Packard Forum Index » General

Does anyone out there have a list of Packard dealers? If so, would you be willing to have it posted on this site for us to reference when searching for long lost dealerships? The older, the better. Thank you.

Try here. It's not complete, but it's a good start.
packardinfo.com/xoops/html/modules/dealer/

John, what you suggest would be a great resource, yet I suspect it will be a far larger project than many of us would expect. My only dealer list is undated but I believe it's about 1939, and is 65 pages long, some pages listing 30 or more dealers. The list is somewhat hard to use because individual dealers are not listed by city and state but by the factory branch/distributorship they were serviced by which in some cases covers several different states. So to find a dealer you must first determine which factory branch covered that geographic area.

Also no doubt dealers were added, deleted, bought and sold, relocated, etc. during the course of each year, thus to even begin to capture the "big picture" would be a huge undertaking.

At some point I'll make a copy of my list and forward to Big Kev for him to see what he thinks might be done with it, but it's only a single list for a single year. Perhaps others will come forward with other lists, of have other suggestions on how to organize the material?

" it's about 1939, and is 65 pages long, some pages listing 30 or more dealers. "

So then, is it reasonable to say that the 1939 list has approximately 1800 different dealers listed????

Is the list strictly US dealers or contains International dealers too????

Does the list contain tags:
Dealer Name: E Grey Smith.

Where the tag is "Dealer Name".

OR do the names and cities and soforth all begin in the same COLUMN on the pages?????

Congratulations on your level of curiousity - I've never met anyone who asks as many questions as you.

Canadian dealers are listed in the domestic section under their respective branches in Toronto, Ottawa, Quebec, etc. The last half-dozen pages are separate and titled "Packard Motors Export Corporation" with a December 1939 date and list dealers from Albania to Yugoslavia. Sorry, no Zanzibar.

EDIT - I'll add a sample page from the list so you can all see how it's organized.

Attach file:

---

  (106.03 KB)

It would be interesting to analyse the ratio of Packard dealers to say Cadillac, Hudson, Nash, Lincoln, Chrysler and Studebaker, dealers during the prewar era.

Especialy between Packard and Cadillac. Perhaps regional ratio too.

Thanks for the example page. The way the info is formated on the page would make it difficult to write a program to parse out the info.

I understand that a list would only be a snapshot of what existed at the time the list was compiled. I think the value would be in the information contained even thought it may not be easily extracted through some search routine. Just the scanned pages of a list like O_D has would be better than what we have. The Packard Dealers information on this website is interesting and somewhat useful, but only a small number are included.

Also some of the early Owners Manuals had list of service dealers in the back (domestic and foreign). If we could get them all into a big spreadsheet, then we could do a mass import in the website Dealer List.

O_D's sample page reminds me of my days as a DM for Chrysler back in the 1980s. The Zone office provided us with printed lists of contact info on the dealers for which they/we were "responsible" - derived as a subset from a greater corporate computerized database. Years later, I had the privilege of looking over a photocopies of a similar dealer lists from a couple of PMCC Zone offices, but I don't have access to those - let alone originals.

Let me tell you, from my experience with the Service Index and Bookshelf features, if someone would be willing to take the time and convert the data from such a dealer list into a spreadsheet matrix, BigKev's "kung-fu" programming could produce a searchable database in relatively short order.

I'm cofindent that BigKev could assimilate the distinctiveness of the existing entries from the user-driven form of the Packard Dealers feature into a greater collective, yet allow for future additions of detail from the members.

THEN, if other lists come to light, we could similarly merge those.

Yet, before anyone jumps in with data entry, we should first discuss exactly what fields to include in the spreadsheet and the target database - beyond the obvious dealer name and address info.

This could be a very interesting and fruitful upgrade to the existing feature.

Any takers?