Tag: Automobile Topics

Chequered Past: Of England and the Automobile

Chequered Past: Of England and the Automobile

It sounds irreligious, but I’ve never been able to relate to Ferraris. Give me a quirky English rig with an interesting pedigree and a shape you don’t see every day. There’s something about the smell of leather, the way the rain beads on the bonnet, that reminds you of the day when almost anybody in England could build a sports car, and most of them did. A worker in Coventry once said to me about the Triumph TR6: "It rides hard and smells of oil, mate. They just don't make cars like that any more!"

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All the Luck: Howard A. “Dutch” Darrin, Part 1

All the Luck: Howard A. “Dutch” Darrin, Part 1

Dutch Dar­rin was supreme­ly lucky—and one of the most charm­ing things about him was that he nev­er ceased say­ing so.

Part 1

Excerpt only. For full text and illus­tra­tions and a ros­ter of Packard Dar­rins, see The Auto­mo­bile, May 2017. 

Look­ing back on the pre­vi­ous cen­tu­ry, the his­to­ri­an Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. reflect­ed that indi­vid­u­als do make a dif­fer­ence: “In Decem­ber 1931 Churchill, cross­ing Fifth Avenue in New York City, looked in the wrong direc­tion and was knocked down by an auto­mo­bile. Four­teen months lat­er Franklin Roo­sevelt was fired on by an assassin….Would the next two decades have been the same had the car killed Churchill in 1931 and the bul­let killed Roo­sevelt in 1933?”…

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