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Satchel Paige talking baseball in front of his 1941 Packard - Tallking Bobblehead
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JeromeSolberg
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This is an interesting Packard-related novelty item, also a fundraiser for the Negro League History Project and the Negro League Baseball Museum.

Satchel Paige with his Packard talking Bobblehead

Posted on: 2022/7/1 11:06
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Re: Satchel Paige talking baseball in front of his 1941 Packard - Tallking Bobblehead
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su8overdrive
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Satchel Paige owned a '40, not '41 120. Because it was somehow "okay" for blacks to be successful entertainers or athletes, Paige probably didn't have to pay a white man the usual $300 to front for him at a Packard, Lincoln, or another dealership.

Nicholas Dreystadt saved Cadillac not just with the Olds-based '34 LaSalle, but by ignoring the day's pervasive bigotry. Cadillac lost money every year through the '30s until 1949, supported by Chevy and B-O-P, many of whose managers were recruited to cost the '35 120 only to wind up running Packard in the '40s and beyond, so much so that Packard's designers were told to use the cowl and roof heights of the Chevy-based '49 Olds 88 as their guide for their 1951 iteration of the '49 shoebox Ford. Its chief stylist, John Reinhart, among those who'd wanted to retain and, his word, "sweeten" the 1941-47 Clipper, Packard's sole success of the '40s not linked to the postwar sellers' market, decried the resulting '51-on "high pockets" dictated by Packard's mgmt.-- increasingly phoning in the cars in favor of more lucrative, less hassle govt. jet engine contracts well realizing all independents doomed -- because steel cheaper than glass.

Compare the '48 Cadillac with the '48 bathtub. Packard, flush with war profits, blew as much to clob 200 lbs. of bloat on the sleek Clipper as a wholly new body would've cost.


It is not enough to shrug the below off with, "Well, that's the way it was back then." Or, "Everyone thought that way."
Because, as you'll see, one man at Cadillac did not see it "that way," to Cadillac's everlasting benefit.

So, out of respect for the dark-hued men who helped build our cars, our fellow car buffs with tans, for the sake of decency, on this national holiday weekend, a good time to look at the below:

Nicholas Dreystadt and GM, Cadillacs and African-Americans ...
https://blackdaffodill.wordpress.com/2 ... cs-and-african-americans/ Feb 5, 2010 ... "So. I have always vaguely wondered about the rather unique love-affair between African-Americans and the Cadillac. I stumbled across this ..."

The Man Who Saved The Cadillac - Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/30/1930 ... ry-business-cadillac.html May 1, 2009 ... .".... of its strategy to capture that market was its refusal to sell to African-Americans. ... In June of 1934 Nick Dreystadt was made head of the Cadillac Division. ... But for that cruel fate the whole history of the American automobile ..."

This Day in Labor History: June 6, 1943 - Lawyers, Guns ...
http://206.190.45.150/search/srpcache ... =CQxxl5wDodFuVwIWksoGow--

"On June 6, 1943, nearly 30 leaders of the Packard Hate Strike in a United Auto Workers-organized plant in Detroit were suspended from their jobs.

After the U.S. entry into WWII, the federal government took over all private industries capable of producing war material. This meant for the duration of the war no more cars would be produced. The world famous Packard Motor Car Company was humming 24/7 with the vital production of the giant Rolls-Royce aircraft engines and twelve cylinder Packard marine engines used to power PT boats.
While the UAW hierarchy outwardly supported integration of its work force, its rank and file did not. Whites didn't mind so much that blacks worked in the same plant, but they refused to work side by side with them. Three weeks before the riot, Packard promoted three blacks to work on the assembly line next to whites. The reaction was immediate and swift. A plant-wide hate strike resulted as 25,000 whites walked off the job, bringing critical war production to a screeching halt. A voice with a Southern accent barked over the loudspeaker, 'I'd rather see Hitler and Hirohito win than work next to a N*.'
Although the matter was rectified within a few days by relocating the black workers, the wheels were quickly coming off Mayor Jeffries' wagon. Detroit was spinning out of control and on a collision course with disaster."

Posted on: 2022/7/1 23:59
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Re: Satchel Paige talking baseball in front of his 1941 Packard - Tallking Bobblehead
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Tim Cole
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It would be an interesting history project to research how Satchel Paige bought his Packard. It definitely must have been a Super 8 given the stories of him driving like a maniac at 85 mph through small towns.

Bill BoJangles owned a Duesenberg.

Given that chauffeurs often were assigned the task of buying cars those dealers may have been receptive to doing business with Satchel, albeit in the office and not on the floor. As well, chauffeurs handled service appointments so minorities inside a Packard dealer probably was not unheard of.

Another possibility is that Satchel did business over the phone and had the car delivered to him. A lot of those rich people never set foot inside a dealer. We did business with David Rockefeller and it was all handled by the chauffeur. And boy did they pay the bills. They didn't care what it cost. They weren't like these bratty rich kids today - they paid!

At Packard toward the end things seemed to be changing as shown below. And let's not forget Vincent Chen which is truly horrifying. I hope that is not what they mean by "making America great again".

In the corporate world it's all about white men figuring out new and different ways of hating each other. They can't do much about the women and minorities so they go after each other. Some of the shxt they pulled on me would have me rich as Midas if I was in a protected ethnic group.

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Posted on: 2022/7/2 11:49
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Re: Satchel Paige talking baseball in front of his 1941 Packard - Tallking Bobblehead
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su8overdrive
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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.

Posted on: 2022/7/2 16:00
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