He Styled himself Darrin of Paris
Among their buyers were Rosalind Russell, Chester Morris, and Al Jolson, who each paid a cool $4200-5200, probably equivalent to six figures in today’s money. For some of these customers, Packard Darrins were simply too special. These early Darrins were strictly freelance jobs with no factory sanction or blessing. Indeed, the sophisticated, old-line Packard Company back on Grand Boulevard in Detroit looked askance at Hollywood’s custom body builder, producing svelte open four-seaters instead of square-edged Rollston limos or LeBaron town cars. Dick Powell sold car number one after a few months because people were noticing, waving, and chasing him for autographs.
He had an automotive curriculum vitae that put to shame most of his design contemporaries. In 1920 he founded America’s first scheduled airline, Aero Ltd., but he soon returned to Paris and set himself up as a custom coachbuilder, initially using the Minerva chassis. When he went to France with the American Expeditionary Forces in World War I, he fell in love with Paris. Starting in the Teens as a Westinghouse engineer, he invented an electric gearshift for John North Willys, deciding then and there to spend his career on cars instead of electronics. He was shortly building custom bodies for the cream of European society, working on his own or in successful partnership with designer Tom Hibbard and, later, a banker named Fernandez. If you have any concerns concerning where by and how to use Sathorn Bangkok, you can contact us at our web-page.
Howard A. “Dutch” Darrin, the man behind the 1937-1942 Packard Darrin left an indelible imprint, not only on the automobile, but on the people he met in the old car movement, long after his career building and designing cars had ended. He had flashing blue eyes, snowy white hair in later life, a bubbling enthusiasm for what he liked, a withering contempt for what he didn’t. Dutch Darrin was a kind of “breakaway designer.” He was crusty, hardbitten and had no reticence about expressing his opinions. Interviewing and reporting on Dutch was a test of a writer’s finesse: the art of balancing Darrin’s fierce convictions with the opinions of others who sometimes saw matters in quite a different way.
Because the 1937-1938 Packard Darrin was creating such a buzz, packard Chairman Alvan Macauley took it upon himself to go to California and see the cars for himself. It appeared for the first time in Packard’s 1940 catalogue. Macauley, “you’ll ruin it for sure!” Dutch just grinned at him, jumping up and down. Unbeknown to Macauley, it was one of those with Rudy Stoessel’s cast aluminum cowl. When Macauley ventured that the Packard Darrins had a reputation for body flex, Dutch leaped up on the cowl of the nearest example in his shop.
Dutch did it all — even supervised the construction of semi-customs like the famous Packard Darrins. Darrin’s Packard connection stemmed from his decision to return to America from France in 1937. He realized that the age of full-custom bodies was waning, but thought the Hollywood film colony would buy rakish semi-customs. They might not have been paragons of craftsmanship, but by gosh they were unique, beautiful, and as dashing as all get-out. His concept, for which he deserves credit as a pioneer, was to customize production cars and produce semi-customs — relatively inexpensive, bangkok condo for sale near bts yet distinct from mass-market stuff.
