Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Blind Logic - The Ralph R. Teetor Story

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Blind Logic - The Ralph R. Teetor Story · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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Break fix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from
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all over the auto sphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors,
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designers, and everything in between.
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Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrol heads that wonder.
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How did they get that job or become that person?
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The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.
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Born in Hagerstown, Indiana in 1890, Ralph Teeter had normal vision until one day his
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hand slipped while working with a knife.
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The blade penetrated his eye, and within a year he was completely blind.
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However, Ralph never let his condition define him.
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He quickly developed a highly refined sense of touch, a trait that would
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benefit him greatly throughout his career.
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In 1945, automotive engineer Ralph Teeter was responsible for creating
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the technology that we now know as cruise control, one of the first
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steps towards autonomous vehicles.
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He accomplished this and many other innovations without
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the benefit of his sight.
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And now we have his great nephew, Jack Teeter, joining us tonight on
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this episode of break fix, and he has taken on the task of retelling this
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lesser known story of engineering.
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And with that, let's welcome Jack Teeter to BreakFix.
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Thank you both very much for having me.
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And for those of you tuning in, you're hearing a new voice.
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Joining me tonight is my co host, Enrique Rodriguez, who also became
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visually impaired later in life, and hosts and produces The touch the
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grass podcast, sharing his experiences about striving and surviving after
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life changing events like his.
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So welcome to the show, Enrique.
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Yes.
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It's a pleasure to be here.
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I'm actually very excited to be more in like the car space.
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You know, I grew up kind of a Jeep person, so being able to be here and
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not only talk about medicine, which is what part of my interest was.
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But then also being able to talk about vehicles and like the history of
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automotive, your tagline for brake fix is every car, except you scratched out car.
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And every one has their story.
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Is that correct?
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Yeah, that's right.
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Yeah.
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And that's something that I really try to promote, like on my podcast
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as well, you know, is that.
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That everyone's got these stories.
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And the fact that Jack is here to be able to share with us one of the stories
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that seemingly put on the back burner, you know, so being able to share with
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the world, not only the challenges that Ralph has overcome, but also
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would love to hear more about Jack.
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What even brought you into the ability to be able to have the
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opportunity to tell this story?
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Well, Enrique, I think you hit the nail right on the head.
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So Jack, like all good break fix stories, there's a superhero origin story here.
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So we need to talk about how this story of your great uncle came to be.
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So why don't you walk us through Ralph's life and explain to
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us what this is all about?
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Let's talk about at age five, when uncle Ralph had his accident and he
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was prying open a chest of drawers with a knife and he slipped and a
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knife penetrated one of his eyes.
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You know, back in that time, the medical profession wasn't
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near as advanced as it is today.
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Definitely before the age of modern medicine, you know, like when
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penicillins and stuff started coming around and antibiotics like in the 20s.
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Back then, really, there wasn't much to even do for someone who was able to
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perforate their eye, you know, other than either evisceration, where you
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remove all the insides, or enucleation, which is removing of the entire eyeball.
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That's exactly right, Enrique.
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In fact, the infection went from one eye to the other.
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So within that year, he was totally blind.
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It's a condition called sympathetic ophthalmia.
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What Ralph had happened to him.
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Doing some research, I found out that Louis Braille, the guy who
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invented Braille, he had a very similar experience to Ralph Teeter.
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When he was a child, he was doing some woodworking, like some
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carving or something, and caught himself in the eye with a knife.
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Just like Ralph did.
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He had basically the same thing happen, which was the sympathetic ophthalmia.
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Your body recognizes an uninjured eye as a foreign entity and needs to be like
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rejected through your immune system.
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You know, these days we have immunosuppressant drugs and stuff
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to be able to hopefully keep the non perforated eye from starting to reject.
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But I really found it fascinating that not only did Louis Braille, who went
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on to Braille and many other incredible things for the blind community.
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But Ralph also, even with the same sort of injury and disability was
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able to go on to be able to still do like all of these amazing things.
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I did not know that story about Louis Braille.
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That is quite fascinating and a whole story altogether.
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After he was blind, his parents decided to, on a philosophy of
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living their life as if Their young child, Ralph, could still see.
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In other words, they taught him to look at things with his hands.
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Ralph chose not to learn Braille.
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And to this day, I don't really know why, but he learned to type.
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My guess is, is that that's where he developed his senses of
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vibration, of feel, of hearing.
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He had a very keen sense of memory.
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And so he developed.
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All these senses by 1902, at the age of 12, he built a gasoline motor car with my
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grandfather machining each part by hand.
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It was pretty a rough car because it was a three horsepower and actually
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went forward only 12 miles an hour and it only had flat rimmed iron wheels.
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But the fact was.
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It was a car and they could drive it, but they had to drive it at the early
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morning hours before the horse and buggies came out because it bothered the horses,
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actually took the car out and drove it and had their fun before the horse and
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buggies came out in the early hours.
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This made news throughout the Midwest.
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And even I believe it was a New York Herald.
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It made the news in, in New York City, but they failed to mention
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the fact that he was blind.
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They had the article about here's this young boy who built a car,
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which was fascinating by itself.
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In addition to that, he had a love for speed boats.
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He had a summer home up about an hour north at Lake Wauwesee
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where he had speed boats.
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That's another whole story too, where he built and tinkered with
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speed boats with my grandfather.
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That's exactly the kind of, like, extra stuff that I would want
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to know about him, you know?
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What else does a blind guy who works on engines get into, you know?
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Oh, bigger engines that go on the water, you know?
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That's, it's awesome, man.
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So what's interesting about Ralph, when you kind of think back to the beginning,
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born in 1890, right at the precipice at the dawn of the automobile, and let's just
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say jumping forward to when Henry Ford really put everything into motion right at
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the height of the industrial revolution, all these things in the early 1900s.
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He's about 10 years old.
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He's seeing all black Fords coming off the assembly line.
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Was he immediately attracted to that?
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Was he interested in that?
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Was engineering something he wanted to do even before he became blind?
