If you were to plan a bank robbery and you had the ability to choose your getaway car, you’d probably pick something with low-key looks, room for your crew and your haul, rapid acceleration, and nimble handling. If you had to escape communist rule, you’d go in any car you could take, as this Jay Leno’s Garage video shows.
When the communists took over Czechoslovakia in the mid-1940s, Paul Rusnak, his twin brother, and their parents fled the country in what many would find to be an unusual car. They didn’t pile themselves and whatever possessions they could take into a homegrown Tatra or even a Volkswagen. Rusnak’s father was a distributor for Kaiser-Frazer and Packard. So when the time came for the Rusnak family to leave their native land and head to Switzerland, they took a Packard Clipper Deluxe two-door.
Rusnak’s father eventually sold the Packard in Germany and the family made it beyond the grasp of the communists and into Switzerland. Luckily, the Rusnaks already had tourist visas to visit America. Their sponsor? None other than Henry J. Kaiser.
That harrowing ordeal was a formative experience for Paul Rusnak, who followed in his dad’s footsteps and entered the auto industry, founding the Rusnak Auto Group in Southern California. He never forgot that faithful Packard and managed to track one like it down in Scottsdale, Arizona. The straight-eight-powered beauty emerged from its restoration with gleaming chrome trim, an attractive dark blue and silver finish, whitewalls, corduroy cloth seating surfaces, and wood-tone painted metal interior trim.
A Packard may not have been the quickest, least conspicuous means of escaping communist rule, but it turned out to be the right car for the journey. It took Paul Rusnak beyond just Switzerland. In a major albeit indirect way, it was responsible for getting him to America, where he made his fortune – without robbing a single bank!
Source: www.classiccars.com