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I saw this on the Hemmings blog yesterday..
It made me ill.
The moral is "can't we all get along?"

http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2009/03/15/sia-flashback-packard-crushathon-1977-derham-dodges-oddies-but-goodies/

I remember seeing those pix when they were first published, but can't recall much of the text. Saddest of all (to me) is that there was at least one V8 Caribbean somewhere in that pile.

Yet, I don't get the bit about blaming club rivalaries for so many cars being crushed. Mind you, I'm not defending any club by that statement; personally, I just haven't found any club to be all that essential to restoring/preserving my Packards. Rather, I believe that having two Packard clubs helps keep things "healthy".

OK, I went back and found you could click on the thumbnails and view the article in a legible size.

I still don't get that club rivalry caused this. The peice even sez that the while only one of the two clubs advertised the auction, NO notice was given that unsold cars would be crushed.

Methinks there's a lot more behind this story than any club rivalry, but it's all water over the dam.

That whole article & especially the pictures just made me physically ill. How could anyone be crushing Packards let alone caribeans? I guess the cars were 22 years old in 1977.

That would be like somebody crushing 1987 cars now. I guess Hindsight is 20/20. There are alot of cars people would have saved if they knew people would have wanted them in the future.

The forced sale (city of Santa Ana) Was advertised in the LA times and phone calls were made to "enthusiast" The problem was this: A private owner contacted the club on Tuesday with a must move by Monday AM. Time was short but many of the Packards and part were sold and saved. Today the results would be different. In 1977 many Packards were, dollar wise, not worth saving.
JFK

Quote:
That's a good analogy. There were very few vehicles produced in the 1987 model year that I would consider saving now.

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.

Those images of the Packard car crushing can easily make a grown man cry (I did)

I wonder where all those saved cars are today?

I vaguely remember that instance. Jerry's version is pretty much the way I remember because one of my friends called one evening and asked if I could go to LA with him and pick up a car the next day--said he had just heard about some available that had to be moved. I couldn't go so he took his trailer down and brought back one car-so at least one was saved but don't remember which other than a V8. Wasn't there some kind of city redevelopment associated with this. Seems like it was around that time that Custom Auto was being threatened with having to move.

The club rivalry was very much in effect then-more so, I believe, than now. We used to be a fairly active region of PAC with shows, tours open to all yet very few members of the other club would attend despite our location being much closer to their HQ and members than to some who did attend. We also didn't attend too many of their functions. The break was before I became too active & don't know the reasons yet remember that there seemed to be a lot of animosity.