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Its a mystery to me and many others (but does not seem to be hit on much) as to WHY Packard didn't assume lease/ownership/control of the Briggs/Conner plant and just continue the status quo of the building of Packard bodies for 1955 in the same manner that Briggs did for the previous years bodies. Everything was in place for the previous manufacture of bodies by Briggs, the only thing needed was Packard to update the current assembly line for bodies to the '55 models, and continue business as it stood. If Conner had excess capacity it could have been used for other stampings and assembly. Nance was handed some very poor advice and surrounded himself with people like Ray Powers who made very bad recommendations.... As a company starting to be fraught with high cash outlays, it certainly didn't have the funds to do much, and yet it foolishly extended itself by moving all production to Conner Ave and thereby creating quality and production problems that would not have happened if it just continued business as it was. It could have leased Conner from Chrysler, continued with same assembly lines for the Clipper and Packard bodies in the same manner as Briggs when they were making the bodies, continued to trim the cars out at East Grand and saved a lot of woe that really cost the company its life. Nance wanted to bring Packard body manufacture back to Packard and it was a good thought, his timing was just all wrong. The argument that a one story plant was more efficient is all well and good and makes a lot of sense, but Packard was on the fence for survival in 1955.... by extending 29 million for start up costs over at Conner it really put itself in great jeopardy.....from which it never recovered. The losses at Studebaker drug it down even lower......till it was so weak as a company with collapsing sales that no one in their right mind would loan them money for the new models...... All these 'studies' of costs efficiencies that were handed to Nance......some of them were obviously just plain flawed. When a business is on the line and doing poorly these major changes instill a risk that is very dangerous........if just one of these 'studies' are flawed or incorrect it can cause the whole stack of cards to fall......which is exactly what happened in Packard's case.

WHY Packard didn't assume lease/ownership/control of the Briggs/Conner plant and just continue the status quo of the building of Packard bodies for 1955

Packard Treasurer Walter Grant figured that continuing as before with body contruction at Conner and final assembly at EBG would save $8M/yr, while combining final assembly at Conner would save $12M/yr. It looked good on paper...

If Conner had excess capacity it could have been used for other stampings and assembly.

It appears that, not only did Conner not have excess capacity, but it was already undersized as Briggs had been leasing some $178,000sqft at EGB.

people like Ray Powers who made very bad recommendations.

Powers came over from Ford in June 53. He was probably involved in the layout of Wayne Assembly, which opened in 52, so that was the layout he was familiar with, not improvising in an obsolete 50 year old facility like EGB.

I wonder when it occured to someone to take the doors off a car before sending it down the line for interior installation, as is done now at the Rouge F-150 plant? As the pic shows, the doors restrict access to the interior. And the doors hanging open as the car moves down the line would seem to invite scratches and dings. I have seen pix of the Kaiser line, and they were all going down the line with the doors open too.

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While we're discussing Conner, here's a pic I came across that isn't in the web site's photo files.

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I am looking forward to any of the old Detroiters to describe the surrounding buildings to the new picture of the Conner Street (not Avenue?) plant.

I believe it was one of the large Japanese companies which came up with the doors off practice for ergonomic and damage reasons almost twenty years ago. Now virtually all the world's big companies do it that way.

The mid-rise building in the upper, right-hand corner was a Michigan Bell Telephone exchange building - it is on the east side of Connor and south of Warren Avenue. That building has been drastically altered and they cut off all the upper floors and now only the first floor remains.

North of the MBT building was the Parkside Homes government housing project and north of that was Chandler Park.

Due west across Connor from the MBT became a neighborhood shopping center with a Sam's Department store, but that was built in the late 1950's IIRC. The shopping center still stand , but now with a lot of mom & pop tenants. It is the bright white roofed building in the AFTER photo below.

I was a little too young to remember the Connor Avenue/Street Plant. But I seem to recall that after Packard moved out it became a discount warehouse and my mom bought a bed and mattress for my bed there - was a long time ago.

I have attached a Google Earth aerial for comparison.

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I am looking forward to any of the old Detroiters to describe the surrounding buildings to the new picture of the Conner Street (not Avenue?) plant.


It should put to bed the debate about whether Conner was single story or not. Looks like the eastern third was four story, which the ground level pic in the archive shows, with the balance of the building being high bay, single story.

Finally figured it out.

