Members stories

When I was young my father told many stories about selling Packard's. Those stories, innumerable Warner Bros. gangster movies and the CBS series "The Untouchables", and meeting Bob Newlands when I was 17, are why I, at 62 years old, own a Packard.

My dad, more than once, regretted he'd lost a pin presented to him by Earle C. Anthony, Inc. to commemorate my dad's accomplishment of selling over 100 Packard's in calendar year 1947.

He'd got lucky that year. He sold 10 vehicles to a colored radio evangelist in So. Central LA named Daddy Divine. And the '48's sold well, even if they were tubs (that's what he always called the '48's). Folks wanted new cars.

Dad passed in '04. Later that year my mom sold her LA home and items got handed down. In a corner of a costume jewelry drawer was a little, tiny, pin. It was the Packard coat-of-arms. I've photographed it laying on the back cover of the CCCA "Bulletin", for scale. The backing is larger than the pin; it screws on in a fine jewelry thread.

Could this minuscule bauble be that artifact of my dad's memory, tangibly commemorating his long-ago odd-hours hard-won blood-sweat-and-shoeshine sales call achievement?

In '04 I'd thought I'd carefully put it by, somewhere. Which means only that I mislaid it. Lost it.

Until this evening. While pawing around for Christmas card addresses I found it again.

I send this photograph as evidence it exists. As I have to put it by somewhere, again