In 1974 I moved my young family from North Dakota to Vermont to take a job
at St. Johnsbury Academy teaching Auto Body. The caravan included a
1953 Studebaker 2 ton farm truck and a 1963 Studebaker Avanti R1 Coupe.
Times were tough back then and money was scarce. The Avanti, being the
most valuable was to be the first to be sold. Unfortunately the
weekend before I was to deliver the car to a buyer in Ohio I was in an
accident and the crashed the right front into a guard-rail on a snowy curve.
The dilemma was how to repair the car with so little money. I had been
buying parts from Roscoe Stelford in Illinois and we entered into an
exchange, Avanti parts for printing of an extensive Packard Ultramatc
Transmission manual. The printing was done on an offset press and required a
massive amount of darkroom , plate and press time but parts were needed to
get the Avanti back on the road.
Roscoe and I
talked many times over that year and on one visit to his home he showed me a
treasure. It was the Packard prototype fuel injection unit developed
in the final years of Packard's existence. It was incredible. I often
thought of the injection unit as they became more and more common. A short
while ago I received this attachment of the Stelford 56 Packard Executive
with the injection unit in place. To my mind, it is a thing of beauty
and typifies what a wondrous thing it was to grow up in the fifties and
sixties.
