A parade car that once belonged to Juan and Eva Peron will be auctioned in Jonesboro on Nov. 7.
The black 1939 Durham Super Eight Packard was commissioned by the Argentinian government before Peron’s rise to power in 1946. It has a red velvet interior, inlaid hardwood paneling and armor-plated glass. With a 148 inch-wheelbase, it is the length of a limousine.
“It is a distracting car,” said owner Carol Plaster, 76, who alongside her husband, Raymond Plaster, worked on the vehicle nearly every day for 19 years.
Once, they were driving it to their hotel after an auto show in California, and a police cruiser stopped them to ask how much further they had to go. “You’re going to cause a wreck,” the officer said, gesturing to the line of cars trailing the Packard.
“Following it, I don’t know if they knew whose car it was,” Carol Plaster said. “They just wanted to see it.”
In 1983, Raymond Plaster saw the Packard for the first time at an auction in Tulsa. After buying it for $4,000, he opened the trunk and found a pile of newspapers inside. One contained a photo of a couple standing in a convertible, a man saluting in a military uniform and a woman waving in a mink coat. It was Juan and Eva Peron at the president’s second inaugural parade.
Three weeks after the photo was taken, Eva was dead. By 1955, her husband was in exile and the Packard had disappeared. It didn’t reemerge until the 1970s, when an Argentinian found it at a dog farm and sold it to a man from North Platte, Nebraska.
When Raymond Plaster brought it to his garage in Bull Shoals, the paint was peeling and the doors did not close properly. He and his wife began working on it everyday. They’d come home, change their clothes and go out to the garage. Over time, they replaced the interior, the roof, the screws and, by 2002, the restoration was complete.
“When you rolled it out of the trailer, you couldn’t believe it,” Carol Plaster said. “People would swarm you.”
They took it to Little Rock, Oklahoma, Ohio, California and Washington D.C. They displayed it at auto shows and performances of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita. They couldn't take it out on drives without getting stopped for photos.
Carol Plaster still gets calls from all over the U.S. People hear about the car and want to come see it in person. She’ll sometimes open the garage and show visitors what it looks like, but she no longer takes the Packard to shows.
Raymond Plaster died three years ago, and Carol Plaster never learned how to operate the stick shift herself. After he suffered a stroke, Raymond Plaster couldn’t drive it either. He would ask Carol to to take him out to the garage and then he would sit there, staring at the Packard for hours.
“It’s a powerful car,” Carol Plaster said. “I don’t know how to explain it except to say the car has a presence to it when you look at it. The car comes to life.”
Now that her husband is gone, Carol Plaster would be unable to fix it if something were to happen, she said. The thought of ruining the car terrifies her.
Four months ago, she had a dream that her husband told her it was time to sell it. The next day, she made a call.
Now, the Packard is scheduled to be auctioned at Nettleton Baptist Church's Community Room on Nov. 7 at 6:30 p.m. along with the rest of her husband’s belongings.
“Eva loved to be seen in the car,” Carol Plaster said. “And it needs to be shown.”