"Finest"

Lehigh University was founded 62 years ago by a man named Asa Packer. In 1884 it graduated a young man named James Ward Packard who took his mechanical engineering knowledge back to Warren, Ohio, his birthplace, and put it to work. Last week Lehigh University acknowledged the receipt, from James Ward Packard, of the largest single bequest since its initial gifts and endowment (two millions and 60 acres of land in South Bethlehem, Pa.) from Asa Packer -- a million-dollar engineering laboratory that was to be the world's "finest." The similarity of the names Packer and Packard " was sheerest coincidence but not so the careers behind them. Asa Packer was successively carpenter's apprentice, canal-boat owner, railroad operator, financier and philanthropist. James Ward Packard, the young graduate of the school Asa Packer founded, was successively an employe of an electric company; organizer of his own electric company; inventor, developer and promoter of a motor car which bore his name. The laboratory which he has presented, complete with the most modern of everything in boilers, generators, delicate measuring devices, special laboratories for research in radio, high voltages, refrigeration, and many another branch of technology, represents part of the proceeds from Mr. Packard's eminently successful motor car.* Even as Asa Packer caused one of Lehigh's buildings to be inscribed with his name, so now might Mr. Packard, nor would it be unfitting to carve below the new laboratory's name the logical motto: "Ask the man who owns one."

--So successful that Mr. Packard was able to retire in 1916 from the presidency of the Packard Motor Car Co. He was succeeded by a man four years behind him at Lehigh (but not a graduate), Alvan Macauley.