Packard’s Fourteenth Series models of 1936 adopted more streamlined styling and included the company’s final open phaetons and touring cars. The romantic dual-cowl Sport Phaeton saw only five authentic examples built on the twelve-cylinder, 144-inch-wheelbase 1407 chassis, only three of which remain in existence today.

The car offered here is vehicle number 921-204, and therefore the fourth of the five, per its original firewall tag; the same tag notes that it was delivered in Toronto, Ontario, on 3 September 1936. Purportedly its first owner was the Japanese Consulate in Canada. In 1951 it was found in Calgary by enthusiast Harvey McEwen, being rented out by Frenchie Pallin’s Dominion U Drive for tours to Banff. In a 2003 newspaper article, McEwen recounted that the car was still in its original black-on-black livery, and an enclosed photo shows it to have been configured, as original and as at present, without sidemounted spares. He purchased it from Pallin soon thereafter.

“I later talked to the second owner,” McEwen wrote, “and he told me he had bought the car from the Japanese embassy in Vancouver when the Second World War broke out.” Another version of the tale is that the car was repossessed by a shop owner from the embassy around the same time. That the car was originally in formal service is spoken to by the Packard logo being “blanked out” on the wheels, steering wheel hub, and everywhere else on the car!

The car was sold by McEwen after several years, but remained in Western Canada, eventually finding its way during the 1960s into Banff hotel tycoon Murray Gammon’s prominent museum of Packards in Victoria, British Columbia. After years on display in Victoria, it was acquired by longtime Classic Car Club of America member, Richard Gold, whose son, Steve, eventually inherited the Packard and, after a restoration to the present, more cheerful Packard Cream, exhibited it at CCCA events during the early 2000s. Eventually it was sold via Tom Crook around 2002 to the great enthusiast Gordon Apker, in whose hands it was exhibited at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in 2007, and at the CCCA Annual Meeting in 2008.

Today one of only three authentic 1407 Twelve sport phaetons known to have survived, this distinctive and elegant car is one of the most significant later twelve-cylinder Packards, with a rich past throughout North America. It is in the first rank of extant Twelves.