Re: Packard Auction -Sep 2021

Posted by Highlander160 On 2021/9/10 11:02:41
After seeing this after the fact I wish I'd have dug in on this conv sedan. Let's talk Dietrich a moment, shall we? As soon as we hear it visions of multi-million dollar customs comes to mind. Sorry, not everything "Dietrich" means millions. A company like any other in their day there was a need for revenue. Their Murray division was building "production" bodies for Packard that were indeed DESIGNED by Dietrich. "What's the 1st tell Jocko?" Many of them had aluminum doors, in fact in my experience all but the cpe roadsters from the start of the 30s (designed by Dietrich but built by Packard) had them, roadster doors were steel. Other than subtle details, if you look close all the Dietrich designs share the same cowl shape and hgt. Conv sedan, victoria, and roadster. The hoods, shells, windshields all interchange, but don't interchange with the sedans, phaetons and others. We can throw in 2/4 coupes in some models but that's mostly 34. I simplify by saying "Short cowl and high cowl" to separate the bodies and hoods. What else? Well every Dietrich body (Murray or custom) got what I call a DIETRICH JOB NUMBER. We have a car with job # 6165. A 33 I know of built a few months later has 6185. A custom may have a number between those 2. Sometimes you'll find the body type number with it. In 1932 (late) Packard began to call out that Dietrich was building these bodies and added a premium to the MSRP and used tags on the body, and all were tagged in 33. I'd have liked to poke at the wood and looked up the job# on this car. Is it a Dietrich? Sure, could very well be. Was it ever the style/model that drove the collector to unlimited avarice and made him "assemble" one? Hardly. The colors alone tell us when it was done, and when you see chrome hood doors and other preiod embelishments the picture becomes clear. I wasn't there when it hammered but at $154K all in with juice it looked like a winner. If you had the car for free you couldn't possibly "get there from here" for twice that. Real? They had a full file on the car to look it all up. I didn't. Now all this knowledge and opinion, coupled with $1.86, will get you a large coffee at Speedway, but then again maybe it helps someone some day too. If I thought I'd get input I'd like to assemble some Dietrich job numbers and start an actuary of sorts. Thanks for reading...

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