The New Americans
The days of Walter P. Chrysler and Henry Ford are long gone. They were car builders, men dedicated to the development of such stalwarts as the Model T and the Chrysler Airflow. Lincoln came out of the staid Ford assembly lines with probably the most beautiful American car ever made, the 1940 Lincoln Continental.
My old daddy was a Packard and Cadillac man, not the bar-of-soap designs that finally polished off the heyday of those brands, but the real thing. “Ask the man who owns one,” was the Packard motto and said all that there was to say about style and excellence.
Not that this is a trip down memory lane, but we used to lead the world in the automotive business and, like so many other American industries, it all changed very quickly after the 2nd World War. Steel is gone, we are no longer a shipbuilder and are left with Boeing fighting Airbus on the last battleground of the transportation industry. One wonders if it weren’t for the military research and development fostering Boeing, …