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His interest in automobiles dated back to the early days before Henry Ford
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even came up with mass production.
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So his passion for engineering became probably two, three, four, five
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years old before he had his accident because his uncle's had a machine
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shop and a company and they were building railroad inspection cars.
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So he was around mechanics.
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He just had this passion for machines, tools, and engineering at an early age.
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Don't forget he was near Indianapolis.
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So Hagerstown was about an hour southeast of Indianapolis.
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Indianapolis was actually the car capital of the world before Detroit was.
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So he would go to the Indianapolis Speedway pretty much every
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year since it was a dirt track.
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Well, as his engineering skills developed and his reputation developed,
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he was going up to the Indy 500.
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And meeting with the race car teams and the race car drivers of the early
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days, like Eddie Brickenbocker and some of the other fellows of those
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days, and he would tune their engines to the highest performance possible.
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And he would get a kick out of, well, let's make the fastest race car possible.
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I bet that made Harry Miller mad.
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Oh yeah.
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He was providing piston rings to all their engines up to the 60s and 70s.
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And they had a very good relationship with Indy 500.
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He was in fact a named chief steward one year, and then he was
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named track official one year.
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And to this day, no one really understands how a blind man can be a track official.
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Now I can only think about his.
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Teen senses of hearing vibration or something, but this is all covered
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in the documentary to more detail.
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But the Indy 500 was a place that he'd love to go every year.
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How does someone so young and who is unable to Read to do
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math, didn't even learn how to do braille math because braille does
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allow you to be able to do math.
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Being able to do math is like one of the more important parts of being an engineer.
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Did Ralph ever talk about how he was able to overcome those challenges
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or was he more of just an engineer who just kind of felt it out?
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I learned that from Ralph's grandchildren, all four of them I've
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interviewed and are in the film.
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And one of my cousins mentioned that he was read to, he enjoyed having people read
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books to him, but mostly not school books, books of inventors, books of leaders,
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Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Edison.
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And he was a sponge listening to stories.
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About these great inventors in terms of mathematics and some
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other things, he would have books read to him when college came.
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This was not very easy, but he wanted to go to engineering school.
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He went to the University of Michigan 1st.
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But they turned him down because they did not know how to teach
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a blind person engineering.
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Well, he was terribly disappointed.
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And his older cousin, Neva Deardorff, was going to the University of Pennsylvania
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on some sort of a scholarship.
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And she said, why don't you come along and we'll go to the engineering
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school and meet with the dean.
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Well, he said, He packed enough clothes for the whole semester because
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he was pretty determined to go in.
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So he met with the dean, Henry Spangler, put his case forward and said,
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basically, I know most of the mechanics.
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I need to learn the theory and other things.
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And with a little tutoring, I'll be able to make it through.
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Dean Spangler had to meet with the faculty and said, come back tomorrow at 10.
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I'll give you an answer.
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The dean met with the faculty And of course, none of them felt that he
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could make it through beyond two weeks.
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They didn't have the heart to tell him that they couldn't accept him.
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So they accepted him.
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The next morning, uncle Ralph went back and Dean Spangler said, we're going to
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accept you and of course, not thinking he would last beyond two weeks, but in
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any event, he did graduate and he was the first blind student who graduated from the
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University of Pennsylvania and further.
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He was the first blind engineer on record in the United States.
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And then years later, he came back and got his master's in mechanical engineering.
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So he had a lot of books read to him throughout the college process.
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Tutors, his cousin, Neva.
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One of the stories, he had to put the mechanics together with his hands,
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and he convinced them to say, okay, I will put this engineering model
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together with thread and needles.
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And he put it all together by hand.
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And I guess that quite impressed the faculty.
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So anyway, that was in 1912, he graduated.
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That was just a few years before World War I broke out.
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So it begs the question, so who got a degree at the same time he did, right?
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Because he had to dictate back to somebody because again, he didn't know
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braille and weren't equipped really to handle a visually impaired student.
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So how did that work?
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How did writing papers, like you said, that he's doing engineering projects by
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hand, and that's all well and good, but he's going to have to submit something.
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Or was it all oral testing?
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Like, how did that work?
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Ah, well.
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As I mentioned, he learned to type and I suspect that probably was in high school.
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So he ended up typing a lot of papers and reports in college.
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In fact, he was the engineering editor for the Whitney engineering club on campus.
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So he did a lot of typing.
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And in fact, he wrote a lot of papers.
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Two that were published, I believe.
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One about the internal combustion engine.
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So he did a lot of typing and I suspect that he did a lot of oral repeating
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of certain things to professors.
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Oh yeah, engineers know all about giving presentations, man.
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A lot of what they do is giving presentations.
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Now, I mean, we have things like PowerPoint and all these kinds of
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tools at our disposal, but back then in the early 1900s, somebody's got
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to be shadowing Ralph the whole time.
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Now, I can imagine he moved around with a walking stick, feeling
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his way through even the campus.
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That had to have been quite the task to overcome in and of itself.
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Well, and you would think that he would have a cane.
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He did not have a cane.
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Wow.
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The reason is this.
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Growing up in Hagerstown, it was a little village of 2, 000 people.
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He would get about town by counting steps, feeling bushes, hearing where the buggies
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were, hearing people's voices, counting steps to a certain store, the restaurant,
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the barbershop, across the street.
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And this is where his incredible senses come in and his keen memory.
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I can only imagine.
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How he got around campus without a cane.
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He did have his cousin Neva to help him, and I suspect some other of his classmates
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helped him before he could learn to count the steps to certain classes.
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So he probably did have some help, but he never had a cane.
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And once he could determine where his dorm room was to a certain class,
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probably wouldn't need much help because he would touch things, he would hear, he
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would count steps and get around okay.
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And in fact, he did that throughout his adult life in Agar Sound
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when he built the company.
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So it is quite amazing.
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You've taken us up to 1912, right at the edge of World War I.
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What happened next?
