Its memory is a bit dusty now and clouded by time, but there was a time when the name Packard had all the authority of the vaunted British marque Rolls-Royce. 
While Henry Ford and Ransom E. Olds set out to make cars for the “common man,” the Packard brothers, James Ward and William Doud, decided they would sell cars to men of uncommon richness. Their plan made sense because, before they had even built their first motorcar, the Packards themselves were gentlemen of substance.
Richer well-to-do’s
By the time the last decade of the 19th century rolled around, the Packard family had reached a comfortable, well-to-do standing in the town of Warren, Ohio. Moving to what was then a small village in the 1850s, the Packard clan established a lumber mill, hardware store, hotel and an iron rolling mill over the course of the next 40 years or so, providing them with a decidedly upper middle class lifestyle. Read more . . .
Over the course of that era, the Dodge brothers split with Ford to begin building cars of their own under the imaginative Dodge Brothers name; Dodge Brothers was bought by Walter P. Chrysler as he built Chrysler Corporation in the image of his previous employer, General Motors; and Dodge (sans Brothers) went from an icon of performance during the halcyon years of the Sixties to becoming largely irrelevant by the late Eighties. Omnis and K-cars will do that, no matter how proud one’s history.
While their American cousins quickly produced automobiles in mass manufacture, starting with Ransom E. Olds before the turn of the last century, the British seemed perfectly satisfied to approach car building as a cottage industry. Hammer out a few here, put together a few there, and perhaps build a little bit of earnings into the enterprise. This was the ourlin for many British car builders, from Morgan to Jaguar to MG to Triumph to Aston Martin.
The irony of the story is that these two luxury car powerplants, among the most remarkable the world has ever produced, were spawned during the world’s most far-reaching and destructive economic collapse.
The original Lincoln Continental, produced as a one-off by Bob Gregorie and his design staff for the personal use of Edsel Ford, was, with little argument, the best American auto design of the 1940’s. Mildly production-ized and sold as a series into the late Forties, it was a masterpiece. Ford Motor Company attempted to re-create the same magic some 15 years later with the Mark II, but to re-create magic is a tougher task than the first time.Though the Mark II lacked the essential rightness of the original’s proportions, still, it was a car to be reckoned with. By sheer presence, sheer mass, sheer price, it was a vehicle that epitomized 1950’s America.