Free Republic

When car restorer Matt Murray got a call from his friends at an estate sale company asking for help pulling an old vehicle out of a property that was being cleared out for redevelopment, the Iron Trap Garage YouTube show host never expected the unique trip into history he was about to take. It wasn’t just any car, but a 1927 Packard Six that had been stored in an abandoned 18th-century factory in the Germantown section of Philadelphia since the 1970s, and not driven for over 60 years. The building was part of the campus for Golaski Laboratories, a company started...

When HP splits in two on Sunday after a year of planning,... on one side with be HP Inc., which will largely consist of personal computers and printers. Ont he other, HP Enterprise HPE, which will sell the servers, data storage, networking, software and consulting services... each company is expected to have annual revenue of about $50 billion and will be among America's largest public companies. The story HPE is taking to corporate customers is HPE itself.Need to change your business? HPE can show you how, executives say. After all, few companies have gone to greater lengths to change.Since Oct....

A former board member of Hewlett-Packard who voted to fire Carly Fiorina as CEO is now endorsing the businesswoman's 2016 Republican presidential campaign. "Carly did what she was brought in to do: turn the company around and make it successful again. Not only did she save the company from the dire straits it was in, she laid the foundation for HP's future growth," Tom Perkins wrote for a full-page New York Times ad. The comments, in an advertisement placed in the newspaper's business section Thursday by a pro-Fiorina super-PAC, were framed as a response to an Aug. 18 Times column...

Packard gave up on its automotive plant in Detroit in 1956, but the 3,500,000-square-foot complex of reinforced concrete remains - if only as remains. It is perhaps just as famous for being ruins as it was when it built cars, still attracting plenty of attention from entrepreneurs, paintballers, vandals and urban spelunkers. Creative types love them some Packard Plant, too, evidenced by the short film produced by Cantini Pictures when they wanted to test out a homemade motorcycle and an aerial drone. The result is a few minutes of "motocross meets the monument." Check it out in the video below....

DETROIT, MI - The long-abandoned former Packard Automotive Plant, one of the largest empty buildings in the country, is reportedly close to being saved from the county foreclosure auction block. The Detroit News reports an Illinois developer is speaking with Wayne County officials about purchasing the 40-acre property for $974,000, the amount owed in unpaid taxes. From The News: “Bill Hults, of Evanston, Ill., told The Detroit News he’s leading a group of investors who want to rehabilitate the crumbling 3.5-million-square-foot plant and build housing nearby. To complete the transformation, Hults has retained the legendary architectural firm that built the...

On the day of the California primary, an all-but-meaningless election with record-low turnout, two famous men died, both in their early 80s. One was Edmund Muskie, former senator, briefly secretary of state, and the candidate wistful Democrats like to imagine might have been their 1972 nominee if not for a dirty trick and tears in the snow. (They forget, conveniently, that McGovernites had engineered the delegate-selection rules.) Muskie's obituary took 82 column inches in The Washington Post, 84 in The New York Times. The other man--eulogized in a mere 28 inches by the Post (eight devoted to his two years...

Margaret Dunning, 102 years old, has been behind the wheel for 94 years, starting on her father’s farm in Michigan. But her even prouder accomplishment is keeping her 1930 Packard roadster in car-show condition, making it an auto-exhibit hit. Margaret Dunning started driving when she was 8 years old. Ninety-four years later, she’s still behind the wheel. The 102-year-old, who has continued exhibiting her Packard 740 Roadster well into her second century, drove fans wild this week at Ohio’s Glenmoor Gathering of Significant Automobiles in Canton. “People were blown away to find a lady who's 102-years-old who is as active...

CANTON, Ohio, - A 102-year-old woman who brought her 1930 Packard 740 Roadster to an Ohio car show said she still changes her own oil and spark plugs. Margaret Dunning of Plymouth, Mich., said at the 18th annual Glenmoor Gathering of Significant Automobiles at Glenmoor Country Club in Canton the car was in rough shape when she bought it in 1949 but it has since been restored with four upholstery jobs and 22 coats of hand-rubbed lacquer, the Akron (Ohio) Beacon Journal reported Monday. Dunning said she still often finds herself crawling under the car, which was the first vehicle...