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The automotive industry still wasn't really where it is, let's say, in the 20s,
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30s, and 40s, and especially post war.
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So that was still a burgeoning enterprise.
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We're on the precipice of war.
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What is Ralph doing from 1912?
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Up through World War One and beyond came back and he started working at the
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family business, which had moved from railroad inspection cars to actually
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building internal combustion engines became the teeter Hartley motor company.
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And at that time, Ralph had a real keen interest in engines.
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He spent the next few years working on the engines until the war broke
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out when the world war one broke out, like many young men throughout
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America, he wanted to serve his country.
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But the question was actually how, what is the blind man going to do?
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Well, he was accepted for civil service.
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At the New York Shipbuilding Company as a engineering advisor
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based in Camden, New Jersey.
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So he was given a desk, but they didn't know what to do with him.
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So he kind of sat there, he listened keenly to what they were talking
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about, and they had received a contract to build torpedo boat destroyers.
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And they were driven by Steve Turbine engines.
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And they had a problem.
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And the problem was the turbine rotors had to be balanced perfectly
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or the boats would break apart at high speeds because they were
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supposed to be going at 35 knots.
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That was a pretty good clip for ships those days.
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And the naval engineers at the shipyard could not solve the problem.
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Ralph had already balanced a lot of crankshafts in his
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days working on the engines.
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So he had a keen sense of how to balance them by the feel
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of vibrations and listening.
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And he suggested to him that, um, He had a way to solve their problem.
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And of course, they kind of dismissed them, put up an argument, said,
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Look, you have nothing to lose.
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Let me try to balance these turbine engines for you.
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And so, okay, they let him try and he Balanced them by rotating the
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rotors in the opposite directions and therefore balance could be achieved
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and he could feel it by vibration and his keen sense of listening by
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the time they got the problem solved.
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And he fixed it for him.
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And the boats built and ready to go.
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The war was winding down and the boats weren't used in service.
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However, They were used extensively in World War II.
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And so he did solve their problem for him.
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And as a result, he was hired as the foremost naval engineers
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for other military shipyards.
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But then he went back and worked for the family company again.
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But you had a lot of things going on in the late teens and early 20s, and you
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had so many what I consider nowadays boutique brands, which have been merged
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into things like Ford and General Motors, names like Cadillac, Studebaker, and
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Packard, and so on down the line, there were so many different brands, and
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it's almost like that today, With EVs where you turn around and there's a new
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brand popping up, whether it's Rivian or Tesla or Lucid or whoever, right?
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And eventually they'll all sort of merge together and we'll get
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the big three in the EV world too.
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What a time to be alive.
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What a time to be interested in cars and be an engineer because you had
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the opportunity to go work for some of the most interesting brands out
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there that, pun intended, were feeling their way through the industry.
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But it was a hot time to buy a car.
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It was an incredible time.
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What Ralph and his uncles found about their building engines was the
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critical component of the combustion and the importance of the piston ring.
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So they actually moved the company.
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From these custom built engines to piston rings and the reason being their company
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was not set up for mass production.
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So when Henry Ford developed mass production, the whole industry changed.
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So all the handmade car companies, there were hundreds in Indianapolis.
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And Megan, they went out of business because they weren't
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set up for mass production.
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It would take a long time to gear up for mass production.
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So the Teeter family's company recognized this and got out of building these
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handcrafted engines very quickly into manufacturing piston rings.
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Because of the importance of the piston ring.
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And so they started producing piston rings and became the leader of piston rings.
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And at that time, Detroit was becoming the capital of the automobile world.
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Because as you say, there's Cadillac, there's Chevrolet, there's
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General Motors, Ford, there's Chrysler, there's Studebaker.
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Oh my God.
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There's all kinds of brands.
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So Detroit, because of their capital and the resources.
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That shifted to the automobile capital of the world and Ralph's company
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was then producing for Detroit.
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It sounds like the whole family is pretty adaptive would be a good way to put it
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adapting to the changes, not only like in Ralph's life, but also to the changes that
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are happening, like in the whole world to be able to maintain that sustainability.
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That's the operative world and yeah, they were adaptive.
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That and also.
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Either some sort of foresight to look ahead and say, we need to adapt.
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You know, the saying, right?
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Adapt or die.
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And in this case, some people, they get stuck, right?
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It's that analysis paralysis, but that forward looking as the Italian
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say, sempre avanti, always ahead.
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That's a great position to be in.
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And if you can be fortuitous like that, to be in a position
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like that, that's amazing.
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So we won't call it luck.
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We'll call it.
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At least that sense of genius to be like, Hey, we need to adapt.
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We need to keep moving with the industry rather than just being
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stuck here, building engines and disappearing into the dust.
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I would take that one step further.
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You know, Ralph was a visionary.
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He could see the need for various things.
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And so.
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He would come up with a solution, you know, the cruise control,
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the automatic gearship, the list goes on when he recognized the
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importance of the piston ring.
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I thought that's kind of cool.
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Who thinks about piston rings?
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Piston rings are really critical to internal combustion engines.
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Something we take for granted these days, like a lot of the teeter inventions
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too, which we're going to get to here.
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And so I want to explore cruise control or the speedostat back then, you know,
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more technical term for it or the automatic gear selector, things like that.
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What inspired him to think about these?
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Solutions to what would be back then seemingly complex problems.
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Things that we take for granted today.
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I mean, every car comes with cruise control and automatic
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transmissions and things like that.
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So where did this all come about?
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Was this another by product of the war or being involved with
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the military or some of the other engineering that he was doing?
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In 1924, he came up with this.
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Idea about an automatic gear shift and he filed a patent his manufacturing friends
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told him that no one is going to pay for the luxury of an automatic gear shift.
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Well, history is proved otherwise, so his patent was used for the next
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40 years on automatic gear shifts.
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Then we move into the thirties with the cruise control being blind.
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Ralph had a lot of different drivers.
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He rode with a lot of different drivers.
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He had many trips to Detroit developing piston rings for every
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new engine coming out of Detroit.
