Heads up, Larry~! 1930 birthdate for this Packard... 1910 birthdate for the driver....

[Massive Attack]

A PAIR Margaret Dunning of Plymouth, Mich., is 101 and her Packard 740 roadster is 81. She will be showing the car at the Concours d’Élégance of America this month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/10/au...ts-driver.html


Here is the video embed (finally figured it out)

PLYMOUTH, Mich.

WHEN Margaret Dunning was 10 years old, she lost control while driving the family’s Overland touring car and careered into a barn, fracturing several boards.

“I hit it, and it didn’t move,” Ms. Dunning, who turned 101 last month, said.

“That car had a mind of its own,” she said. “And I’m not a very tall person, so I had trouble getting onto the brakes with enough power to hold that engine down. It just got away from me.”

Soon enough, though, she was back at it, rumbling around the back roads of Redford Township, just west of Detroit, where her family owned a sprawling dairy and potato farm. By then she had already been driving for two years.

Before the barn incident, Ms. Dunning’s father had often let his young daughter steer while he operated the other controls. One day he let her do it all, but not without a stern lecture.

“Do you know what you’re controlling here?” she recalled him asking. “Do you know the power that you’re controlling?”

“He explained to me how, for some jobs, it was better to use multiple horses,” she said. “But the minute you lose control, you’ve got wild horses to deal with.

“And that’s how he taught me about horsepower,” Ms. Dunning added. “And it stuck with me.”

After that, Ms. Dunning, an only child, drove everything on the farm that was drivable, she said, including a Maxwell truck and eventually, tractors.

When she was 12 her father died, and his Model T Ford became hers.

Once her politically connected mother, who had arthritic feet and could not drive cars, finagled a driver’s license for the 12-year-old Margaret, she drove her mother everywhere. Her mother drove the farm’s four teams of horses.

“If you had just a little knowledge and some baling wire and bob pins, you could keep the thing going,” she said of the Model T. “It was the little car that made America.”

She cherished her time in the car alone, reaching into the wind for roadside stalks of fragrant sweet clover. “I’d see a few friends or race past a blind pig,” she said, using the euphemism for Prohibition-era drinking establishments. “Before I could get home, people would be calling saying, ‘I think I just saw Margaret, with quite a dust pile behind her.’ ”

In those days there was something else in the air: the excitement spawned by a burgeoning auto industry. Henry Ford not only led that wave, but to the Dunnings he was a friend and neighbor who lived minutes away.

“Dad would come in and say, ‘Well, Henry’s outside and I’ve asked him to stay for dinner,’ ” she said. “Mom had made huckleberry pie and offered Henry some.

“He said that was his favorite pie — I think he was being polite, but he was marvelous just like that.”

She added, “He always wore a hat with a sizable brim and a black band, and he’d push it off his face when he talked to you, and looked you right in the eye.”

Ms. Dunning, who never married, attended a private high school in Wellesley, Mass., before enrolling at the University of Michigan, intending to study business.

“When I was little, Mom asked me what I thought I wanted to do for a living,” she said. “I told her ‘to buy and sell.’ I think that surprised her.”

She dropped out of college during the Depression to help at her mother’s real estate business and later had successful turns in banking and retail.

All along she supported her beloved town of Plymouth, where she has lived in the same home since she was 13. In the 1940s she and her mother donated property to establish what is now the Dunning-Hough Library. She has also donated more than $1 million to the Plymouth Historical Museum.

Her love affair with vehicles never waned. She drove a truck as a Red Cross volunteer and has owned a parade of classic and antique cars. At her home, she also keeps a 1931 Ford Model A, a 1966 Cadillac DeVille that she often drives to car meets, a 1975 Cadillac Eldorado convertible and her everyday car, a 2003 DeVille. A battered Model T steering wheel is her garage doorstop.

But her real love is a cream-color 1930 Packard 740 roadster, which she has owned since 1949. She plans to show the Packard at the Concours d’Élégance of America in Plymouth on July 31 .

“I saw a for-sale picture and I was a goner right then and there,” Ms. Dunning said. “The guy said his wife had told him they had to get a closed car if they were going to have children. It was raining that day in Detroit when it came in, I remember it well. It sat in a carrier all by itself.”

Ms. Dunning cannot recall how much she paid for the Packard, and said it was unclear how many miles were on its in-line 8-cylinder engine. The Packard had not exactly been pampered, she said, before it was fully restored by a friend.