After six decades, Margaret Dunning, age 101, still breezes down the road in her creamy 740 Packard roadster. http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/07/08/automobiles/collectibles/100000000895665/two-classics-one-car.html

It's just a little graffiti, and yet its existence has caused a firestorm of legal wrangling as to who actually owns the work and the building that once housed it. Seems rather odd, until you take a closer look at who is responsible, where it was created and why it exists in the first place. The Location Of all the derelict buildings filling the city of Detroit, one of the most famous is the former Packard automobile plant. As much as the city of Detroit would like to do something about the the 3,500,000-square-foot facility, nobody seems quite sure who...

The granddaughter of one of Hewlett-Packard’s founders wrote a letter Monday trashing California GOP Senate candidate Carly Fiorina’s leadership of the company. Arianna Packard, the granddaughter of HP co-founder David Packard, wrote the letter to the three Republican senators who recently endorsed Fiorina – James Inhofe and Tom Coburn of Oklahoma as well as Jon Kyl of Arizona – over former Rep. Tom Campbell and state Assemblyman Chuck DeVore. Packard has a long feud with Fiorina, publicly criticizing her leadership of the company and pushing for her ouster in 2005. In 2002, Packard teamed with Bill Hewlett – son of...

One day's obituaries reveal the blind spots of the opinion establishment. On the day of the California primary, an all-but-meaningless election with record-low turnout, two famous men died, both in their early 80s. One was Edmund Muskie, former senator, briefly secretary of state, and the candidate wistful Democrats like to imagine might have been their 1972 nominee if not for a dirty trick and tears in the snow. (They forget, conveniently, that McGovernites had engineered the delegate-selection rules.) Muskie's obituary took 82 column inches in The Washington Post, 84 in The New York Times. The other man--eulogized in a mere...

A Georgia woman has sued Hewlett-Packard, claiming the ink cartridges for their printers are secretly programmed to expire on a certain date, in some cases rendering them useless before they're even installed in a printer. The suit, filed in Santa Clara Superior Court in Northern California last Thursday, seeks to represent anyone in the United States who purchased an HP inkjet printer since February 2001. HP, which recently endured the high-profile ouster of former CEO Carly Fiorina, is the world's No. 1 computer printer maker. An HP spokesman said the company does not comment on pending litigation. HP ink cartridges...

WASHINGTON - Two strange new species of worms, without eyes or stomachs or even mouths, have been discovered living on the bones of dead whales in California's Monterey Bay. "Who knows what we can learn here," researcher Robert Vrijenhoek said. "There are many things left to discover in this world. Some we find by accident ... and some we find because we look in places that few people have explored before, as in much of our work in the deep oceans." In this case, it was a bit of both because the unexpected discovery was made about 9,400 feet below...

As I See It: Jobs and Jehovah by Victor Rozek Hewlett-Packard's CEO, Carly Fiorina, made a provocative statement a while back. "There is no job that is America's God-given right anymore," she said. It was a telling, if somewhat flippant, remark that sought to vindicate the practice of outsourcing, while dismissing opposition to it for not being divinely sanctioned. As a measure of how far we've slid down the outsourcing job drain, Ms. Fiorina apparently could see no benefit in preserving middle class jobs. Indeed, it was a disingenuous statement coming as it did from the CEO of a major...

The H-P-Compaq Mess Isn't All Carly's Doing By MICHAEL MALONE As part of its campaign to woo shareholding employees to its proposed merger with Compaq, Hewlett-Packard management put together a glossy road show. A high point of the extravaganza was the appearance of Richard Hackborn, H-P board member, former chairman and company hero, who solemnly announced that "unless this has the full commitment of employees it's not going to work."The vote, as we know, passed thanks to some last-minute wheeling and dealing with institutional investors by H-P CEO Carly Fiorina. But H-P management not only didn't get the near-unanimity it...