As 2016 approaches it’s always a great time to reflect. For the Facebook Checker Cab Group, this has been a year with many ups and downs. For this blog we are going to focus on the positive and more importantly thank the many people that have made this group the largest Checker Cab Club in the world!

As many people in the group know, we’ve been around about 7 years, as a club we were early adopters of the free Facebook experience. As recently as a year ago we had about 275 active members: fun loving Checker fans happy to engage in dialog, share stories, parts info and most importantly the sharing of photos of their Checkers, in all states of restoration or service. In 2015 we’re happy to report that we have almost 450 members, the daily experience in our group is alive and active. Thanks to all for making our group part of your Facebook daily experience.

The Facebook album library increased this year, again thanks to all who created close to 50 new photo albums (Matt Thomas and Steve Talaga, you guys are rock stars). We current have about 5000 photos in the group library! Each photo has special meaning to the member who posted, thanks for sharing special memories, historically significant Checker material and more importantly photos of your Checker. We know that virtually every Checker looks the same, but each one is special and has a story all its own.

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Rick and Dick Burgen, Checker men

 

This past February a question was posted, should the group create its own Newsletter? David Powers was first to respond with the answer “absolutely!” In March we created our first Newsletter, four issues later the feedback has been positive and we will issue a new one shortly for January.

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Free Newsletters, download and print if you want them on paper

This past July a new group blog was created: Thanks to Micheal Pincus, Eric Lachmann, Jane Muir, Chris Hutter, Doug Klauck, William Brandum, Alex Hale and Stephen Disbrowe for sharing your stories! Each story is so different, but always links back to one thing: Checkers. Beyond the personal profile blogs, over 50 Checker historical blogs were created in the last six months. Our group is now the proven authority of Checker history, we live and breath it every day

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Jane Muir with her one family own Checker

Outside Checker forces proved challenging this past summer and as a result, a new Checker Cab Group website was created resulting in a more formalized club and branding outside of Facebook. Again, thanks to all the folks who stuck with us and more importantly helped build the world’s greatest Checker Cab website! Our website is now the most popular Checker site on the internet!

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Introduced on Labor Day weekend the new Checker Cab Club website

Again with the help of many of our members, we now have the largest free archive of Checker related material. Over 1200 archived documents in the library, all downloadable and all free. Virtually every post war Checker service bulletin, shop manual, assembly manual and parts manual has been loaded. At least 10 post 1959 cross over parts lists are now on the website archive, all due to the support of the 450 members of this great group.

 

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The Checker Cab Club Archive Library, the largest in the world!

This past year we participated in two shows as a group. One in Pennsylvania and one in Illinois. Small, let’s have more informal meet ups in 2016. Feel free to set up an event in the events sections of the Facebook page. Thanks to Matt & Leanne Thomas Chad Elmore, Doug & Carol Klauck, Jim Rogers & Nicole Rogers, Marjorie & Bruce Ulrich and Christian Hutter for representing us this year at events.

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The Thomas Family!

On a personal note I would like to thank Ben Merkel and Bill Munro for inviting me to the party in the creation of the book “Checker, The All American Taxi”. A year ago, this was just a dream,  now critically acclaimed in Europe and the US thanks to all who helped make it happen. Thanks to Dan Strohl at Hemmings Motor News for publishing excerpts! Thanks to David Powers, Connie Powers, Matt Fry, Joe Pollard and Rick Burgen for all your support and encouragement for the creation of this exciting Checker forum.

Special thanks to Andy Taylor, Andy is a wealth of Checker knowledge, he provides all his help free of charge and wants to see every parked Checker back on the road. A real stand-up guy, I wish everybody had a friend who stuck by them like Andy did for me when things got tough this past summer.

I would also like to thanks the board of the CCCofA, club President Jim Garrison, former club President Ron Leatz and George Lazslo, the actions taken this past summer have truly inspired me to make the Checker Cab Club the greatest Checker experience in the world.

We will continue to move forward with the free experience and continue to use the internet to share as much Checker related information and stories as possible. In 2016 we plan to have our first national convention of Auburn, Indiana more news to follow

To my critcs who recently wrote about me “doesn’t he, have better things to do than this?”, It’s called Checker passion. The  people, the cars and the history of last and longest surviving independent US auto company.  Its our collective goal to  keep Checkers on the road.

And now, let’s close with a little ditty by Andy Taylor.  Just paste the link below.

https://www.facebook.com/tempolarolls/videos/10208456025108146/