This is a short story as shared by our friend Peter Boyce. A great history from a tried & true Packard Fan! (and a Wonderful Human Being!)

At 14 years of age I started visiting a motor museum and made friends with the curator who had a fine range of makes on display, but a 1929 Packard 7 passenger sedan was my pick and I became a fan of that marque from that age.  I purchased my first one at 16 years (B&W photo) and restored it over the next three years, so by 1969 it became my daily driver, my only car.  I found I had a never ending stream of brides wanting me to take them to their wedding in the car (church pic on promotional post card I would send to couples whose names appeared in the engaged columns of the newspaper), so thought there was a business opportunity in having a fleet of such cars, so looked around for some identical cars and found and restored three more and by 1979 started trading with four (in front of castle NOT my home!!!). 

 

After tiring of brides who insisted the top be lowered and then wanting it raised again when they found the wind blowing their veil too much, I decided sedans were the way to go.  Also I missed out on a number of bookings because my cars were not white, their preferred color, so I started restoring a number of sedans from the 20s.  Then I seriously fell foul of the bureaucrats in out state department of transport who did not want to issue licences for vintage cars to operate commercially full time even though the legislation provided for it.  Thus started a protracted battle with the government which finally ended in court where a magistrate ruled that the government must issue me a licence.  They were outraged and appealed to the supreme court to have the magistrates decision overturned, but the presiding judge eventually (after two years) upheld the magistrate's decision and I was granted a licence.  (The government was so upset they then changed the legislation so that never again could a magistrate tell them what they should do.)  However this was 27 years after I initially applied as a teenager, and I have never really been able to recover from the delay.  To do something ambitious like this for me at least would require more youth on my side than I had when the matter was resolved.

So I have been using the unrestored cars I have yet to finish as teaching resources with second chance learners who had "disengaged from mainstream education prematurely" which is education speak for being thrown out of school.  Troubled teens wanted to learn about cars so they could get wheels for themselves, so in the spedcialist institution at which I was employed, I had better attendance than any other subject.  I actually taught science and maths and the car in pieces on campus was my teaching platform.  I could electrocute the whole class with a spark plug lead if they all held hands and completed the circuit back to the car from the lead on an idling engine and experience electricity.  Those who didn't want to learn about fractions capitulated when they saw spanners going up in increments from 1/2 to 9/16 to 5/8 which had no apparent pattern until they let me teach them about numerators and denominators.  (Student in pic wrote a lovely letter one year saying he thought he would be in jail had it not been for his second chance.)

Encouraged by the reliability of the cars, I decided to organize a long distance endurance trial for cars made pre 1930.  The opportunity came up when Australia's Bicentennial approached and the government was promoting and encouraging citizens to organize their own way of celebrating the occasion.  I advertised nationally and internationally challenging anyone with an authentic antique car to drive overland from London the Sydney in 1988, starting on New Year's Day at Marble Arch in order to try to get to the Sydney Opera House by Australia's National Day, 26 January.  I didn't want it to become a race as too many people get killed in races, and each entrant could pick their own route provided they headed in an overall south easterly direction, undertook one only major ocean voyage to get to Australia and this had to be commenced from at least the Equator.  That is, they could cross the English Channel, and get to the bottom half of Africa or Singapore, India was not far enough south.  (Actually Singapore is 2 deg. N, but I overlooked that.)

I wanted to re-create the conditions of pioneer motoring.  From all over the world, 150 people responded and wanted to enter ....  until they saw the supplementary regulations.  No fleets of tow trucks or mobile kitchen following them, no air lifting, and if they found themselves in a war or a hospital or a jail, they would just have to get themselves out again.  All I would do was start them in London, greet them in Sydney and present them all with a sterling silver wire wheel on a stand especially crafted for the occasion with a plaque detailing which route they took, their names and the make of the car.  Entry fee was $1000 and I just broke even because the field thinned itself down to ... six!

The "winner" got here by Easter weekend after crossing the Sahara, shipping from Dar es Salam in Tanzania to Perth on the Western Australian coast, then crossing the continent in  record time.  He wrote a book "Across Africa and beyond" a thrilling read with the most evocative image on the front of their 1930 Talbot crossing the Zaire River on a makeshift vehicular ferry, two canoes lashed together to float them across as there was no ferry and no bridge!  One other great photo showed them in the middle of the Sahara in the company of a new Nissan pathfinder, a 1943 Berliet truck still in regular service trucking goods across the desert, and the new car was being towed by the truck after breaking down.  The other two antiques were the only vehicles still running!!!  Other entrants also documented their adventures and it was written up in a number of auto mags. 

At This time I am actually trying to build a motor home body on one of the spare frames I have, a '27 Packard 8.  It will be based on the brown trailer in the link 

and I plan to tour North America in it afterwards!

Our thanks to a True Packard Fan and owner of some Beautiful Cars, for sharing his story. There are so many great car stories out there! Won't you share yours?