The Journey

Serial number 5662-3040. The engine number matches it exactly, meaning this is her original engine, not a replacement, seventy years on. The sequence number puts her at roughly the 1,040th of the 2,100-odd Touring Sedans built that model year, which lands the build early in the run rather than late. 1956 was the last model year Packard built cars in Detroit at all.

The exact build date isn’t pinned down yet: the delivery stamp on the VN plate, the engine number, or a surviving build slip could each confirm it.

Exported new to Italy. The exact sailing date hasn’t turned up yet, unlike the second crossing, which the registry dates precisely. A waybill for this leg, if one survives, would settle it.

This is the stretch some of our research paper matters most for. Right now we don’t have the where or the day-to-day of these years, just that they happened between landing in Genoa and heading north over the Alps.

Driven, not shipped, this leg: over the Alps on the Brenner Pass road into Germany. A Packard sedan built for Detroit boulevards, doing mountain switchbacks in the Dolomites.

Ownership changed hands here in October 1970: one soldier selling to another, both stationed with the U.S. Army, for $700 cash. The bill of sale survives, chassis number spelled out in full. Whatever year she first arrived over the Brenner Pass, she was still in Kaiserslautern years later.

The Packard registry dates this crossing to 1969. A handwritten bill of sale from Kaiserslautern puts her still in Germany a year later, in October 1970. One of the two is wrong, not yet resolved. Bremerhaven to Norfolk is the route the family has always told; the year isn’t settled.

The second owner kept her in a field in Ohio for the better part of two decades, through three restoration attempts. Two failed outright: one marked plainly “this project failed” in the ledger, and a repaint the same ledger says stalled out with most of the work never done. The third actually took: a local mechanic did the body and engine work over more than a year, and receipts survive for parts from a Packard specialty supplier. She stayed in Ohio until a U-Haul trailer took her out of state in October 1991.

The second owner brought her to New York state by U-Haul trailer in October 1991 and started a fourth restoration project, parts sourced from a local auto supply shop. It didn’t last: by May of 1992 he sold her to a third owner for $500, half what he’d paid to buy her from a soldier in Germany twenty-two years earlier.

By the mid-1990s, exact date unknown, she finally gets the restoration that holds: stripped, masked, and repainted panel by panel, chrome polished back out to match. After changing hands and changing states more than once, this is the one that returns her to shiny chrome glory.

The paint cures and the trim goes back on. What was stripped to bare metal and taped up in newspaper comes back whole: two-tone paint, chrome bright, finished and sitting in a New York garage.

Home now, and still a driver, not just a display piece: ice cream runs, people sitting in her, individual systems restorations ongoing, not parked under a cover.

Detroit to Genoa to Kaiserslautern to Pittsburgh isn’t the end of the story, just where it’s at right now. One of the last Packards. Still on the road.