Over By the Car: Documenting Islanders' love affair with their cars

Years ago, while teaching a social history course at UPEI, something became very apparent to David Weale: Islanders love their cars.

Or at least, they like having pictures taken with their cars.

That becomes apparent, as well, to anyone flipping through Weale's latest book, Over By the Car.

It's a collection of vintageblack and white photos that go back as far the 1920s. Many were collected years ago when Wealetaughtat UPEI and asked students to bring in old family photos for a class project.

An automobile brings out something in people. It brings out the sauciness, it brings out the attitude. David Weale

"I got seeing all these albums coming in and began to notice very early that they all had these photographs of people by their cars, and it became very apparent that Islanders loved their cars," he said on CBC Mainstreet.

"People as a rule like to have their picture taken with or beside things that are important to them."

That's why many were snapped, as the title suggests, "over by the car."

Mainstreet PEI7:12Over by the Car

A new photo book by David Weale looks at the time in which portraits were usually taken in front of a car. He spoke with Natalia Goodwin.

"An automobile brings out something in people. It brings out the sauciness, it brings out the attitude," Weale said.

"And so you get these pictures of people with their foot up on their bumper you know and that look on their face, like look at me, or the guy with the elbow out the window and his head stuck out."

Taking the Island by storm

Weale said the photos are ironic in a way because P.E.I. initially opposed the onset of the automobile.

"Automobiles were banned here, outright. You could own one, you just couldn't drive it, except for on your own property," he said.

"So it went from that around 1906 to the '20s and '30s when they start to show up, all these photographs of people."

It's no wonder Islanders came to embrace cars, Weale said.

"People at one time were very restricted in their movement," he said.

"You knew very well when you were growing up the girl you were going to marry or the boy you were going to marry was somebody that lived within as far as you could go with a horse and a buggy in the evening. When the car came, all of a sudden those boundaries moved."

Weale is holding a book launch for Over By the Car at 2 p.m. on Oct. 9 at the Guild in Charlottetown.

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