indianapolis reported at the time, “She was a Negro,” or “a Negro girl.” Growing up in the rural community of Rushville, Indiana, she had nurtured an adolescent fantasy of moving to Chicago and pursuing a career as a fashion model. That dream, however, metamorphosed into the reality of an assembly-line position in a factory that made large appliances. If the factory hadn’t been idled by a strike, she wouldn’t have taken the job that brought her to Martinsville—selling encyclopedias door-to-door. Or, perhaps, had she and her co-workers not got a late start, they might have been able to reach their intended destination of Vincennes, ninety miles farther down the road, and therefore wouldn’t have bothered canvassing in Martinsville—then a working-class town of ten thousand, situated about forty minutes southwest of Indianapolis. Or, had she consulted and heeded her stepfather, Carol Jenkins never would have set foot in Martinsville, in which case she might very well still be alive…”

— Source: “Who Killed Carol Jenkins?” by Mark Singer (The New Yorker)

The Investigation Surrounding the Ford Pinto Car Notes:

Header Image Source: Photo by Dawid Zawiła on Unsplash

Other Images:

Ford Pinto (Ken Clare via Alamy)

https://www.flickr.com/photos/daveseven/1910839183

Lee Iacocca (Bob Daemmrich via Alamy)

“One evening in the mid-1960s, Arjay Miller was driving home from his office in Dearborn, Michigan, in the four-door Lincoln Continental that went with his job as president of the Ford Motor Company. On a crowded highway, another car struck his from the rear. The Continental spun around and burst into flames. Because he was wearing a shoulder-strap seat belt, Miller was unharmed by the crash, and because his doors didn’t jam he escaped the gasoline-drenched, flaming wreck. But the accident made a vivid impression on him. Several months later, on July 15, 1965, he recounted it to a U.S. Senate subcommittee that was hearing testimony on auto safety legislation. “I still have burning in my mind the image of that gas tank on fire,” Miller said. He went on to express an almost passionate interest in controlling fuel-fed fires in cars that crash or roll over. He spoke with excitement about the fabric gas tank Ford was testing at that very moment. “If it proves out,” he promised the senators, it will be a feature you will see in our standard cars.”

Almost seven years after Miller’s testimony, a woman, whom for legal reasons we will call Sandra Gillespie, pulled onto a Minneapolis highway in her new Ford Pinto. Riding with her was a young boy, whom we’ll call Robbie Carlton. As she entered a merge lane, Sandra Gillespie’s car stalled. Another car rear-ended hers at an impact speed of 28 miles per hour. The Pinto’s gas tank ruptured. Vapors from it mixed quickly with the air in the passenger compartment. A spark ignited the mixture and the car exploded in a ball of fire. Sandra died in agony a few hours later in an emergency hospital. Her passenger, 13-year-old Robbie Carlton, is still alive; he has just come home from another futile operation aimed at grafting a new ear and nose from skin on the few unscarred portions of his badly burned body. (This accident is real; the details are from police reports.)

Why did Sandra Gillespie’s Ford Pinto catch fire so easily, seven years after Ford’s Arjay Miller made his apparently sincere pronouncements—the same seven years that brought more safety improvements to cars than any other period in automotive history?”

— Source: “Pinto Madness” by Mark Dowie (Mother Jones)