Beach bucket
Gene O’Hara and the 1948 Packard Woodie he will display at the Palos Verdes Concours d’Elegance. Photo by Olivia Kestin The car that is likely to be one of the showstoppers at the Palos Verdes Concours d’Elegance at Trump National Golf Course on September 18 and 19 doesn’t look like much at the moment. It’s a hulk sitting on a rack in a dusty workshop in El Segundo, lit eerily from below with droplights and occasional showers of sparks where a restorer is grinding an axle bracket. But to the practiced eye of Gene O’Hara, who has been working on this car for years, it is a thing of beauty. “In the collector car world, everybody has their brand, but Packard is generally regarded as the best car made in America. They weren’t the equal of the best European cars, but they were definitely better than the other American high-priced cars,” he said. This 1948 Packard Woodie is one of only 1,248 made that year, and it was in awful shape when Stanley Zimmerman of the Automobile Driving Museum of El Segundo bought it. The car had been forgotten in a leaky garage for 30 years. The once-beautiful hardwood that adorned the vehicle was in bad shape. Happily, it was put in the hands of the only…
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