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The following is from the Packard Owner's Service Policy that originaly came with my car listing the original owner's name and address. It has delivery date of 4-18-56.

DEALER name follows:

All spelling is corrected and double checked:

E. Gray Smith
1405 Broadway
Nashville, Tenn.

(current zip code for that area is 37203).


In later years E.Gray Smith also sold RR, Jag and Bentley and perhaps sold those badges concurently with Packard but i really don't know for sure.

One of his work orders touts:
E. Gray Smith
"Quality Automobiles and Service Since 1910"

I have a listing for what I assume is a Packard Zone office in the 1948 Washington DC yellow pages:

Packard Motor Car Co.
(Wholesale Only)
1242 24th St., N.W.
Washington, D.C.
Tel: REpublic-0123

I added several DC/MD/VA dealers to the registry a while back (from the same source), but left this one out since it's not a dealer. I think adding the "official" Packard offices is a great idea.

Thanks for info guys.

Here is a map I was using yesterday for testing the integration code. This only contains about 800 or so dealers and has not been weeded yet. The is a alpha-testing map, so it will look better when done.

Preliminary Dealer Map

You can zoom right down to the street level. Best to click on the Hybrid Mode so you get the Satellite view with the street map overlaid.

For example here is Screen Shot of the Packard Dealer in Dayton, Ohio. Obviously this only works if a dealer has an actual known street address. Other wise on the general city is tagged.

Attach file:

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Kevin, the map feature is keen. Great work, you deserve an award.

A couple of comments that may be on other maps too. On the locations in Santa Fe, things noticed:

The captioned balloon and bull's eye are not in agreement for the 125 North Guadalupe address. The bull's eye is correct, the balloon is not.

The Emblem and Lawrence dealership was located at 140 East Palace Avenue, per the captioned balloon, but the bull's eye is indicating 110 East Palace Avenue. The 140 address (on the corner of Palace Ave. and Burro Alley is not bull's eyed.

The 110 address is the location of Henry Lawrence Packard Dealer and is not balloon captioned.

Don't mean to use up a lot of bandwidth on this, but thought you would want to have this feedback. Others can look at sites they are familiar with and see if they see the same kinds of things.

This is really something special. Thanks.

The balloon is always usually offset a bit. It's the bullseye that marks the location. Also just like using a car GPS, the actual location of street address can be off going up and down a street. Sometime my car GPS says I am in front of my house, when I am actually about 6 houses down from it.

Also if you look on some of the locations the street overlays don't always 100% align with satellite overlay. Sometime there is shifting involved, probably something to do in the mathematics with the conversion between the satellite imagery and the GIS data. All of this is really a function of Google Maps, and how the GIS data gets encoded. I have to take the street addresses and run them thought a script that converts them to Long/Lat for Google Maps to plot. Sometimes those tools and scripts don't resolved to pin point accuracy. Hopefully later the tools will improve to provide better "Front Door" accuracy.

Kev,

One of the Briggs stamping plants was at 11631 Mack Ave, Detroit, MI 48214. This is now the site of Chrysler's Mack Ave Stamping plant. I am not sure Packard bodies were produced there. Maybe at the Conner Ave plant (which Nance eventually purchased).

Just did the mass import. 2380 dealers now in the list

There may appear to be duplicates of certain dealers, but those are there due to the fact that a dealer had multiple addresses in the same city listed. Either from multiple offices, or address changes and moves over time.

Also on the Non-US addresses I had to convert some of the countries to their modern day names. The Directory List I was working from was dated 1940. So almost 70 years some of the countries no longer exist, have been renamed, or are now part of another county. So I used the appropriate modern name to make it Map friendly.

Still working on getting the Map built. Stay tuned for that.

What a staggering list! I've never seen anything that comes close to it.

My favorite from the list is the dealer from the Bahamas: Kellys Lumber Yard Ltd... "Your one-stop shop for two-by-fours and Twelves!"

LOL Good One!

Some of the Dealers had interesting names. Only thing I found odd about the 1940 Directory was only 1 Distributor had Dealers and Service Stations listed separately. All the other Distributors listed everything as a Dealers. So eventually I will go back and try to clean that up.

Also the Interactive Google Map has been added to the Dealer List Page. It really puts it into perspective when you see the coverage across the World. The U.S. looks like it's covered in some crazy shag carpeting!

Eventually I want to add some color coding to the map so you have see Distributor Territories easily.

Also I will be making a couple more changes to how the Dealer Info page looks to display the type (Distributor, Dealer, Service Station, Factory, etc.), and also who that Dealers distributor way. The information is already in the Database now, just need to wire it up.

I've heard it said by folks who know far more than I about the Packard dealer network that, with those that came and went, were bought out and changed names, changed addresses, etc., there are probably about 10,000 distinct entities.