Caribbean

Of course I was out of sorts. It was Monday. I rose to the alarm and limped to the kitchen to start the coffee. Then I fell back on the Murphey bed to listen to story time on the BBC. A rich plummy voice reads abridged stories for fifteen minutes each weekday morning, five episodes to complete each abridged book. This week is about tractors in the Ukraine . Then Dan Damon and the World Update come on at five, just when the coffee is done.

That is my cue to get out of bed and slog into the week, and I normally do.

There was something very wrong this morning. The theme music was wrong, and the World Update was no where to be found. The regulars were out on strike, protesting the elimination of 4,000 BBC jobs.

That is a staggering amount of people to be let go, enough for another quality network or three in most places. I laid there, looking up, trying to absorb the impact of the job action. Carl Castle sounded confused, too. He is the American who comes on after the BBC teaser to give us the word in plain English before cutting back to Dan and the Update. The station is running the big fund raiser this week, and they seemed a little embarrassed that the venerable senior partner was out on strike.

It was all very stiff upper lip from London ; Management stumbled through the headlines and then put on a taped segment on the German economy to cover the void. It was thoroughly depressing. Unification had brought the old industries of Socialism into the welfare state, and despite trillions of Deutchsmarks of investment, the old East was flat on its ass. Thousands had become used to staying there, and the lassitude threatened to bring down the whole nation, the engine of Europe .

It seemed a cautionary tale, and it seemed to penetrate right into my own life. By this time I was out of bed, which was progress of a sort, but could not decide whether to drive downtown in the traffic or just work from home in the morning, since I have a meeting out at the Shopping Bag Building at noon.

I am already nervous about a trip to New Jersey that I am supposed to manage this Thursday, so I imagine the prudent thing is to get downtown and arrange for the limos and sent some electronic pleas to make sure that our guest is treated properly, and check the phone messages which I cannot seem to do from the safety and comfort of my little desk at Big Pink in my underwear. It was the rain that made up my mind.

It had been cool but pleasant of late.  had to drive out to the country yesterday for a meeting and got lost driving around. It was OK; I was driving the world’s fastest production pickup along the Fairfax County Parkway , keeping pace with new Mercedes convertible, crimson as a courtesan’s lips, paint as glossy and rich as her nails. The wind roared and the engine rumbled. It was built in Detroit , and if it did not handle as nicely as the little red car, it certainly went rapidly in a straight line. I did not mind being lost, though I did mind being late for my appointment. The automobile, German or American, is a marvelous thing that permits us to live in the woods and work in the city.

I eventually found my destination, which was an estate in a private development off Route 123.

I remember Route 123 from the years I lived in the County. It was a sort of back-door route to sneak down to the Occoquon River to merge onto the interstate without dealing with the madness on the Beltway. The interstate swoops south of the dreaded Mixing Bowl, where all the spaghetti comes together and the traffic crawls even at the best of times. The Occoquon is where the big concrete sewer crosses the river on the way to Richmond , flushing out the Capital.

Route 123 was a two lane then, and that is why it was so unfamiliar yesterday. Now it is four lanes wide and the vegetation is cut back a dozen yards beyond that. The new road is a great swath cut through the old farms. I remembered vaguely that there was a burying ground around here that must nor be under the southbound lanes, sealed in concrete like Jimmy Hoffa. For the life of me I could not connect the landscape of then with the landscape of now.

I had looked at a satellite image on the computer to orient myself before I began the drive and it hadn’t worked. By the construction depicted in the picture, I dated the age of the mass transformation at about five years ago.

The estate was private and leafy, and the garden was beginning the development that would result in the August riot of foliage and flower.

The humidity was low and it could not have been more pleasant to be lost. But to live out in the County and try to have a working life in the city requires a love affair with the automobile.

I pulled up in the driveway and an enormous old black dog that greeted me with great dignity by the garage. She sniffed my hand and permitted me to leave my vehicle after briefly contemplating joining me in it. My host emerged from the house. For reasons of privacy I will spare you the particulars of who I was seeing and why. Not my privacy, of course. I have little enough of that.

I am trying to acclimatize myself to living in the future, where satellite images of my house are available on the Web, and my personal information is for sale to the highest bidder. 

The lord of this manner takes pride in his estate, which was lovingly built to the specification jointly laid out with his wife. He had scaled the heights in his professional life, and lives a vigorous and engaged retirement. You might not ascertain his passion at the first encounter, since his station carries a certain reserve. But his passion was revealed when he opened the garage door to permit me to see his cars.

In the cool darkness I saw a magnificent pre-war tan Packard, parked on a professional-grade mechanic’s lift. The top was down and the chrome gleamed from the fixtures that have disappeared from the cars of today. It was powered by one of the classic straight-eight flathead engines that slumbered under the long narrow hood. It was a lovely machine, captured on the hoist like a gigantic butterfly.

It would be the gem of any collection, but what was in the middle bay of the garage took my breath away.

I don’t know about you, but in my dim and cobwebbed brain I thought that the Packard motorcar company had not survived the War, and the grand name had disappeared with the vanquished Fascists. It was not true. The name disappeared later, in the jumble of the 1950s and the emergence of the new consumer America .

