I’d like to take this opportunity to personally thank you for making it this far and taking a precious few minutes out of your life to peruse my webpage, and listen to (read) my ramblings. I’m Phillip Masters, PharmD, RPh. I’m an Acute-Care Hospital Pharmacist by trade, and perfectionist by nature. Why I chose the pharmacy profession instead of following my passion in hot rods is a story far longer than any of us have time for today.
As I’m writing this today, my lovely wife of 18 months, Vickie, is 38 weeks and 3 days pregnant with our firstborn child, a lovely boy who we are naming Robert. I hope someday he finds this post and reads it, and has a rough idea where is old man’s head was at this very moment. As it currently stands, my great uncle Bob, who we are naming Robert after, is actively on hospice care and in the process of departing us. For the last 7 months (as long as we’ve known we were pregnant), I’ve told Bob he wasn’t allowed to leave us until he got to meet ‘Junior,’ a name we’ve lovingly bestowed on little Robert in utero. I’m incredibly blessed to have the opportunity at the practice of fatherhood, but also scared to death. How can I accomplish all the things… and still ensure that I raise a productive member of society who hopefully knows how to change a flat on the side of the road?? Only time will tell how good of a job I do, but it’s my goal every day to be the best for little Robert that I can possibly be.
I’m currently writing this purely out of anxiety, and trying to make sense of this crazy world. I’ve been planning to make this website for months, and just hadn’t made it this far. I think this is my form of procrastinating. Furthermore, with the advent of ChatGPT and other AI, I’ve become far too accustomed to having AI’s help in writing emails etc and trying to squeeze 18 hours worth of work out of a 9-hour workday. That said, this is my own handwritten ramblings, without the help of ChatGPT. I used to fancy myself an eloquent writer, and I’m afraid I’m becoming to dependent on my virtual assistant that I need an opportunity to bring some written humanity back into life.
Things are getting crazy in life… Social media is taking over… TikTok, Facebook Reels, Youtube Shorts etc… It all gets in the way of living life. Sure, I find some cool ideas for hot rod builds on there, but it’s keeping ME from building MY dreams, and maybe YOUR dreams too! This is my ‘writing down my goals’ of getting unplugged (start a blog on my new website to unplug… makes sense if you don’t think about it). I intend to keep this going, and please feel free to follow along on ‘The YouTube’ as my grandparents call it. This is my opportunity to stay accountable to myself and my build projects, and maybe even vent or lay out some sarcasm that 99.999% of the human population will likely never read. Here it goes: Welcome to Whitebreast Industries and Masters Speed Shop.
I’ve always been a tinkerer. My dad ran a used car dealership from our shop next to our house, and I did my best to be out there as much as I possibly could. He bought the yellow 57 you see if some of my pictures when I was 2 and 1/2 years old. He didn’t realize it then, but that would spark my passion for years to come.
At age 16 (I’ve apparently wrongly been quoting 14, but I looked on my HAMB thread attached below, and I guess I was 16.), I purchased a pitiful old orange/white 4-door 57 Chevy 210 and ‘restored’ it as best as I could with the budget of a high school kid. I hate doing things over and over again, so I won’t bore you with the same story you can read on the link below. At age 30, I’m embarrassed by 16-year-old Phil’s overuse of emoji’s. Oh well, part of it. https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/resurrecting-my-57-chevy-210.717991/ Needless to say, to this day, it’s my daily-driver, trailer toter, family hauler, road tripping hot rod street/strip car. We keep finding the ‘weakest link’ but I’m sure we will get it all sorted out eventually. I’m not giving up, so there’s that.
Life got busy, I went to college, and I kept buying project after project for that dopamine hit… I kept buying projects like I was still in high school and went to class from 8 to 3:15 and could wrench in the shop until midnight every night… But I learned that Drake University’s PharmD program didn’t allow that. Add a couple old trucks and a 69 Roadrunner to the list of not-yet-completed projects…
Fast forward 5 and 1/2 years since I graduated from Drake, you find me right here, sitting in a Lazy Boy recliner in my comfy living room, trying to figure out what unfinished project to start in on next… I joke that I suffer from ADHD (Automobile Dismantling and Hoarding Disorder), but it’s more like a cross between Perfection Paralysis and chasing a dopamine hit from another Facebook Marketplace steal. It doesn’t help that my lovely wife also sends me numerous goodies on Marketplace, and she’s sometimes a little too supportive. Not complaining at all!!! But man, I’ve got a lot of irons in a lot of fires… HAHA!
I joke that I suffer from ADHD (Automobile Dismantling and Hoarding Disorder), but it’s more like a cross between Perfection Paralysis and chasing a dopamine hit from another Facebook Marketplace steal.
This brings us to the gist of this post. Just like all of my hours-long stories… I ramble on about things for way too long before finally making my point, only to realize my poor audience has either fallen asleep, or forgot where we started in the first place. I said all that to say this… If you want to follow along on my adventure, and my goal to teach some things to some folks along the way, or you’re open to letting me get some wrenching in on your project… Please keep reading, and come back occasionally!
From hot rods and classic trucks… to vintage wood and fiberglass boats… and maybe the occasional firearms content, WELCOME. Seriously, how many times have I said that? ChatGPT would never let me ramble this bad, and that’s how you know it’s real!
Wrapping Up This Ramble…
In conclusion, thanks for reading this far. I know I didn’t really say too much about where ‘Whitebreast Industries’ comes from, but ‘Masters Speed Shop’ should be pretty self explanatory. To explain the former, I grew up in Whitebreast Township, in Lucas County, Iowa. Just a mile west of the Chariton city limits, if you look on Google maps, it’s geotagged where the old town of Whitebreast, Iowa used to be. That’s the highway intersection where I grew up, and I guess it sounded good when I slapped Whitebreast and Industries together into a name. Nothing dirty implied in the name, except all the dirt and mess that comes with innumerable projects yet to be completed.