Sonny, I’ve Been Around Just Long Enough To Know That
By George Hamlin
Postwar
Packards generally used the predominant body color on the wheels. The two big
exceptions: French Blue and Packard Ivory bathtubs, which usually ended up with red wheels,
and V8 Caribbeans, whose wheels matched the
center stripe, not the upper body.
·The word PACKARD on the 1952
trunk handle is painted
red (spent hours in the sun in a lawn chair over the years, keeping that red paint fresh). The sunburst lines below the name, and the strips in the
separator over the bug-eye taillights 1951-54, were not painted.
· The color strip just below the
parking light on V8 Caribbeans
is painted the color of the center stripe, not the color of the lower stripe. Yes, we know, it lines
up with the lower
stripe. Still that's not the way they did it. Paint that little section to match the stripe.
The
catwalk grilles on the 1941s were painted body color. Not black, unless the car happened to be black. The paint goes
(1) in the sunken strip inside each vertical bar and (2) on the connector
section between bars all the way around the
top. They weren't installed "all
chrome" because the stylists
didn't want that catwalk grille to
overpower the rest of the front of the
car. The reason replacement parts
were all chrome, no paint, is that they
didn't want to stock more than the two parts, left and right.
· Every one of Packard's radio and television ads that mentioned the
· The color separation at the
bottom of the 1955 Clipper front door ends in a vertical line. It does not
attempt to follow
the divider-strip angle across the rocker panel; that looks kind of odd when a restorer does it.
· The 1946 and 1947 Packard sedans
received different 2- tone treatments. The 1946s got the top color on the trunk lid and upper doors; for 1947, the top color
stopped below the rear window, along the
crease. So many folks have done their 1947s in 1946 style because
Packard never released a 1947 sales color brochure
- just kept on using the 1946 edition.
· Packard never marketed either a
Wonder Bar radio or a
Load Leveler. Those trademarks belonged to other companies.
· Though the brochures showed
them, it is unlikely that a single 1946
car of any description was delivered with whitewall tires. The customer was
lucky enough to get bumpers, and then often
after a wait of several weeks. AACA once considered deductions for a
1946 car with whitewalls but backed off;
"We should have done that early on," the Chief Judge at the
time commented. "It's too late now that
all these 1946 owners have gone out and spent all that money on whitewall tires." Where you see white tire sides on a picture from 1946, odds are, it's a Port-a-Wall
or a bolt-on accessory painted white.
There
were other automotive things during 'way back
when, too, that folks born too late sometimes don't realize:
· Willys was pronounced WILL-is. No broadcast commercial ever said it any other way, clear up through its sponsorship of the "Maverick" TV series, until the company changed its name from Willys Motors Division,
Kaiser Industries to Kaiser Jeep Corporation in 1963. And yes, that had the unlikely result of putting the Kaiser
nameplate back on the highway, though it's not
known how many states registered them that way.
· The Mustang was introduced (on
17 April 1964) as a 1965
model to give Ford the jump on everyone else. Ford did that a lot. There was no 1964 Mustang.
· The 1960 Valiant was not a