Re: Why no hood ornament on this 1939 Packard 120 coupe?

Posted by su8overdrive On 2016/2/21 14:15:54

It has a hood ornament. Sadly, in today's gotta have it mentality of what remains of the vintage/pre-'50s old car hobby, people think these cars "need" what were options.

Many of us have seen photos of---or in person if old enough--open models of late '30s Packard Twelves, for example, parked on Persian carpets surrounded by potted palms in big city showrooms shod with blackwall tires, adorned with the same basic "bail" hood ornament as the '39 One Twenty you cite. As lifetime vintage car buff, Packard owner, writer and professor of English, SUNY Buffalo, Robert Mehl recalled, snapping photos of what were then known simply as "fine cars" in posh neighborhoods of his adolescent Pittsburg, PA in the '40s, you never saw fog or driving lights on cars of any cost then.

If only more buffs today might use their Packards as exemplars of less is more, understatement, befitting the understated elegance these cars embodied originally, instead of festooning them with every option they can justify, and in circus wagon colors.

Like the frog boilt to death in pan of initially tepid water, we've seen what cars remain today transmuted into garish parodies of what they once were, often justified by a magazine ad illustration, itself an example of artistic license merely to grab the reader's attention much as TV ads in today's ADD society.