One of the pleasant surprises of becoming SAH President has been the contact with members and non-members that comes with being in this position. I have received responses (both favorable and critical) to each of my first five Presidential Perspectives columns, and have been impressed by the in-depth nature of the comments. In addition, as the first e-mail contact listed for questions and comments on our www.autohistory.org website, I am often the person that non-members contact first when they have auto history questions.

One of the more intriguing inquiries in the latter category came from a person who had just graduated from college with a degree in business administration, who really wants, in his words, to "study cars." His question was how does one become gainfully employed as an auto historian? Or, to put it differently, how does one make automotive history a career? It is a good question, and a fundamental one.

Like many of you, automotive history for me is necessarily an avocation or hobby, something I do in addition to my "daytime job." Other members include it as part of their retirement activities. But for some, a lucky few, it truly is their career, their life's work. The email from the recent college graduate started me thinking about what jobs one could recommend to someone in his or her early twenties who wanted to pursue auto history as a career. I do not view this as simply a theoretical exercise, because I believe it is related in several ways to the future of the SAH and related automotive organizations. If we expect the Society to continue to grow and prosper, we have to expand our membership base, and a significant part of that expanding base needs to be young adults.

In responding to the writer, I was able to come up with three ways that one could "study cars" for a living. First, I mentioned the career route with which I am most familiar, namely to pursue a doctoral degree in history or business, and then teach in a college or university department that offers a major in technological history or the broader field of science, technology, and society. (I know of no university with a major in automotive history per se -- a topic to which I hope to return in a future column.)

The second option that occurred to me is to enter the museum world. As most of us know, in addition to major facilities like the Smithsonian and The Henry Ford, there are hundreds of smaller, more specialized automotive museums throughout the United States and the world.

A third possibility is to become a successful freelance writer specializing in automotive history. This can take the form of writing a regular column and/or authoring a series of historical articles or books with broad, commercial appeal. (While it is technically possible to make a living as a freelance writer, very few people are able to rely on such work as their sole source of income.)

Interestingly, my correspondent replied that of the three choices presented, the one in museums was the most attractive to him, although he added the qualification that it had to be "an interactive one." I found his response to be particularly noteworthy in light of my experiences last fall at the IX World Forum of Motor Museums in Detroit. Although I mentioned the disappointing trip to the General Motors Tech Center in a previous column, my primary purpose for being there was to deliver a paper entitled "Auto Museums as Educational Partners with Colleges and Universities." Following the presentation, I was approached by a number of Forum attendees who had questions and comments. I was struck by the similarities between their interests and ours, and by the abundant opportunities for cooperative projects they presented.

One has only to look at our Society's recent history to see that motor museums and automotive historians are clearly kindred spirits. In 2005, the Society's officers and Board of Directors held their spring meeting at the Toyota USA Museum in Torrance, California. Last spring's Sixth Biennial Conference on Automotive History in South Bend, Indiana was co-sponsored by the National Association of Automotive Museums, and we have committed to the same arrangement in 2008 in Nashville. There were two candidates on this year's Board of Directors ballot whose primary automotive affiliation is with museums. We annually deposit Cugnot Award nominated books in a special collection that we have established at the Auburn Cord Duesenberg Museum in Auburn, Indiana, and the SAH recently purchased the Ralph Dunwoodie collection of historical articles and arranged to have them housed in the AACA Library & Research Center in Hershey.

Motor Museums want to preserve and interpret cars and automotive artifacts, research their development, and explore the motivations and business history of the companies that brought them into being. In short, they "study cars." In that respect, museum staffs and their patrons have much in common with our membership. Therefore, it would seem logical to pursue additional areas of cooperation, such as joint research projects, so that we can combine the relatively limited resources that we each have to our mutual benefit, irrespective of whether we as individuals view automotive history as our career or as our avocation.

- Mike Berger, SAH President