In considering a Classic Era Packard, connoisseurs look for the original vehicle tag on the firewall, confirming the car’s original vehicle number, delivery date, and selling dealer. This Super Eight One Sixty touring sedan goes one better, as it still has its original Bill of Sale from salesman C.L. Norton of Alvan Fuller’s Packard Motor Car Company of Boston. This notes that the car was delivered with engine no. D503713 (still under the hood today) and “complete equipment,” including six wheels, Electromatic Clutch, and Aero Drive, at $2,698.50. A 1937 Packard seven-passenger sedan was traded in on the purchase by original owner Alfred C. Gardner of 26 High Street in Revere, Massachuetts, receiving $700.50 credit.

Mr. Gardner’s Packard passed in 1972 to his son, Robert C. Gardner of Center Sandwich, New Hampshire. The current owners purchased the car from Robert Gardner’s widow in 2005 and are the third owners and the second outside of the original owner’s family.

In Robert Gardner’s ownership, the touring sedan was refinished in the original Grove Green; the factory lacquer can still be found in the doors and on the firewall. The body is remarkably solid for a New England car, while the interior is beautiful, including the original broadcloth upholstery, irreplaceable carpeting, and a superb original dashboard and instruments. Even the original radiator from the Modine Manufacturing Company of Racine, Wisconsin, is still in place. The car is offered with a history file that includes the aforementioned Bill of Sale, several early 1940s registration and gas ration cards, manuals, the original service booklet, and, wonderfully, the paper headlamp and Electromatic tags that would have been suspended from the dashboard switches when Mr. Revere took delivery of the new Packard in 1941.

This is, simply put, a “time warp” Packard.