Re: Packard Crushathon 1977

Posted by BH On 2009/3/16 18:14:25

Thanks for the additional perspective, Jerry. I generally enjoyed SIA for decades, but it's starting to look like that article was a piece of yellow journalism.

Ironically, my first trip to Fall Hershey was in the fall of 1978, and I was looking into the availability of parts for my dad's Exec, which I found left in a field a couple years earlier. I was told by plenty of vendors, there, that my Exec was too "new". Yet, outside of that venue 55-56-57 Chebbies were a hot item - even then.

Seems to me, now, that the failure to find good homes for all of those Packards was not because of any club rivalry, then, but the result of people ignoring (or even looking down their nose at) the postwar Packards.

I can better understand why my dad left the tired old Exec in a field back in 1963: supply far exceeded demand. (Still, I wish history had played out a bit differently with that one.)

I'm not some foolish optimist, but instead of counting and mourning the loss of all those that were crushed, perhaps we should count and be grateful for those cars that survived this event and others like it.