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One driver in particular was his patent attorney, who was a jerky throttle brake
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kind of driver, couldn't hold a steady speed, and that was very annoying to
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Ralph, and this was sometime in 1936, he thought, I've got to invent something
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that will keep the car at a steady speed, so for the next Eight to ten years, he
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tinkered in his basement workshop, and then by 1945, he filed for his first
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patent on the cruise control, which he called the trademark name Speedostat.
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I'm bringing back the Speedostat.
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I think that's an incredible name, man.
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I love things like that.
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Tell you what they are right up front.
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And it's a play on the Rio stat, which is the electric dial that you can
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adjust voltage and things like that.
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So in this case, it's a dial that adjusts the speed of the vehicle
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and then locks it in place.
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So in a very German way, again, it tells you right up front what it's all about.
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From there, it was followed for his patent and then kind of tinkered with
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it over the next few years or so.
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It was a slow development process because he had a company
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that he was responsible for.
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They were piston rings, it was World War II that he had to deal with.
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There was.
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Unions that he had to deal with.
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It was all kinds of other things.
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And somewhere in there, he started a family too.
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Well, yeah, well, that was, uh, 1932, uh, he Ralph and my aunt
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Nellie had daughter, um, my aunt Marjorie, their one and only child.
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How did the original cruise control work?
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Have you dived into the technologies?
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I'm not an engineer.
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I've looked at these cruise controls.
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I've looked at diagrams.
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I've looked at the drawings and the blueprints of them.
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I know the early ones were with cables.
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Most people don't really understand the technology of it.
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In 1954, popular science came out with an article about the speed of
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stat and they included diagrams.
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So this was the first publicity of the Speedostat.
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It got some recognition and on the heels of that publicity, Uncle Ralph
25:35
made a couple of samples for the trucking industry to try out and
25:39
use, but interest was really slow.
25:43
It was just kind of non existent.
25:46
A couple of years later where things were really starting to kick off.
25:50
He kept developing and refining the engineering of it to the
25:54
point where he was putting them on engineers cars in Detroit.
25:59
In 1957, Chrysler, Chevrolet, and Ford were all testing his speedostat.
26:06
They had a big press conference in Anchorstown, and they had
26:10
journalists and articles about it.
26:11
So there was a lot of publicity about it, and It was finally Chrysler who
26:18
decided to be the first ones and introduce it on their luxury brands in 1958.
26:26
Then 1959, Cadillac followed, and then a year after that, other brands
26:32
followed as well, and then it just Kind of kicked off, but he kept refining it.
26:38
And it's really funny that something he invented in the thirties, it took
26:42
25 years for it to come to fruition and be adopted by the automotive industry.
26:47
And now looking ahead 70 years, it's on every car.
26:52
Now it's evolved a lot since those early days.
26:54
I mean, when I first encountered cruise control, turning
26:56
wrenches for myself, it was.
26:58
Late seventies, early eighties technology was vacuum based semi electronic solenoid.
27:03
Now it's completely digital because we're all fly by wire.
27:05
So that one idea, and it's the progression of many engineering ideas back then it
27:10
was physical, electromechanical, whatever.
27:13
And now we've gotten to the point where it's cruise control in name.
27:17
But not necessarily harks back to that original design that your great uncle
27:21
came up with, but what an impact on the automotive industry, much like
27:25
the intermittent wiper story that we heard about, you know, was it 10
27:28
years ago, but you know, things like that, that again, we take for granted.
27:31
It's fun to get that origin story after Chrysler introduced
27:34
it, they called it autopilot.
27:37
Then there were naysayers about this device being a dangerous.
27:42
So Uncle Ralph and his engineers had to educate the safety
27:48
commissions, law enforcement, and politicians about this device.
27:53
And in fact, invite him down and show him how to use it.
27:58
The naysayers, of course, had never driven one.
28:01
They were spouting off before really educating themselves on it, just
28:07
saying it was a dangerous device.
28:09
But actually, it was an educated device because there was a warning back
28:14
pressure on it, so it couldn't lock in.
28:18
So there was nothing dangerous about it.
28:20
Then after Chrysler, Cadillac introduced it, and they called it Cruise Control.
28:24
Now that's the name that Stuck and became the name that everyone is
28:29
used, but cruise control is fun.
28:31
It's easy to say, and everybody remembers it, right?
28:33
It looks better on an ad campaign on some big Madison Avenue agency that,
28:37
you know, it's putting it out there.
28:39
It's interesting about this device because the automotive hall of fame
28:43
stated that Ralph Teter's device was the first step towards autonomous vehicles.
28:48
And I believe in that argument because it really is the first step
28:53
before we are today, and you look at Tesla, and you look at Google and the
28:57
technology today, and of course, we all take cruise control for granted.
29:02
Every car pretty much has one.
29:03
Not only a safety device, but it saves gas for cars again.
29:08
The kicker here is designed by a gentleman who didn't drive a car, was being driven
29:13
around, and he was visually impaired.
29:15
The irony of it all, but it's absolutely just amazing.
29:19
And his passion for engineering, his mindset to always look
29:25
for solutions to help.
29:28
The passenger experience, if you will.
29:31
But we do need to switch gears.
29:32
And you came here to also share with us the story that you've put together
29:37
inside of the movie, Blind Logic, which is your retelling of Ralph's
29:42
story as we're talking about it here.
29:43
So, Tell us about that process.
29:45
What was that like?
29:46
Where does Jack's story start?
29:48
What were your beginnings?
29:49
Like, how did you even get to the point to where you could have this
29:51
opportunity to tell your uncle's story?
29:53
You know, I'm very inspired by my great uncle Ralph, because essentially
29:58
he inspired everyone who he met.
30:01
I remember Uncle Ralph has a child going down to Hagerstown in the 50s and 60s.
30:07
And he would take my brother and I down to his workshop and give us a tour of
30:12
all of his machines and out to his garage to his two or three Cadillacs and show
30:18
us every little dial in each one and what was different with each Cadillac.
