Re: Satchel Paige talking baseball in front of his 1941 Packard - Tallking Bobblehead

Posted by su8overdrive On 2022/7/2 16:00:28

Good points all, including the horror of Vincent Chin, a draftsman at a Detroit auto industry supply firm 40 years ago. Our nation's loathsome treatment of Asians goes back 200 years; perhaps our lowest ebb was the War II Japanese-American internment camps. Hard-working, decent, loyal, taxpaying US citizens lost their homes, businesses, furniture, cars for no other reason but their ancestry. We didn't have German-American internment camps.
Guantanamo would seem poetic internment for the treasonous make America white again fake bone spur-in-chief who lost money every year of his life playing businessman on daddy's over-leveraged real estate, incurring titanic debt to Russian oligarchs, saying those who served "suckers and losers," John McCain not a hero because he was caught.

Kev, be assured Monsignor Cole and i not discussing "politics," but character this July 4th weekend on a site devoted to "a gentleman's car made by gentlemen," advertised in Literary Digest, National Geographic, and the New Yorker, among other respected magazines.

Packard's ads in their day were tasteful; quality products -- and nations --not requiring shrill. Right about David Rockefeller; anyone in business today hears "no problem" from the brats you mention, a simple "you're welcome" an imposition on their hipness.

But Paige's '40 had junior grille and three-bar grille guard.
With overdrive, well tuned, such cars could nudge 90.

Before adding overdrive to the '40 120 owned in my 20s, usual 4.09:1 axle, I got valve float at about 85 mph.

Land and later water speed record setter John Cobb took a '40 Hudson Eight sedan to 93.89 mph at Bonneville, a new Class C record. Hudson rated that engine's 128 hp at a high for the era 4,200 rpm, compression raised that year to 6.5 from 6.3.

Hudson always watched piston weight, tuned versions of their eight could rev safely to 4,500 rpm and beyond. Hudson claimed the splash oiling good for over 5,000 rpm, Railton tuners having no trouble with the innards even when extracting 150 bhp via supercharging.

Rolls-Royce had studied Hudson's 254-c.i. eight, Derby's engineers sneaking one into a ponderous Phantom III, the brass given a ride around the grounds, marveling at the smoothness, believing the car still had its complex 447-ci ohv V-12, which shared the Hudson eight's 4 1/2-inch stroke though with a quarter inch larger (3 1/4") bore. There are reports of these eights going 200,000 miles before major work required. Augie Duesenberg was selling a marine version in 1940.

A fellow One-Twenty owner, a 3M engineer, selling me some parts when i was rebuilding the car in '75 told me there were until recently or still 24-hour-a-day irrigation pumps in Texas powered by 282-ci One-Twenty engines. Don't know where their governors set, but likely 1,800 or 2,000 for peak torque.

Absolute speed in vintage cars has always interested some of us because the higher the top speed, the more relaxed the engine in normal cruising, but there's been so much buff book bolshoi it's deuced hard to divine.

Nicholas Dreystadt was both smart and a class act to buck the prevailing idiocy of the times. The only Cadillac i ever liked was a '40 Series 62 sans mounts in a dark color, but through '48 Cad still used a water pump right out of 1930.

The late Steve Williams, who many here might recall as owner of Steve's Studebaker-Packard parts in Napa, CA, had earlier been a service manager at an area Cadillac dealership. Steve liked Packards, Chryslers, and a few FoMoCo products, but derisively dismissed GM as "Generous Motors."

Only GMobile that ever appealed other than that one Cad are a few prewar Roadmasters, but even the rare, no-cost optional 3.6 axle introduced in '39 far from an overdrive, if how a Compound Carburetored '41 Century managed 110 mph at the GM Proving Grounds, fastest car off a showroom floor in the '40s.

1940 Packards were cheapened a little over the '39 120s, but also lighter. Terrific cars. But always thought their hood louvers tinny looking, understandably aping '38 Buick, which had broken Packard's three-year run of Gallop Poll's Most Beautiful Car.

Good road cars, and better ergonomics than the Clippers. Satchel Paige knew what he was doing, certainly had the hand/eye coordination to allegedly race through those small towns. Like another man with a tan, Lewis Hamilton, today's leading Forumula One driver, and for that matter, 77-year-old rocker rodder Jeff Beck, he avoided meat and dairy products. Had Paige been allowed in the honky majors, it would've been a new ballgame.

Cary Grant took part in informal nocturnal races through sleeping LA in his '41 Roadmaster. Johnny Depp loves his bone stock '36 120 sedan, their only drawback their trucky rear axle ratios.

A black man from Togo, West Africa, Edmond Berger, invented the sparkplug in France in 1839.