What could Packard have done, that wouldn't cost a lot, like buying Willow Run, but still give some of the advantages of a modern single story plant in terms of material handling, workflow and overhead clearance?

Not only was EGB an old style multi-story plant, it was not even rectangular, but followed the even older model of having many narrow wings to maximize the amount of natural light.

Those narrow wings provide the opportunity: roof over all the courtyards between the wings of buildings 31-38, at the same level as the roof of the existing wings. Once the roofs are in, knock out the first floor walls of the wings and remove the windows from the 2nd and 3rd floors, turning them into mezzanines.

While we're at it, I doubt Packard really needed building 39 as it was built for the Merlin program, so knock it down and rebuild as high bay space.

This would only add about net 100,000sqft of workspace for a total of about 370,000sqft on the ground floor, but the name of the game is space free and clear, no pillars, no narrow wings and free movement of workflow and forklifts carrying parts, meanwhile work in the upper floors of 31-38, the subassembly work that was done there before the remod, continues undisturbed.

The new high bay areas would have plenty of height. If Packard wanted to put in paint booths and ovens, so they would only have to sub out stamping, they could. If they wanted to bring stamping in house, they would have room for the largest presses they could need.

Speaking of presses, I think I figured out why Packard outsourced all the bodybuilding to Briggs when they did.

Packard's 1944 annual report has diagrams showing how the wartime work was distributed around the plant, and how work was distributed pre-war. The pre-war diagram shows the "stamping division" in buildings 41-50, with steel storage in 90, which was between the railroad tracks and the 41-50 complex. 41-50 are only one story tall. When GM came out with it's one piece "turret top" roof stampings in 35, the move to larger stampings, and the larger presses needed to make them was on. Even if Packard had wanted to invest in new, larger, presses, the new presses would not have fit in the buildings they had. Confronted with the need to: buy new presses, build new buildings to hold the presses, buy land somewhere on which to build the new buildings (couldn't build where the old stamping division was because that would stop production for a year) Packard did it's usual thing and punted.

I have heard two things about the Packard/Briggs deal

-Packard didn't keep records of what equipment it moved to Briggs

-the price Briggs charged the first couple years was very attractive, but then the price soared.

My hunch is Packard bartered the equipment for a discount on the bodies. After the first couple years, the barter agreement ran out and Briggs started charging full price.

And to think I was right over in Dearborn, starting in September of 53. Nance could have driven over and asked me what to do....but my language skills were not well developed at that time, so he might not have understood what I was driving at.

My wife's Aunt Rita moved to Detroit with her husband to seek work in the early years of the Depression. They had left family in Pennsylvania because the mining jobs had dried up, and their Russian-speaking relatives in the Motor City assured them that car plant jobs still existed. Her husband ended working somewhere else, but Rita landed her first and only job at what she still called "the Packards." She worked with other women in the upholstery section where she either put springs or padding into seats. When her husband got re-employed back in PA, she reluctantly quit "the Packards" and moved back and started having babies while he built General Electric locomotives in Erie.

Only recently, did I put the old stories Rita would tell about her days at "the Packards" with what must have been going on all over the EGB plant. From what I've been told, the plant was populated with workers of every description, but many were from Eastern Europe and our southern states. All probably knew that others wanted their scarce jobs and they'd better be good at it or else.

I don't know what years Rita worked at Packard, but some of the friendships she made there lasted for 30-40 years. I once tried to pin her down as to the years, but she only told me that she felt lucky to have the job making seats for cars they could never hope to afford. That kind of spirit made them successful later on. Both their kids graduated from good colleges and became leaders in their communities. With that success, the mother who had her one job at "the Packards", was finally able to buy their first new car in the early Fifties. Not a Packard but a new Olds 98. Some stories don't end the way you want them to.

but Rita landed her first and only job at what she still called "the Packards."

That's something I have noticed about some old autoworkers.

In a documentary about Studebaker done by the South Bend PBS station in 83, in observance of the 20th anniversary of Studie's shut down in South Bend, former employees talked about working at "Studebaker's".

When my parents first moved to Dearborn in 48, mom worked at the Rouge, and referred to it as "Ford's"

Although Ford Motor was the only one of the three that was privately owned, by members of the Ford family, (Ford went public on Jan 17 of 56) it's interesting that employees of all three thought of the company as if it was owned by the person whose name was on the building.