It's funny

["Mahoney, John" <JMahoney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The list is back on Files (I can re-send the two old posts that are still missing, if anyone wants to read them and then I can empty the "out" box of AMCs) and, for old "see-it-to-believe-it" types like me, it's real again.  Thanks, Frank and Jim.  You are virtually real.

If it seems like yesterday, it must be today.  In the '70s, AMC was the shakiest US automaker, yet debuted some of the newest automotive ideas.  In the '00s, Ford is the shakiest US automaker (only a bit shakier than GM) with the newest automotive engine.  Its V-6 may be a carbon copy of an old one by Nissan, but that may be as good as the US now gets.  When that 3.5 gets put into a crossover softroader on a platform from Mazda (with a Ford-GM tranny copied from yet another foreign make), it should be as successful as the once-revolutionary (in design if not motor) AMC Pacer once was.  It started as a success.  Ford hopes for a longer life.  (Not to mention enough "oomph" to haul their big fat Audi, er, uh, Five Hundred around.  "Are we so fat that our -cars- must be super-sized now also?")

If you missed my newest joke last night on NBC ("Didja hear about the Avalon, the wipers and the cell-phone engine cutout?"), you might also have missed the newest AMC Pacer spot that debuted Monday night on CBS.  Don't worry; you won't need to pay Jay for a repeat.  Sears' "Wish Big" Pacer commercial will be around (and around and around) 'til Christmas.

(It's actually not a bad piece, but, like my first automotive burst on TV, good, then gone.  15 years ago, Zsa Zsa Gabor hit a cop at the door of her Rolls-Royce and Jose Canseco hid a gun on the floor of his V-12 Jaguar.  They were funny [if Jose still is, is Zsa Zsa dead?] then; 15 years from now, flat-screen TVs will be equally out-of-date.  Cars and comedy change fast, but consumer electronics can beat either in a race to the checkered flag of obsolescence.  That's funny too.  Or too sad.)

75 years ago, Buick had to make a quick change because Packard lawyers drove up.  That fact raced past when I visited Wiki-Wonka's Ambassador factory.  (And another story passed as I read the "Who write's..." post: it involved the Fall Auto Special a chain of suburban newspapers asked me to look at.  I knew the founding publisher of that highly respected [and highly-profitable] undertaking: he had been an early advocate of historic preservation.  He put his $$$ where his opinions were, saving buildings and helping turn tired old canal towns into living gems.  His wife [still alive, since she was 20+ years younger...] did her historical thing a few miles down the road, too: she single-handedly saved a small hamlet by making it her version of Greenfield Village-cum-Williamsburg.  She moved in old buildings that would've been demolished; she stood her ground even on the use of [widely-hated] historically-authentic paint:

http://tinyurl.com/a9kmc       

because despite what art is,

http://tinyurl.com/chxue

bilious yellow was correct.

http://tinyurl.com/d4hv8

[Remember that when you restore old cars; use "their" eyes, not ours...]) 

Anyway, I imagined him turning in his grave.  All anyone had to do was recast the auto manufacturers' PR-supplied boilerplate.  Cut and paste and adapt.  But, to quote another old funnyman I never wrote a word for, Nooo, today's "writers" never learned how.  Commas, hyphens and agreement are from Brooklyn.  Fuggedaboudit.  Vocabulary comes from an MTV soundtrack [or perhaps from an IM screen?]  Style is non-existent [unless "clumsy" is in style], so I stopped after marking two pages; I gave the idiotic insert back.

If we can't teach and learn reading, writing and 'rithmetic in America, we'd better ramble back to bicycles.  We won't be able to afford autos: autos that'll be made in India, in China, and in any place but Motown...)

Now, back to the Ambassador, the Buick and the Packard (which isn't my cue for some "minister, priest and rabbi" jokes!) that Wiki's "'valley pans' along the tops of the inner fenders" set my mind racing toward.

First off, the '69-up "cusps" or "coves" are on the hood stamping, not on the fender (a longitudinally-higher fender edge can have "ridge" or "vane" or other names, though...) and they generally are acknowledged as design trademarks (if not -Trademarks-) of Packard.  They were why the Packard attorneys drove over to talk with GM.  Not too long after Nash had been at the wheel of Buick (and later, of course, of GM), someone (pre-Harley Earl, of course; outright copying wasn't his, ah, style) decided that making Buicks look like Packards would raise the profile (and the profits) of what many people (doctors, lawyers, and business owners prime among them) considered GM's Packards.  Unless, of course, they could afford GM's even better Packards.  LaSalles and Cadillacs.

When Packard coves appeared on Buick hoods (and, obviously, back when hoods were hoods and fenders were fenders, on Buick radiator shells),

http://www.madle.org/buick23j23.jpg 

http://tinyurl.com/8v92n        

and their use was daring --- unless you think all old cars look the same.

It may look like a tempest in a teapot today (back then, of course, a Pontiac was an Oakland, so a Tempest was a Shakespeare storm): but it was a cause for action.  How dare they copy the best?  (If we look at the matter with their eyes, of course, we can better understand.)  So cease-and-desist was demanded and, on cusp of litigation, the Packard tradition was upheld.  It lived on to grace the last Detroit Packards

http://mclellansautomotive.com/photos/B5420.jpg

and was applied to the last built in South Bend.

http://www.westol.com/~blcars/images/sale3001a.jpg
 
It was, of course, revived (with reason and reverence) on the last of the Nash Packards, on the newest hood of AMC's Buick Roadmaster or Electra, 

http://tinyurl.com/c62c9

and on a final hood its famously named flagship.

http://tinyurl.com/c62c9

http://mclellansautomotive.com/photos/B32583.jpg

That hood covered Packard's final coffin.  RIP.

http://www.amcrc.com/junk/P5030009.jpg

But don't let your tears blind you to the fact that Buick still wanted to be Packard while Packard was on the cusp of its own drive to death.

http://www.calcruising.com/49buick-1.jpg

http://www.ephemeranow.com/images/JPGs/bu51yel.jpg

And when Buick's Packard coves were fading,

http://tinyurl.com/ad3sj

Buick's Roadmaster Ambassador had powerful

http://tinyurl.com/cnxsa

portholes (that today look like bad jokes.)

http://www.buick.com/lucerne/gallery_exterior.jsp

So ask yourself now, if you like auto history, 

"Why does a Buick look like an Altima from VW?"

"Because it's not a Packard Ambassador by AMC?"

"No, 'cuz America can't read or write anymore!"

Of course, I'm just kidding.

http://tinyurl.com/7ze3v

Or am I not?

I'm funny.

Tee hee.