Re: One Story Assembly Plant What If?

Posted by Steve203 On 2014/5/16 20:45:36

<i>RE: the shortened building... You are correct. They did cut the building back. I remember exactly when they did this. They used the same brick and shortened the building....keeping the same look. Stone Container Corp. eventually moved in this building.</i>

By any chance, do you know what Packard was doing in that building after the war? I started a seperate thread about it, but noone has answered.

Re the Jean Peters car, There was an article in the Detroit Free Press late 72/early 73 about Frost and French Studebaker in LA. The article mentioned the odd thing that had happened there recently: a man in a chauffer's uniform had driven in with a Caribbean with only 300 miles on the clock, had the oil changed, and they never saw him again. They had no idea where that car came from.

A few months later Motor Trend magazine covered the car in their "Retrospect" feature. One of their staffers had been seeing it around and finally caught up with it at a car wash. By this time the car had 611 miles on it. The young guy who had it explained he was a relative of Jean's, showed the MT staffer the original registration with her name on it. The story he relayed is as you say, Jean didn't like the car, so some Hughes staffer picked it up at the house and drove it off to a warehouse, where it sat for the next 18 years.

When I was at the Motor Muster in Greenfield Village last year, the archivist from the Studebaker museum in South Bend was there. I asked him if he knew what ever happened to "the Jean Peters Caribbean", and he said "who?"

So, where is that car now, in a museum, or in the hands of a lucky collector?