Wu Tang & Whitewalls

Right, so this article was supposed to go live early this morning. That was the plan. That was the mission. But then a strange thing happened—Wu-Tang announced a show in town last night and all rational decision-making went out the window. There I was, lost in the chaos of Method Man’s war cries and RZA’s sonic sermons, thinking less about 1950s steel and more about Shaolin-style carnage.

The fog is just now starting to clear and the hearing loss has set in, but I figured it was time to get back to business—namely, a long-overdue look at Gene Meeks’ 1952 Packard Patrician. This one’s a goddamned fever dream on whitewalls.

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In 1954, Gene Meeks of Ottumwa, Iowa took a swing at custom and knocked it sideways. The result was a radical car unlike anything else rolling through the Midwest at the time—a Packard reworked not just for style, but with a kind of manic, patchwork genius that makes you wonder if the man wasn’t possessed by something or the other.

He started with the grille. Forget Packard’s upright, aristocratic sneer—Meeks chiseled it into a honeycomb abyss, inspired by the 1954 Nash Ambassador. Below that, the lighting was its own sideshow: 1951 Ford fog lights tucked into the bottom, with directional signal lamps parked right in the center, like sleepy eyes staring through an absinthe haze.

Later on, that whole headlight situation got another overhaul—this time with 1954 Buick units, complete with bezels that looked like they were pulled straight from Flash Gordon’s garage. And that wasn’t the only borrowed brilliance. The front fenders? Snatched from a 1951 Studebaker Commander. The front bumper? Chrysler, circa 1952. And the hood? It featured a section of a 1939 Ford decklid, just for good measure.

The rear was no less demented: deck lid shaved, handles deleted, and a secret trunk release buried under the step plates next to a godless Continental kit. Even the gas filler was hidden. The fins from a ’54 Pontiac gave the Packard a silhouette that flirted with early jet age madness. Wide whites, two-bar spinners, and fender skirts rounded it all out like a Sunday punch.

And under the hood? None of that sedate straight-eight nonsense. This bastard ran a 1954 Olds Rocket V8. The car was a sermon in contradictions—elegant lines hiding muscle, Frankenstein parts functioning in beautiful, chaotic harmony. Sort of…

When it hit the pages of Motor Trend in March of ’55, it wore white paint with red highlights in all the right places—grille mesh, headlight recesses, spare tire trim. The effect was hypnotic: half sculpture, half war machine.

Eventually, like so many brilliant customs, it faded into obscurity. It passed through the hands of a university professor, sat dormant in Illinois for 40 years, and reemerged in 2010 like a long-forgotten ghost. By then, it was red, worn, and up for grabs on eBay…

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I don’t know where it is today. I hope it’s not rotting behind a tire shop in Queens or holed up in some climate-controlled garage surrounded by velvet ropes in the South. Cars like this deserve to be seen. Driven. Gawked at. Worshipped or hated.

But either way, I’m sorry for the delay… Blame Staten Island’s finest. But if you’ve made it this far, you’ve just read about one of the weirdest damn Packards to ever roll out of Iowa—and that, my friends, was worth the wait. And even if it wasn’t, I have no regrets. The Wu Tang Clan, after all, ain’t nothing to fuck with…