This week it will be 100 years ago that a Packard model F made a historic trip across the United States. Back in 1903 two gentlemen from Ohio, E.T. (Tom) Fetch and M.C. Krarup, drove their ton-and-a-half, single cylinder Packard across a country that had no roads, no bridges and don’t even think of gas stations or garages. Fetch and Krarup started their journey on June 20 from San Francisco Bay, where they reversed into the Pacific Ocean (only with the rear wheels) to baptize the car. From then on the Packard was known as “Old Pacific”. On the back of the car they carried two twenty-foot strips of heavy canvas, to serve as an improvised road. Almost two months later, on August 16, they arrived in New York after endless hours of being stuck in mud, bombarded by heavy rainfall and building bridges across impossible terrain. The lithograph by Angela Trotta Thomas shows Old Pacific somewhere along the route, its drivers trying to fix a broken wheel. This lithograph can be bought from The National Packard Museum in Ohio.

Litho by Angela Trotta Thomas

August 8, 2003