On This Day

Friday 24th April 1908

112 years ago

Jacob M. Murdock packed his family into a 1908 Packard "Thirty" touring car and left Los Angeles. Keep in mind this was before Interstate highways (or paved roads, for that matter). On May 26, Murdock and Co. arrived in New York City, setting a transcontinental record for the longest continuous run of a single car and driver -- just over 32 days in all, although they did rest for five Sundays during the expedition. The fascinating tale of their journey, which Packard published as a book titled "A Family Tour from Ocean to Ocean," ends with this passage: "As we drove up Broadway it was hard for us to realize that the job was over. When at last we unloaded at the Packard store on the corner of Broadway and Sixty-first street -- while the time of 32 days, 5 hours, 25 minutes for the 3693.8 miles we had come, was being spread to the rest of the world by the newspaper men -- it was equally difficult for us to comprehend that simply as a family party, which on a mere caprice, had undertaken a transcontinental tour, we also had driven into the limelight as the first party of the kind to make such a journey and, in addition, were record breakers."