30:23
And he had a big.
30:24
Impact on me in the sense that he was very modest, very kind, humorous man at that
30:30
time when you're young, you don't realize the significance of the accomplishments of
30:36
this man being blind at such a young age.
30:40
So, flash forward to 1995, his only daughter, my Aunt Marjorie, wrote
30:47
a book called One Man's Vision, The Life of Automotive Pioneer Ralph R.
30:52
Teter.
30:52
All the family members, of course, read it, and when I read it I thought,
30:56
This is an incredible story and it's going to make a great movie.
31:01
Being in the film business back, starting in the eighties, I thought, well, I got
31:05
to bring this story to the forefront because as you mentioned, Ralph Teeter
31:10
is pretty much unknown, except in the circles of the automotive business.
31:15
And even then he's unknown except for the old timers.
31:19
I'm very proud to bring this story to light and tell the story accurately
31:24
and the way it should be told.
31:26
And I shared it with some of my filmmaker friends throughout the years, and they
31:32
concurred, this should be on film.
31:34
But I wasn't really ready in my career to make that step until there was a
31:41
family reunion in 2013 at Lake Wallasey, when my father was still alive, and
31:48
my Aunt Marjorie was still alive.
31:50
They were very Close cousins.
31:52
And it was wonderful.
31:53
We all got together in the cousins and the idea of this film came about.
31:58
So we talked about it and they kind of looked at me and said,
32:01
well, where do we go from here?
32:03
And I said, well, I have to start with writing a script and
32:08
adapting the book into a script.
32:11
And then I have to research.
32:12
And go through that process, that was a eight, nine year process before I was
32:18
ready to roll the cameras with something of a game plan to start production.
32:25
But I really had to have a good idea that, okay, this is going to look good
32:30
on a script, but now can I bring it visually that presented another problem
32:37
or a challenge, I should say, I didn't know what we had in any archives.
32:42
I had a few pictures from my aunt's book.
32:45
I had some from my father from childhood, but other than that, I
32:50
really had no idea that I had the vigils to put together a movie.
32:56
But I went ahead anyway, and I went to Hagerstown, Indiana.
33:01
I took drone footage of the town, took a camera crew and we interviewed my four
33:06
Indiana cousins, all grandkids of Ralph Teeter, in the Hagerstown Museum where
33:11
they have the perfect circle display.
33:14
I started with that.
33:16
And my cousin, Ralph Meyer in Indianapolis, he laid out all
33:21
the pictures that he had in his archives on his grandfather, and
33:26
they were pretty extensive papers, patents, photographs, going back
33:31
to the 1890s and throughout life.
33:35
Then we stumbled upon some audio recordings when we came
33:40
across some 16mm home movies.
33:43
I felt that I had a bit of a bonanza here to start with.
33:47
Was there ever a moment when you were accumulating all the artifacts,
33:51
that you opened, you know, a drawer or a box and you found something
33:54
and you go, Wow, I didn't know my Uncle Ralph was working on that.
33:58
Was there ever an invention or a project or something that he left unfinished?
34:03
Other than your movie project.
34:05
That you feel needs to be finished.
34:07
Oh, he had a lot of inventions and there was a lot of wow moments when I spent a
34:14
week with my cousin Ralph in Indianapolis, going through the archives, he had a
34:19
couple of very interesting inventions.
34:22
One was a pistol grip fishing handle, and one was a.
34:27
Very interesting doorknob that was kind of a push and pull lock system.
34:33
And he also had this very interesting suitcase, especially designed for suits.
34:41
And none of these really made it to the marketplace, but it
34:45
didn't matter with uncle Ralph.
34:47
He wanted to make things better.
34:49
He made a better suitcase and a better fishing handle, but he had something
34:55
like 50 patents from 1919 to 1946.
35:00
So he was always inventing things.
35:02
When you find so many, like, archival things, what are some of
35:06
the processes that you go through that, well, like, what makes the cut?
35:09
You read my mind, Enrique, because I was thinking on similar lines in
35:12
the sense that nowadays, the word documentary is a loaded term, and
35:16
there's different ways to approach it.
35:18
If we use a automotive parallel for folks that maybe binged a lot of movies during
35:23
COVID, you could look at File footage like what Jack is talking about in the
35:28
sense of like Bongio's film where there's some original footage of him driving back
35:33
in the day and photographs and then some interviews with him right before he died.
35:37
Then you have things like Shelby American where it was Carol Shelby narrating the
35:41
whole thing and they used, you know, All these photographs and whatnot.
35:44
And then you have things like dramatizations, like framing John
35:47
DeLorean, where you had big actors coming in and reproducing what was in John
35:53
DeLorean's book and things like that.
35:54
So I was thinking the same thing.
35:56
And I'm wondering where did Jack take all this archival footage and
36:00
how did you make a movie out of it?
36:02
2021, when I decided to start.
36:05
Filming my cousins that I was not going to do a reenactment type
36:09
documentary with actors because that was going to be cost prohibitive for
36:15
me, and I felt that I wanted to do it with archival pictures footage.
36:22
To bring a better sense of reality in a historical context, because
36:28
don't forget this starts in 1890.
36:31
It's a 90 minute documentary covering 134 years of history.
36:35
So we're going through quite a few years.
36:38
I did start with a lot of archives, and then I came back and we digitized
36:45
everything, and then I had quite a few other challenges, like every image
36:49
has to be dealt with individually, with the right pixelation, the
36:54
right ratio for the big screen.
36:57
That's where I called my brother Dan.
37:00
Because his skill set is as a photo editor.
37:04
So I brought him on board from basically day one when I came home
37:09
with hundreds and hundreds of images, but that was still not enough.
37:14
So I started storyboarding and realized I had to license some additional image, some
37:20
footage to really tell the story properly.
37:23
And exciting and entertaining, I would use every archival image that I had
37:30
that was going to be appropriate for the story that was right for the script.
37:34
Now, interestingly, I wrote a 1 hour script because I
37:38
was thinking of PBS 1 hour.
