Packard

MIGHTY PACKARD

1956 Packard.

Here I am this morning (Sunday, September 16, 2007) navigating north (west, south, east; WHATEVER) on state Route 64 in the Bucktooth Bathtub, returning from running at the so-called elitist country-club.
I notice a car approaching in my rear-view mirror.
It’s backlit, so I can’t tell what it is.
But it appears to be from the late ‘50s. The wheel-track is quite narrow; wheels at least eight inches inside the wheel-wells — as opposed to the way they are now far out at the corners.
What I could see also appeared to have peaked fenders, and what appeared to be a wrap-around windshield.
What have we here? A ‘55 Chevy — the car I lusted after all through high-school and college?
I turned toward Ionia, and the car passed on my right.
Holy mackerel: a ‘56 Packard — the self-same car my supposedly all-knowing car-guy brother misidentified as a Desoto, for crying out loud.
Some car-guy. A Desoto is a Chrysler-product. MoPar had wrap-around windshields too, but different than Ford and GM (and Packard). The MoPar wrap-around wrapped at the top as well as the bottom — the other wrap-arounds didn’t.

The Keed.

I think this is the actual car I saw; it was this color.

GOOD GRIEF! What I pictured ain’t the MoPar wrap-around. The bluster-boy has even confused two-piece windshields with one-piece, and ya didn’t see one-piece until after 1952 or ‘53.
How in the wide, wide world can an alleged car-guy flub a ‘56 Packard?
By then Packard was doomed. In the ‘30s it was the grandest car that could be had — but they stuck with that beautiful snarling vertical grill even after WWII.
On top of that they produced a butt-ugly beetle-bomb introduced in ‘41 or ‘42, and produced it clear up until the early ‘50s. That snarling grill pasted on a beetle-bomb looked ridiculous.
They also couldn’t afford new designs like mighty GM. Early ‘50s until just before Studebaker took over was essentially the same car; rebodied.
By then Packard had given up on the snarling grill — about the onliest vestige of that is the curve of the grill-mouth (see pictures).
But it was nothing compared to a nail-valve Buick — or a Caddy.
The parents of the first girl I lusted after in Erlton had a Packard, but it was white. (Her name was Joan Kupzoff — she had dark hair in a pony-tail.)

RE: “north (west, south, east; WHATEVER).............. My loudmouthed macho brother-from-Boston and I have been having an argument about which way a road goes in northern Delaware, where we grew up; me as a teenager. I say the road goes west-east; he says it goes north-south. Actually it goes northwest-southeast.

“The Bucktooth-Bathtub” is our 2005 Toyota Sienna van; called that because it’s white and like sitting in a bathtub, and appears to have a bucktooth on the grill.

“The so-called elitist country-club” is nearby Boughton (“BOW-tin”) Park, where I run. It was called that long ago by an editor at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper, where I once worked, because it will only allow taxpayers of the three towns that own it to use it. We are residents of one of those towns.

“Ionia” is a tiny hamlet east of where we live.

“MoPar” is Chrysler Corporation.

“The bluster-boy” is my all-knowing, blowhard brother-in-Boston, who noisily badmouths everything I do or say. He noisily claims superior knowledge about cars.

RE: “nail-valve Buick.......” During the mid-fifties, Buick fielded its first V8 engine, and it was overhead-valve, but unlike most overhead-valve V8s of that time (e.g. Cadillac and Oldsmobile). It valves were vertical to the crankshaft, instead of the cylinders, rendering a smooth shot to the intake-manifold, but a contorted path to the exhaust-headers, which were on the outside.
The valves were also tiny — “nail-valves.” Later Buick gave up with the “nail-valve” design.