Ken Ruminer had watched the huge, black Packard slowly decaying for years. The stately machine slowly sank into the earth, and even though he wasn’t a “car guy” involved in the collector vehicle hobby, seeing the Packard being so neglected broke his heart.
Ruminer never seriously considered staging an intervention, however, until his wife Sandy unexpectedly gave him the green light. “Yes, you can blame my wife,” chuckles Ken Ruminer, a resident of Lakeland in Southern California. “She’s the one who really started it. She told me to go [inquire about buying it]. She said, ‘We’ve got to go save its life.’”
That was about 20 years ago in Downey, Calif. The Ruminers’ challenge was to get the Packard away from a well-meaning owner who didn’t really want to sell it. The last registration sticker on the car’s license plates was from 1968, meaning the car had sat for almost 30 years. The owner clearly wasn’t in a hurry to do anything with the Packard, and any acquisition probably wasn’t going to happen overnight.
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