“It had been through the boot camp at some Army places during the Second World War,” she explained. “In those days soldiers wanted something to drive from camp to their new city, and they loaded them with other soldiers and ran the dickens out of them.”

Since it was restored, the Packard has mostly been a show car, although Ms. Dunning used to drive it more often than the three or four times a year that she takes it out now. “It’s always been a car that I’ve kept separate from other cars,” she said, adding that she has owned other Packards.

“They’re just made out of such fine material,” she said. “I love the engineering that went into it. There’s just a lot of very, very fine workmanship.”

Packard, an upscale brand produced from 1899 to 1958, ushered in several innovative designs, including the modern steering wheel. Ms. Dunning’s roadster was built in Detroit in an Albert Kahn-designed factory complex, now abandoned, that covered 3.5 million square feet and once employed 40,000 workers. In addition to the luxury vehicles, the factory turned out engines for World War II fighter planes.

Ms. Dunning still changes the oil herself, but mostly relies on a small maintenance team that includes a 90-year-old friend. “His hands are just magic,” she said.

Her car has black fenders and a red leather interior with a cigarette lighter, map light and glove compartments on each side of the dashboard. The windshield pushes outward, and there is a rumble seat and storage compartment in back. The transmission is a 4-speed — manual shift, of course.

All these years Ms. Dunning has kept her Packard’s original key with its elaborate crest. For her recent birthday, some friends duplicated the prized key.

“I was thrilled to death to have another one,” she said. “If I had ever lost the one I had, the locksmith would be out here for a week, and I still would not have that crest,” she said.

Ms. Dunning, who belongs to several car clubs, including the Michigan Region Classic Car Club of America, said the Packard has never given her much trouble, although there were times she had to deal with vapor lock, when the gasoline gets hot and evaporates before making it through the carburetor.

“You wait until the car cools off, restart it and off you go,” she said.

“I’ve never run out of gas with it,” she said with a chuckle. “That’s the famous thing to do with old cars. You’re so busy trying to keep everything else in shape, you forget about the gas.”

She said she was looking forward to the concours because she had not shown the car in years. “And it’s just such a pleasure to revive old memories, people I haven’t seen in such a long time.”

Having experienced the horse-and -buggy and Model T days, Ms. Dunning is amazed by the technology and styling of contemporary cars, she said. She is considering buying another vehicle, but she does not know what yet. “It’s just so much easier to drive now because of power steering and brakes,” she explained.

“With the older cars you have to use what I call arm-strong steering. But cars like the Packard make it all worthwhile. I love that car a great deal. I mean, I honestly do love it.”

[Nourdmrolnmt]

Having experienced the horse-and -buggy and Model T days, Ms. Dunning is amazed by the technology and styling of contemporary cars, she said. She is considering buying another vehicle, but she does not know what yet. “It’s just so much easier to drive now because of power steering and brakes,” she explained.

thread derailment!

omg a 101 year old driving!!!

[HideYoKids]

CSB

for once in my life I mean it, that is pretty cool.

[stacman]

She's old, she's a lady, and I would trust her 100% behind the wheel of just about anything. Sounds like she really knows her stuff.

[Peloton25]

Wow - that is a beautiful car.

>8^)
ER

[HideYoKids]

Wow - that is a beautiful car.

>8^)
ER

I was wondering where you were the last few days, we had some F1 threads without you

/derailment.

[Powderkeg]

Her mechanic is 90 years old. Nothing like having experience with old cars on your side.

[Mike!]

That woman is awesome

This is even cooler than the 101 year old buying a new manual Camaro

[MAC]

I'm going to find her at the show and propose

She must have been something before electricity.

[Internal Combustion]

She doesn't look 101. Would hit

[Blunderbuss]

She obviously loves cars.

[Omnilith]

Awesome to see not only the vehicle, but the PERSON from times nearly forgotten.

Hope she has many healthy years ahead.

[MAC]

She's old, she's a lady, and I would trust her 100% behind the wheel of just about anything. Sounds like she really knows her stuff.

Check out the video with the article. Its a trip. She handles it no problem.

She's got a bumper sticker on it that says "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill"

[Chapel]

Check out the video with the article. Its a trip. She handles it no problem.