37:41
Or history channel one hour, that would be enough of Ralph Teeter.
37:45
I could tell the story appropriately, but as I was getting into it, I kept adding
37:50
more because I found these incredible stories that had to be in the film.
37:57
I couldn't leave them out because they were so incredible to me.
38:00
I thought that they're going to be incredible for an audience experience.
38:04
I actually added another half hour throughout my two and a half year
38:09
process of editing this and putting it together because I also realized I needed
38:15
more people to interview more credible people from the automotive business who
38:21
would be able to share their insight.
38:25
And related to Ralph Teter.
38:27
So, in other words, I just couldn't have family people, because the audience
38:31
would say, oh, well, look at that.
38:34
All he got was family.
38:36
And some of the people on that list, one of which has been on Break
38:40
Fix two seasons ago, is Lynn St.
38:41
James.
38:42
Legendary race car driver, rookie of the year in 1992, the Indianapolis 500.
38:46
You had Franz von Holzhausen, who's the chief designer at Tesla.
38:49
You had Sarah Cook, who's the president of Automotive Hall of Fame.
38:52
Mark Kendall, chief historian of the Peterson, things like that.
38:54
I mean, you really reached out to a lot of folks and then you
38:57
extrapolate that and you've got big Hollywood names narrating this thing.
39:02
Jeff Daniels, Barry Corbin, Rick Zeif, Mike Rowe.
39:05
How'd you do it?
39:07
Well, the celebrity voices came at the last part of the process because
39:13
I hired temporary voices so I could edit the film and put it together.
39:19
And the reason was, then I could go back and re edit and re edit and add, cut and
39:25
add more and get it before I committed to getting celebrity voices because
39:33
once you get the celebrity voices, and you record him, you can't get him back.
39:38
You have to have everything in place beforehand.
39:42
Getting Mike Rowe took a matter of four months.
39:45
Getting Jeff Daniels was two or three months.
39:48
When you're a filmmaker like myself with no name or reputation, you're not Steven
39:54
Spielberg calling his agent and saying, Hey, we'd like to have Jeff Daniels.
39:58
You gotta really put a case forward.
40:01
You gotta convince them that, It's a small documentary, but it's really worthwhile.
40:06
And here's why I want Mike Rowe.
40:09
Here's why I want Jeff Daniels and Barry Corbin.
40:12
You just have to build your case and be persistent.
40:16
They all responded in due time.
40:19
It takes, you know, the gatekeepers, but they were all
40:24
very excited about this story.
40:26
Once they got involved, they got very excited about it.
40:30
They were all great to work with.
40:32
They were all wonderful people to work with.
40:34
I'm glad you had Lynn St.
40:35
James on your podcast.
40:37
She's such a terrific lady.
40:39
She is so wonderful in the film and I'm blessed to have been able to get her.
40:45
And she brings a whole new perspective to the Indianapolis.
40:49
Motor Speedway section in the film, your background in
40:52
Hollywood on the production side.
40:54
You said, you know, as I'm putting the film together, as I'm editing
40:56
this, did you do the work yourself or did you have a team of folks
40:59
that help you produce the film?
41:01
Well, I wrote the script directed and I produced, I had a vision from day one.
41:06
I wanted to have complete control.
41:08
And I had a couple of other producers that said, well, we'll get involved.
41:13
We'll help finance.
41:15
And I said, thank you, but I really want to control everything.
41:18
I had a couple of script consultants review the script professor and
41:23
an Indiana historian, because I talk about some things in Indiana.
41:28
That happened in 1995, particularly with the UAW.
41:33
And I wanted to get my facts straight to see if I was neutral enough.
41:38
My sister, Wendy is very talented and extremely good with the writing word.
41:45
And she reviewed it and gave me a couple of tidbits to work with.
41:50
As I say, my brother is a very skillful photo editor.
41:55
who is very responsible for all the images that you will see in the film,
42:01
probably 400 or 500, that we had to collaborate together on each one.
42:05
And that was over two years working on that.
42:09
The editor was based in Indianapolis.
42:12
He actually was the head of the film crew that I hired.
42:17
When I first went to Hagerstown, his name is Derek Toe.
42:20
He was an excellent cameraman, cinematographer.
42:24
He knew about independent films.
42:26
And at the end of our day, I was really pleased and happy with his crew.
42:30
And I went up and I said, Derek, are you an editor too?
42:34
And he said, Oh yeah, I edit all kinds of things.
42:37
And So I, I asked him on the spot, I said, would you want to edit this film?
42:41
And he said he'd love to.
42:43
By that time, he had a sense of the story.
42:46
And I kind of liked the fact that he was Indiana based.
42:50
We just got along very well.
42:52
And I thought, well, why not?
42:53
You know, I'm in Los Angeles, but we can send files back and forth and I
42:58
can review and then give them my notes.
43:01
And I would storyboard.
43:03
and get all the images ready and send him like the first act and the second third
43:08
fourth and so on and so forth and then we would go by act so we kind of just plotted
43:14
through over the several years the film covers 134 years of history What we didn't
43:21
cover in the first segment of this episode is the end of Ralph Teeter's story.
43:27
And what I think a lot of people don't realize is how long he lived.
43:30
He lived until 1982.
43:32
So he was well into his 90s before he left us.
43:36
And what a long and incredible life.
43:38
And where we left off in his story is what happens next.
43:42
He did all these amazing things in the early days, especially in the thirties and
43:46
the forties, and he became the president of the SAE, all this kind of fun stuff.
43:49
He developed the perfect circle company, as you mentioned, which developed
43:53
piston rings and things like that.
43:54
And we fast forward to the 1960s, the height of the hot rod era,
43:59
car manufacturing is changing and he sells the company to Dana.
44:04
Yeah.
44:04
A name that jeepers like Enrique would be familiar with because they build all sorts
44:09
of parts for off roaders, which eventually then got sold to Mali, which is a German
44:13
company that's still around today.
