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Second oldest Packard, Teague literature collection to highlight CCCA Museum Experience

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1900Packard_950
Photo courtesy CCCA Museum.

One of the earliest Packards will make a rare appearance outside of its museum dwelling, while the public will get its first glimpse of a literature collection compiled by one of the company’s more notable designers at the same event next month.

Much like the first – and the world’s oldest – Packard, the 1900 Ohio Model B considered the second-oldest Packard has long been on display, but the latter’s route to the limelight took a far different course than its elder’s. Originally sold out of the Warren, Ohio, factory to George Blackmore, a businessman in nearby Painesville, Ohio, the nine-horsepower single-cylinder two-seat runabout shared many of the same advances as the Model A: automatic spark advance, a float-feed carburetor, and a recirculating water pump. In fact, its 143-cubic-inch engine, essentially identical to the Model A’s engine, was stamped with engine number A-30, making it the 10th built by the company (engine numbering began at 21 and switched from A to B shortly after this car was built).

Rather than simply signing some paperwork and driving the car home, Blackmore got personal instruction on how to operate it and maintain it by one of the men who actually built the car, Henry Schryver, the head machinist for the company. Blackmore apparently thought so highly of the car that he later became the first Packard sales agent outside the factory.

Subsequent owners, not so much. After glimpsing an early single-cylinder Packard at the 1968 Hershey meet, collector Terry Martin began a search for an equally early Packard of his own, a search that netted only the engine and chassis from Blackmore’s Model B. That engine, Martin discovered, passed through the hands of Blackmore’s son and another collector before making its way to him in the early 1970s. With the help of Blackmore’s son, who provided photographs of his father’s Model B, Martin began a 35-year process of collecting or remaking enough parts to replicate the rest of the car. Since its completion in the late 2000s, it has been on display at the National Packard Museum in Warren, a museum that Martin helped found in the late 1990s.

DickTeague_300Factory literature covering Martin’s Model B may very well exist in the Packard-specific literature collection compiled by former Packard designer Richard Teague. Teague, who had an eye for automotive history as well as for automotive aesthetics, used his position to save as much documentation and paperwork as he could from the trash while Packard was going out of business in the late 1950s. Even after Packard closed its doors in 1958, he continued to amass Packard-specific literature, cataloging it by hand.

In 1987, just as he was retiring from American Motors, Teague sold the collection to a literature collector who in turn sold it to Dr. Glenn Hamilton of Dayton, Ohio, in 2010. According to Hamilton, the collection has always remained private and never been shown to the public.

At least not until next month’s Classic Car Club of America Museum Experience, which will showcase both the 1900 Ohio Model B and the Teague literature collection. Hamilton noted that he will bring select examples from the collection that will “give some insight into the breadth and depth of this remarkable assemblage.”

The CCCA Museum Experience will take place June 6-7 at the CCCA Museum on the grounds of the Gilmore Car Museum in Hickory Corners, Michigan. Any CCCA Full Classic car or Packard is eligible to participate in the event. For more information, visit CCCAMuseum.org.


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