Death of Packard

For most people, however accustomed they have become to seeing streets thronged with such swift and glittering vehicles, the automobile still seems, in a somewhat profound sense, new. It is hard for them to realize that, measured against a man's span of life rather than against the centuries during which men moved by more awkward contrivances, automobiles have existed for a long time. Yet few of the men who built the first automobiles are still alive; Maxwell, Haynes, the Dodge Brothers--these were among the most important and all of them are dead. Last week Death, in his quick chariot, overtook one more. This was James Ward Packard, famed maker of Packard cars.

James Ward Packard was 30 years old when he began to make automobiles. Before that he had experimented with electrical devices and organized two companies to manufacture them. In 1893, having studied the motor plans of Daimler and Benz and the body-building methods of Levasseur, he had drawn the plans for the first Packard; the financial depression of the next few years prevented him from manufacturing cars for the several years afterward. It was not until 1899 that the first Packard rolled out upon the roads, a high, sloping car, followed by children and stared at by scornful farmers.

In the years that came after the hectic turn of the century, Packards became gradually a familiar symbol, a symbol, in the strictest sense, of progress. The first ones opened down the back like the puffy blouses worn by the women who rode in them. Then the later Packards, with the lined hood that still distinguishes them, appeared; gigantic limousines, touring cars like towers, and snorting red racers. The windshields were rimmed with brass; the men who sat bolt upright behind them wore alpaca dustcoats.

James Packard retired from active business in 1915. His house in Warren, Ohio, where he had been born, where he knew and liked all his neighbors, was decorated with a thousand gadgets for making electricity do the work of men or women. With these Mr. Packard puttered; he gave to the town of Warren $100,000 to build a library and, with his brother, 150 acres of land to build a park & playground. The largest of all his numerous donations was one of $1,000,000 to Lehigh University, alma mater, with which to construct and equip laboratories. Sixteen months ago illness drove James Packard to the ho pital. He stayed there sixteen months, in the same room. Then he died.