Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i Hemmings Classic Car

History in books is important, but history in the form of relics makes those recitations of fact come alive. That’s especially true for the un-initiated, for whom things like the California Gold Rush, Gilded Age millionaires, the Roaring Twenties, pre-interstate America, the Great Depression, arctic exploration, gender barriers, and coachbuilt bodies might be entirely academic if not for the preserved objects representing those times and themes. This Packard is a relic encapsulating all of those things. Its first owner, Louise Arner Boyd, was a California millionaire and arctic explorer at a time when women, even heiresses to gold-mining fortunes, were not expected to do those things (See HCC, #244—January 2025 or visit hmn.com/boydpackard for her story). The continued survival of her car, a 1934 Packard Twelve Individual Custom Dietrich Convertible…

Everything ends. No matter how much you personally may like something—a restaurant, a TV show, a band, some other popular entertainment property—no matter how much you may want to keep it going into the far-flung future, no matter the comfort in maintaining the status quo, market forces will ultimately convince those who hold the purse strings that they need to adapt. Everything, everyone, has their time—and when that time ends, they are cast aside in favor of new ideas better suited for ever-changing market conditions. Whether consumers feel that things were cut down in their prime or believed they have lived well past their sell-by date almost doesn’t matter; forces working high above ground level are making moves that they feel will ensure their long-term future. So it was with…

Before 1947, there was no single nation called India. Instead, the British Empire controlled the land mass now mostly known as India, some of it directly and some of it indirectly through local princely rulers known to most westerners as maharajas. The maharajas predated British rule of India, and the British found it most convenient to leave them in power so long as they worked acceptably well with the Raj. One of the ways the British ensured the cooperation of their native allies was by allowing them great access to the wealth their provinces produced. Between the 1850s and the early 1950s, these princes of India were some of the richest men on Earth. All their possessions reflected their wealth, prestige, and power but perhaps none (excepting the Taj Mahal)…

On August 12, 2024, as the vintage vehicle world began its annual pilgrimage to California’s idyllic Monterey Peninsula in earnest, a friend of the Hemmings Classic Car team posed a question: What single word describes the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance? It made us pause—we needed time to reflect for the simple reason that Pebble, as it is affectionately known, is arguably unlike any other concours in the western hemisphere. It starts with a selection committee that is annually tasked with carefully examining 1,000 or more vehicle display applications, of which no more than 220 in any given year receive a formal invitation. We’re not talking 1,000 cars located in North America—Pebble receives request to display on a global scale. The breadth of what graces the Pebble Beach Golf Links’ 18th…

FAMILY WHEELS ON DISPLAY AT LANE Whether it was family vacations, Little League, or countless trips to the grocery store, station wagons were a huge part of family life since they began to roll out of factories en masse. The popular mode of transportation is now on display at the Lane Motor Museum in Nashville, Tennessee, with its “Station Wagon Style!” exhibit. Explore the history of family trucksters and see a diverse collection of wagons of all eras, including some European models sprinkled in among the haulers from Detroit. This exhibit will last until March, so there is still time to see it and many other cars at the Nashville facility. Visit lanemotormuseum.org for more details. LONE STAR PACKARD MEET The 46th annual Texas Packard Meet is scheduled to take…

At one time, both in the U.S. and in Europe, motorsport was an open-road affair. Fast cars competed on public roads in what were largely city-to-city races, at least in Europe, where the inter-city road network grew at a much faster pace than it did in the massively sprawling United States of America. In the first decade of the 20th century, road racing was marked by events such as the 1903 Paris-Madrid debacle, which claimed the lives of both drivers and spectators as primitive race cars careened off the dusty, rough course. To a lesser extent, the same thing occurred on these shores. Open-road racing in America dates back to 1895, when the Chicago Times-Herald bankrolled a race held just after Thanksgiving, with Frank Duryea as one of the entrants.…

“Looking back from an adult perspective, I don’t know how my dad did it. I cannot recall one time Dad complained, or said he was tired, or said, ‘You guys do it yourself,’” Gerry Bigony says of his father, Ronald Sr. It’s a sentiment about a supporting parent many share from their youth when in a moment of reflection—a snippet of time that passes quickly before life continues forward. But in Gerry’s case, his tone carries a far deeper emotion, tied to a story that began to unfold as the calendar flipped to 1969, and with the 1964 Mercury Comet Caliente featured on these pages. To be fair, Ron, a resident of Reading, Pennsylvania, must have at least mumbled one complaint in late 1968. That’s when the family car, which…

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