Re: NEW PRODUCT - White Glove Collection - Cormorant Swan Hood Ornament & Radiator Cap

Posted by su8overdrive On 2023/2/22 19:13:41

The ornament was intended as homage to the noble pelican of the Packard family crest, plucking from its own breast to feed its young. In the '30s, one of Packard's advertising fellows thought the rapacious cormorant, which steals from other birds, more elegant.

What's lost in this shuffle is that the cars look cleaner, innately elegant with the standard bale ornament instead of the above gargoyle. You can't tack on elegance, understatement. Just as we've seen imposing Super 8s and Twelves in photos of big city Packard showrooms in the late '30s shod only in black sneakers, so also were they displayed with simple bale ornaments.

When people offer pricey reproductions of baubles the history of which they do not understand, their sole intent is clear.

The "cormorant" overpowers the car, makes it look comic opera. Rolls-Royce got by with a small figurine, Bentley a simple flying B, Hispano-Suiza a diminutive horizontal stork, even the overblown Duesenberg J for the arriviste a small suggestion of fleetness.

For the insecure, the Winged Goddess of Speed is less obtrusive and sleeker, as is, for earlier models, Adonis, Sliding Boy.

(Please don't tell us the cormorant was standard on '40 180s. Packard was waning by then, good sales that year only because of drastic price cuts, and 2/3rds of their output 110s; desperately playing on their past while GM unveiling racy new C bodies.)

If you want to offer something useful, how about silkscreening our original cowl delivery plates? Many have the inscribed signature, stamp of the dealership selling our cars, and we'd like to keep that, not have a new piece of tin from Taiwan.

And if you really want to be useful, there are any number of electromechanical bits in short supply for various models you might reproduce.

The focus on bolt on effluvia like the above underscores most today more interested in talking about their garage queens and looking at pictures of shiny old cars online.

Meanwhile, this wonderful site for the preservation and rejuvenation of some of the best road cars, luxe or not, of the first half of the 20th Century concludes with a forum for "Packard Parts & Miscellaneous." Have used it to offer spares for sale. It works. Try it.