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Holy moley! In that photo with Kruschev and Nixon, the washer-dryer combination shown is... Mine!! OK, I have to free myself of the shackles of the current job so that I can get that danged dry function working again... Even our "Fearless Leader" would approve, I am sure... LOL
 
John:

That was a very kind thing for you to do; I hope it wasn't too much trouble! What a fascinating story. Now I know for certain that the "Packard/ZIL Legend" is just that - a legend.

It would be very interesting to see some of these Soviet cars in person, but of course it's rare to find them here in the West.

You might like to know that back in the '50s, my grandfather's boss had a '54 Patrician in black. While we weren't terribly wealthy, Cadillacs and Buicks weren't uncommon where we lived; everyone was used to seeing them. But that Patrician always inspired awe; it was considered many cuts above anything else you could drive, almost otherworldly. The only other cars I remember getting that reaction were the Lincoln Contintental Mark II of 1956-57, and the Eldorado Brougham of 1957.
 
Jon:

With all due respect for what Edsels now represent to collectors as a cultural icon, I was around in '57, and I well remember the snickers they raised. The styling was considered downright weird. Most cars of that era were styled with heavy horizontal emphasis on the front grille, and heavy vertical emphasis at the rear, with tailfins. Edsel's vertical "horsecollar" grille and horizontal taillights ran directly counter to that consumer preference. It was also a commonly-held belief from the get-go that the Edsel wasn't going to fly, that people buying them would be stuck with a low-resale-value "orphan." That, of course, became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The low build quality of late-'50s automobiles didn't help, and Edsel models with Teletouch quickly garnered a reputation for diaphragm problems.

I remember my dad being offered a pristine Bermuda wagon in the early '60s, cheap. He passed, on the grounds that he wasn't born yesterday.

P.S.: When I was in high school (1965-70; Atlanta didn't have middle schools then), the local handyman drove a beat-up, but fully loaded, nine-passenger 1960 Edsel Villager wagon with Polaraire air conditioning. We used to laugh when we saw that car. We wouldn't be laughing if we could afford one today, would we?
 
Sandy, I never saw a '54 Patrician in its heyday, but our family's second car -- very second! - in the Sixties was a '52 Packard 200, the bottom of the line. It still seemed huge. The back seat had so much room my sister and I added a couple of little chairs on the floor between the front and rear seats.

It had automatic (Packard's own Ultramatic Drive) but no power steering, and my mom had a hard time parking it. On one memorable occasion she skidded down an icy hill and slammed into a Corvair full of boy scouts; it must have been a very low speed accident since nobody was hurt, but it seemed terrifying at the time, probably more so to the occupants of the Corvair! There was no damage to the Packard.

The Ultramatic was my first driving experience. I reached out from the car seat and shifted it from Drive to Lo. Lucky it didn't go into Reverse, which was at the bottom of the quadrant, like Dynaflow and Hydra-Matic.

We finally got a VW Beetle and gave the Packard to my uncle, who drove it quite awhile longer until one of his sons put his foot through the floorboard. By that time the floor pan was about rusted out, but it sat in my grandmothers barn next to her '50 Olds 88 until I was in high school. I'd love to have either of them today.

BTW, Jon, another uncle of mine was convinced the Edsel would be a valuable collectors item some day, and accumulated 3 of them. They were still next to worthless, and inoperable, when he died.
 
It is interesting that old-timers at Packard remembered large shipments to the Soviet Union during the '40s of car parts or equipment. I've always thought the story of Senior Series dies being sent to the Soviets was implausible, but there seems to be a lot of documentation on cooperation between Packard and the Russians before the start of the Cold War.

 

Somewhere I have an American magazine from the early '50s about cars of the world. There is a page on the Zis with a photo of one that was captured in North Korea by American forces. None of the GIs knew anything about Zis but plenty were motorheads and had driven or owned old Packards. They were utterly amazed to find this old pre-war Packard abandoned by fleeing North Korean forces, and even more amazed to find it wasn't actually a Packard but a Russian copy. According to the article, it was full of weird colors and textures, especially the plastics, but otherwise appeared to be just another old Packard.

 

Regarding the story of Ford and the Soviets in the '30s, it should never be forgotten that Ford asked for volunteers of Russian descent who spoke Russian to go the the Soviet Union and help set up some of the joint-venture factories. Some of these people were Russian born immigrants, others were born in the US to immigrant families. Most were skilled laborers who helped train their Russian counterparts. Once the factories were up and running the joint ventures were dissolved and the unfortunate volunteers were forgotten by both Ford and the US government. The Soviets did not want them going back to the US for many reasons and they were not allowed to contact any embassies or consulates or even to visit Moscow or a large city where they could possibly speak with foreigners. These poor people lived the rest of their lives in the Soviet Union even though they were legitimate US citizens.

 

I think we should now start a new thread in Super to continue these discussions, as they've gone rather overboard from vintage washers.
 
Jon, this the only picture I could find that shows the machine from more or less the same angle... As my father would say, "Yes, this looking like same vasher" LOL

turquoisedude++12-3-2012-18-29-29.jpg
 
Jon:

If you'll look carefully, you'll see I didn't single Edsel out for poor build quality - it was pretty much all cars at the time. Our next-door neighbor had a '57 Fairlane that could not be relied upon to reach the end of her driveway with any regularity. Our '56 Chevrolet 150 had a lot more problems than any car today would have. And don't get me started about Plymouths of that era - you almost didn't have to worry about mechanical problems, because rust would eat through the car before anything else had a chance to go kaflooey, and it's not like Georgia salts its roads.
 
Paul

Luscious Khrushchev machineski!

Sandy, no I agree quality has skyrocketed since the 50's , but no one can say the Edsel was any worse off than any other car at the time. If you reached 100,000 miles that was almost unheard of, if you reached 10 years that too was unheard of. Today most cars can reach 300,000 miles with solid maintenance so today things are much better built, unfortunately most Americans cant see this because they didn't live through it!
 
Jon, those dangerously-located controls are for indeed for the stove... I've not fried myself yet, though... LOL

Ah, after the wiring diagram for this unit was finally located (it turned up in the Automatic Ephemera downloads about a month after getting soaked on eBay for it... D'OH!) I studied it carefully and realized that it was a miracle that I got the machine to get through a complete wash cycle! However, I also have a severely damaged thermostat for the drying control - I thought I could just swap out a thermostat from a 1959 model (John parted that out for me some time ago) but again it didn't seem to just fit but with the wiring diagram I believe I figured out how to adapt the 1959 thermostat. All I need to do now is find some time to pull the combo and do some tinkering... I may get my wish in January, though... stay tuned...
 
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