She's got a bumper sticker on it that says "Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill"

This lady is a hoot

[The Kilted Yaksman]

Sassy ol' broad. I think I'm in love.

[lil' thumper]

She gets her friends over frequently for a polishing party. That's a lot of square footage to be polishing and it looks like it would be really gratifying to put a shine on that beauty

[patrikman]

Something tells me Larry may not be around for a while, I am sure he has had enough of TCL bull**** to tide him over for some time.

[barry2952]

Something tells me Larry may not be around for a while, I am sure he has had enough of TCL bull**** to tide him over for some time.

Can't say as I blame him. Some of the responses in that last thread were just shameful.

People don't really know what his circumstances are and should just take a chill pill about his Leno trip. If they were in his shoes they wouldn't give him any crap at all. Being an intense caregiver for the last 10 months I can attest to the pressures it puts on you.

He will make the trip, when he can.

As far as this lady is concerned, I give her a lot of credit. I hope to meet her at St. John's in less than two weeks. Please, anyone that's going, please look me up. I'll have my '33 Continental Flyer in the show.

[patrikman]

Can't say as I blame him. Some of the responses in that last thread were just shameful.

People don't really know what his circumstances are and should just take a chill pill about his Leno trip. If they were in his shoes they wouldn't give him any crap at all. Being an intense caregiver for the last 10 months I can attest to the pressures it puts on you.

He will make the trip, when he can.

As far as this lady is concerned, I give her a lot of credit. I hope to meet her at St. John's in less than two weeks. Please, anyone that's going, please look me up. I'll have my '33 Continental Flyer in the show.

I agree about Larry, he doesn't deserve that crap. Didn't mean to derail the thread because it is truly a remarkable story.

[McBanagon]

Check out the video with the article. Its a trip.

"People always ask if I have lived in Plymouth all my life. (laughs) Not yet!"

She is awesome.

[McBanagon]

She must have been something before electricity.

[Chapel]

Something tells me Larry may not be around for a while, I am sure he has had enough of TCL bull**** to tide him over for some time.

more reasons we need a private geriatric forum...
turn down the noise, turn up the quality.
TCL is troll city lately.

[barry2952]

more reasons we need a civil forum...

FTFY

[Chapel]

FTFY

yeah, now fix it for us
never gonna happen

I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit
it's the only way to be sure.

[barry2952]

I don't remember treating older people different just because they are older. Most of our friends were almost always much older that we were. Yes, I had to bite my tongue a few times, but I benefitted greatly from their knowledge. All the book learning in the world means squat if you don't have experience.

[barry2952]

She doesn't look 101. Would hit

With what?

[per-diems]

awesome story and beautiful car

[barry2952]

She must have been something before electricity.

Electricity existed before she was born, but not by much!

[HASSELHOF]

Awesome story. Awesome Auto. Truly an inspiration. I wish i was 1/16th as cool as she is.

[HideYoKids]

With what?

you don't want to know/are too old.

[Chapel]

Electricity existed before she was born, but not by much!

I've been on the Wheel of Progress (my favorite ride at WDW) I know what Electricity looked like back then...

[eunos94]

Ms. Dunning still changes the oil herself, but mostly relies on a small maintenance team that includes a 90-year-old friend. “His hands are just magic,” she said.

Obvious jokes are obvious
1) That's what SHE said!!!
2) Git R'done
3) I bet (wink wink nudge nudge)
4) OMG he's 11 years younger than you!!!
5) Well hell anyone can live to be 101 if you have a small maintenance team and magic hands.
6) It's just Parkinsons not magic.

Ba dum bump

[patrikman]

Obvious jokes are obvious
1) That's what SHE said!!!
2) Git R'done
3) I bet (wink wink nudge nudge)
4) OMG he's 11 years younger than you!!!
5) Well hell anyone can live to be 101 if you have a small maintenance team and magic hands.
6) It's just Parkinsons not magic.

Ba dum bump

I am going with #3

[Rob.]

She looks pretty good for 101.

[Nourdmrolnmt]

I don't remember treating older people different just because they are older. Most of our friends were almost always much older that we were. Yes, I had to bite my tongue a few times, but I benefitted greatly from their knowledge. All the book learning in the world means squat if you don't have experience.

it's the whole aspect of anonymity... Why be worried about what you type?

Who chased larry off? most people don't realize with enough googling, you can find names, addresses, phone numbers, etc