44:15
So from the 1960s to the 1980s, the last 20 some years of Ralph's life, you're
44:22
around, you know, you mentioned spending time with him and his shop and all that.
44:25
What were his golden years?
44:27
What was his retirement like when he finally sold the business in the
44:30
sixties and said, you know what?
44:32
I'm done.
44:32
Well, he wasn't done.
44:35
In fact, when Dana came at that time, Ralph was chairman, they were
44:41
talking up with Dana and they liked the fact that they had similar goals.
44:46
Dana was heavily involved, as you say, in automotive parts.
44:50
And it seemed to be with the board that this would be a good marriage.
44:55
And at that time, the board of directors, they were all in retirement age.
45:01
They felt that this would be good for the company, and that Perfect
45:06
Circle brand would remain intact, and the factories would remain
45:11
intact, because Uncle Ralph was very concerned and loyal to his employees,
45:18
and he wanted them to have a future.
45:21
And so, the company sold in 63.
45:25
He regretted that decision for several reasons.
45:29
First of all, uncle Ralph thought that he would be kept on as chief engineer, the
45:34
speedostat because he still had things to do with the speedostat and improve it.
45:39
He was kind of forced out and the other board of directors retired and
45:44
Dana came in and a whole new culture took place in that small Indiana town.
45:50
And there was three other factories and other small towns nearby.
45:55
Bye.
45:55
But the culture changed, they were corporate people that came in and they
46:00
didn't have a sense of responsibility to the small communities like Ralph did and
46:06
the company did and they built libraries and they did things for the town and
46:11
they did so much for the communities.
46:14
And if something was needed in town, Ralph and Perfect Circle would give it to them.
46:19
But Ralph didn't want to retire and he formed another company called
46:23
Tedco to foster his inventions and developing his other things.
46:29
So he worked on that.
46:31
He wrote papers and he still was heavily involved with his educational
46:36
scholarships that he started at SAE, Indiana Tech, and another university.
46:43
He also donated.
46:45
Earlham College in Richmond, the Joseph Moore Museum needed a planetarium.
46:51
He donated money and they built a planetarium.
46:54
So he did a lot of philanthropy.
46:56
That was sort of what he was doing as his retirement.
47:00
He was giving back.
47:01
So it really sounds like a man of the community.
47:03
And especially when you're so reliant on so many other people
47:07
to just, like, have your everyday life be so, quote unquote, normal.
47:12
It really makes me happy to know that he was someone who was so willing to give
47:16
back to this community, who was able to not only provide, like, such a good
47:21
environment for him to be able to do the things that he wanted to do, then was able
47:26
to allow the community to also be lifted up in that way, even without the company.
47:31
So outside of the film paying tribute to Ralph, did the town
47:35
bend at some point, turn around and dedicate a monument to him?
47:40
Or is there a museum in his honor and his name, or is it just the
47:43
names on the side of the buildings because the endowments that he made?
47:46
The town went through a few phases.
47:50
The final perfect circle piston ring factory closed.
47:54
In 1995 in Hagerstown, 100 years after the company started, there is
48:02
now a monument there to honor what Perfect Circle did for the town.
48:08
They also had a factory in Richmond, Tipton.
48:12
They had four factories all together.
48:15
But they do have a monument there.
48:17
There is another plaque that was recently put in this year for Ralph Teeter.
48:22
What also happened after Ralph died in 1998, he was posthumously inducted
48:30
into the Automotive Hall of Fame.
48:32
Today, he has an exhibit there.
48:35
At the Automotive Hall of Fame Museum, and that's where we filmed Sarah Cook,
48:40
the president of the Hall of Fame.
48:41
And it's a wonderful exhibit.
48:43
They have a cruise control and they devote the whole section to Uncle Ralph.
48:48
So his legacy lives on there.
48:50
He is being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
48:56
He's in the National Science and Space Museum.
49:01
They have a cruise control there.
49:03
His legacy does live on, but Ralph Titor is still unknown, and I'm hoping
49:09
this film will expose his story to a new audience about what this man
49:15
has done and was able to accomplish.
49:18
He was a very modest man.
49:19
He would be happy that I'm doing this.
49:22
I know Aunt Marjorie, who has since been Passed away in 2019
49:26
and my dad passed away in 2016.
49:29
They both would be thrilled that this story is coming to light now because
49:33
they believe that this story should be told, and I'm happy that I'm the
49:38
one to bring it to the forefront now.
49:40
It seems like he was very much about making the world a more
49:43
accessible place to others.
49:45
So I was wondering what kind of like accessibility you'll be
49:48
bringing into the film at all.
49:50
Narrations for stuff or any sort of other sorts of accessibility
49:55
options for watching the film?
49:56
I do want to have something for the blind and I believe it's an extra audio track.
50:05
Yeah, that's usually what people have accompany any sort of like visual medium.
50:10
I know that you can go to museums and you just like plug in your headphones
50:13
and it'll be an audio description of whatever you're looking at.
50:16
So I was wondering if like your website is going to have some descriptions of
50:20
any of the pictures or anything that you're going to be using during the film.
50:24
Or is it a documentary much like where not like planet Earth where
50:28
I can sit down and listen to it?
50:30
And just hear the entire thing and get the full story just through the audio.
50:34
Or are there other ways that I'm other people who, myself included,
50:39
who are visually impaired and blind to fully appreciate the art
50:43
that you're creating in your film?
50:44
In my website, I have a page devoted to blind institutions.
50:49
I'm hoping that people that come to my website see that page, who know
50:54
people that are visually impaired, that they might be able to direct
50:58
them to the resources I have.
51:00
And I've been also reaching out to blind institutions because I want
51:05
to have some charity screenings.
51:07
I believe in Washington, the National Institute of the Blind.
51:11
I reached out to them a couple of years ago.
51:14
They're aware of Ralph Teeter and I'm hoping to do something with them.
51:17
The answer to your question is I'm definitely moving this direction
51:21
and I want to do the right thing and make it available and accessible.