There was much more to the story, and the final flower was parked before me.

It was a 1955 Packard Caribbean . A first glance, it looked like the others built by the Big Three in the middle part of the decade, a Cadillac, perhaps, or one of the big Buicks. It was cream and turquoise, and white piped leather upholstery and a big chrome front and dual antennas. The top was down and tightly buttoned. Dual antennas jutted smartly out from the fins, and a Continental spare tire rode proudly on the rear bumper. There were chrome details on the flanks and it gleamed with life in the darkness.

I had no idea that this was the end of the line for a great company, caught in the squeeze-play of the decade that began the Interstate system and the Levittown suburbs.

The owner told me the story of how it came to be, how Packard tried to cross the great divide of the war, abandoning the old technology and trying to stay even with General Motors and Ford. The Caribbean was built in the penultimate year of Packard’s existence, before the merger with the idiots at the Studebaker Motor Company.

That is where I had a connection to this magnificent automobile. My father worked for George Mason, a visionary industrialist who combined the Hudson and Nash companies to create American Motors. There was a scramble to consolidate the grand old names. Packard decided to buy Studebaker, and there was serious talk of joining Mason’s consortium and keeping the Packard as competition to the top of industry, GM’s Cadillac of GM and Ford’s Continental.

The problem was that the modern car was becoming an expendable item that was built to last only for the length of the finance contract. Planned obsolescence is what they called it, and the manufacturers made as much on financing as they did in producing the cars themselves. The business model was that consumers would replace their cars every three to four years. In Michigan , where I was born, it was not unusual for a three-year old car to have rust holes in the fenders after just a couple winter seasons in the road salt.

Planned obsolescence was not a part of the Packard’s heritage. In 1952, more than half the Packards ever built were still on the road.

Mason was a careful man, and he told the Packard people to finish their acquisition of Studebaker, and then come back to see him when the dust settled. The painful merger was begun in 1953, the year the sleek convertible before me was a concept car. By the time it was done, Mason had died and George Romney was in charge. He looked at the Packard executives and pursed his lips.

“You better look at the business model at Studebaker,” he said. “Break-even comes with sale of 160,000 cars. They have never sold more than eighty percent of that. I would be crazy to take you on.”

Packard had always been an engine manufacturer, who bought the bodywork from the Briggs Company of Detroit . One of the Briggs children lived next door to us when we were little, and the Detroit Tigers played at Briggs Stadium. Chrysler bought Briggs, and had little interest in preserving Packard’s supply. The Studebaker deal seemed like a way out of the squeeze play.

The Caribbean began as a concept car in 1953, and offered leather trim interiors; power-assisted everything: steering, brakes, windows, and seats; dual heaters and defrosters. A three-way radio with electric antenna was standard, as was a self-leveling suspension which kept everything on an even keel, no matter what or who you put in the trunk.

My host climbed onto the massive rear bumper. “Levels in eight seconds,” he said, and sure enough, something began to whir in the sleeping car, and the right rear suspension rose to accommodate his weight, and settled right down when he got off.

Power was everything in 1955, and the Caribbean was the most powerful in the land. The power derived initially came from Packard’s 327 cubic inch inline-eight, producing 180 hp in 1953 and 212 hp in 1954. The new V-8 drove power went up to a very respectable 310 hp, and they crammed fifty more horses into it in the 1955 campaign to stay ahead of GM and Ford.

But what competition was out there! This was dawn of the Corvette from Chevrolet, and the legendary Thunderbird from Ford. There was never a more stylish time to be on the road, and Packard simply could not keep up. The Caribbean was the end of the line.

The whole thing died in 1956, swamped in Studebaker. The Packard name went on for another few years, a plate stuck on Studebaker iron. It was sad, and I remember when it ended. But even in the melt-down there was a last flicker of flame, the mighty Hawk series, and at the last moment, Studebaker made its last contribution to automotive history, the eye-popping swooping Avanti.

I don’t think I have ever been so impressed with a car. That Caribbean routinely won every classic car show the owner took it to. It was that special, the last car not intended to disintegrate with the finance package. It was a cautionary tale, I thought, like the East Germans that won’t work. I tromped on the accelerator of my fifteen-year-old muscle truck, and felt the turbo-charger press me back in my seat.

Nice piece of Detroit iron, I thought, and now GM is in the same sort trouble that Pakcard was. World’s Largest Corporation, it was, and now the stock is downgraded to junk bond status.

I looked up “Packard” on the web this morning. I was surprised to find that the Packard® Motor Car Company still exists. The web page says the company is “continuing refinement of the prototype sedan, which it expects to be “the only ultra luxury automobile manufactured in the United States .” It will be powered by a V-12, 525 cubic inch aluminum engine, and feature all wheel drive and moderately conservative, distinctive styling.

While they are waiting for the business model to come together, they offer an extensive line of Packard Key Tags, Pocket Knives and ballcaps. It reminded me of the Bricklin, or the DeLorean, wonderful doomed rolling dreams. The future is a brutal place, and the competition is fierce.

I really like the look of that Caribbean . From the relentlessly optimistic styling, you could not imagine what they were about to drive into.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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