51:26
That's fantastic.
51:27
And thank you for telling this story.
51:29
I know that when I became blind, it was very much a crisis of identity
51:35
and I really didn't know how I was going to be able to continue to go
51:40
through and continue to live my life despite my difference in ability.
51:45
And especially with something as severe as going blind, like in your late
51:49
20s, it's a huge change to your life.
51:51
So it is stories much like Ralph's that are the ones that helped me get through
51:56
the hardest of the times when, you know, everything was just not looking great.
52:01
I was in a bad place mentally.
52:02
It was stories a lot like Ralph's and other visionaries
52:06
who have been able to create.
52:08
a life that works for them, no matter what sort of obstacles come through.
52:13
So I do think that this is a fantastic film that you are creating and like, not
52:18
that I've seen it yet or anything, but I do want to just express my appreciation
52:23
for sharing such a beautiful story.
52:25
I'm making this film in large part for people like yourself.
52:29
The inspiration to make this film was overwhelming because
52:34
how inspiring Ralph was.
52:36
And from day one, I wanted to make a film that at the very
52:41
least is inspirational and brings inspiration to people on many levels.
52:47
But like yourself, visually impaired, it means more to me than anything
52:54
if I can help inspire people in their lives to see what this man
53:00
has done and what Every individual is capable of doing if they really
53:06
work hard at it and they concentrate.
53:09
And one of the things that Ralph Teter had was mental vision that was beyond what
53:17
we can really fathom as ordinary people.
53:20
But we all have strong mental vision if we really put it to use and use And
53:27
hopefully this story will inspire people.
53:31
To maybe make the world a better place, maybe make their lives
53:35
a little better or work harder and give back to the community.
53:40
If this film does that in any little way, then I have done my job well.
53:45
Mission achieved.
53:47
Jack, we have reached that part of the episode where I always like to remind our
53:51
guests to share with us any shout outs, promotions or anything else you'd like to
53:55
share that we haven't covered thus far.
53:58
I've been working with the Hollenbeck Youth Center in East LA, where we
54:02
help kids from gangs and broken homes through athletics, through
54:07
educational programs and mentoring.
54:10
We help them achieve a better life.
54:13
I've been doing this for 25, 30 years.
54:15
That sounds really fulfilling, man.
54:18
It is.
54:19
So I've been giving back that way.
54:21
I'm also on the board of advisors for Artists for Change.
54:25
Where we make media that has a statement to help social
54:31
services and so on and so forth.
54:33
So I do try to give back and that brings me a lot of pleasure helping kids and
54:39
I am going to be having two premieres, one in Detroit and one in Los Angeles.
54:45
But the dates and the venues to be determined, I know the Automotive
54:49
Hall of Fame wants to have a series of educational screenings.
54:53
Clemson University is going to be having a screening, likely
54:57
in May or June or in the fall.
54:59
This month, April, we're going to be having a screening at
55:03
Earlham College during their events around the total eclipse.
55:09
And we're going to have a screening in Hagerstown as well.
55:12
And all these dates will be on my website.
55:15
And before we sign off, Enrique, I want to give you the opportunity to
55:18
tell our audience a little bit more about your show, Touch the Grass.
55:22
So my name is Enrique.
55:23
I go by Ike on the internet.
55:25
And I've just recently started my own podcast, The Touch Grass Podcast, where
55:29
we focus on where people are overcoming their everyday challenges in life and
55:35
what they do to make them happy, just to be able to have a happier life.
55:41
So, you can check out more episodes of The Touch Grass Podcast on
55:44
my YouTube channel, youtube.
55:46
com slash at.
55:48
Ikemedia, I Q U E, media.
55:50
And I also have a website as well where you can find all the rest of my socials.
55:54
That's I Q U E dot me.
55:57
M E, as in the first two letters of media.
56:00
You know, I hope to see you on the internet sometime soon.
56:02
Known primarily for his invention of the cruise control, Ralph Teeter, also
56:07
served in World War I, was a crusader for his workers rights, and posthumously
56:12
inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.
56:14
Ralph Teeter's life spanned the entire development of the
56:17
American automobile industry.
56:19
He was granted 50 patents from 1919 to 1946.
56:23
And to many Indiana families, Teeter is remembered for his generosity,
56:28
respect, and loyalty to his employees.
56:31
The documentary film of Ralph Teeter's life is currently in post production
56:35
and scheduled for release in 2024.
56:38
And you can learn more about it by visiting www.
56:43
blindlogicproductions.
56:43
com Or following at Blind Logic Film on Twitter and Instagram, or reaching
56:49
out to Jack Teeter directly at jack.
56:52
teeter on Facebook.
56:53
And with that, I have to thank you both for getting together
56:56
with me here on another awesome episode of Break Fix Podcast.
57:00
And what's most important about this is it's not even really about.
57:03
The automotive part of this, which is an interesting corner case in the many
57:08
stories of what we call the auto sphere.
57:10
It's another stone that we've turned over to find something
57:12
that we didn't know about before.
57:14
It's been an education, but I think the moral to the story is
57:17
that of adapting and overcoming.
57:21
Challenges and adversity in life.
57:23
And if there's anybody, especially as an automotive and vehicle enthusiast
57:27
to be inspired by, as Jack said earlier, it's his uncle, Ralph.
57:30
So watch the film, read his aunt Marjorie's book, learn as much
57:35
as you can about Ralph Teeter.
57:37
And at the end of the day, be like Ralph.
57:39
Definitely.
57:41
That's fantastic.
57:42
Oh my gosh.
57:43
Thank you for having me, Eric.
57:44
It was, uh, really just a pleasure to be here.
57:47
And thank you for talking with us, Jack.
57:49
I cannot believe that I even got the opportunity to be able to hang
57:53
out with you and just learn more about such an incredible person.
57:56
Well, let's meet in person someday.
57:58
And I thank you both for having me, Eric.
58:01
Thank you so much.
58:02
For this opportunity, I enjoyed it immensely.
58:10
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58:14
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