Published at: 04:08 am - Monday August 23 2010
Reminiscence from the 1985 Interview with Irvin W. Rybicki. Automotive Design Oral History, Accession 1673. Benson Ford Research Center. The Henry Ford Museum. This interview as well as many others can be found at the Automobile in American Life and Society website.
I think this was a cover from Automotive News. Behind Irv is a montage of renderings by Tom Semple (patchwork background/shadow), Jack Gable (trees, bricks, sunset), and Pete Meier (old car).
This is a very interesting and insightful interview with glimpses into how things worked at GM Styling. Irv talks about how he got his start as a designer, how several programs were developed, where some of the ideas came from, and what it was like working for Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell. He also mentions a lot of names including Alex Mair, Bill Mitchell, Bill Porter, Bob Eaton, Bob Fosher, Bunkie Knudsen, Carl Renner, Chuck Jordan, Clare MacKichan, Dave Crippen, Don Hoag, Ed Cole, Ed Glowacke, Frank Hershey, Harley Earl, Harlow Curtice, Henry Haga, Henry Lauve, Homer LaGassey, Howard Kehrl, Howard O’Leary, Hulkey Eldicotchi, Jack Gordon, Jack Humbert, Jerry Palmer, John DeLorean, John Gordon, John Schinella, Lloyd Reuss, Ned Nickles, Phil Garcia, Roger Smith, and Wayne Kady. It’s long but worth reading.—Gary
“This is Dave Crippen of the Henry Ford Museum’s Edsel Ford Design History Center, and this is June 27, 1985. Today we are at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, and we are conducting an interview with Irvin W. Rybicki. Mr. Rybicki is currently Vice-President for Design and Product Development at the General Motors Corporation, and he will recount the highlights of his career as an automotive designer.”
A: I’m a native of Detroit born here in 1921. My parents were Walter and Helen Rybicki. My dad was from the State of Pennsylvania, and my mother is from Bay City, Michigan. I spent my entire life in this city. I attended a Catholic grade school and went on to a public high school called Chadsey High on the West side of Detroit . My interest through my school years lay largely with aircraft and sports. I played just about every sport imaginable, including football, hockey, baseball, tennis, and golf. I was a member of the swimming team, but aircraft was always on my mind. I drew and designed my own planes, built aircraft out of balsa wood in kit form and attended the few art schools that were in the city. They no longer exist. One was called the Meinzinger’s in Orton, and I spent some time there trying to understand how to use an air brush and how you create proper perspectives. I didn’t think I was getting enough of that out of these classes in the school. I pursued that along with sports up until I was about fourteen.
Q: Did you go to Meinzinger’s in your off hours?
A: Yes. In the evenings. I pursued aircraft and sports until I was about fourteen, and I used to work in an uncle’s grocery store. I remember this like it happened yesterday: it was a Friday evening and it must have been somewhere around October. My cousin and I were stacking produce in the window when my uncle drove up with his new car. It was a black, 1938 Cadillac Sixty Special, and, with the lights playing on it out there, I thought, “My God, that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. If I can draw airplanes, why can’t I do something with automobiles?” And from that day on, it was cars, period. That’s all I ever did. I created a portfolio at home that must have been two feet thick, and, if I wasn’t studying school work, I was designing an automobile. My dad had a summer home out at Portage Lake, twenty miles West of Ann Arbor, and I spent my summers out there fishing, swimming and playing and thinking about automobiles. It was a beautiful lake.

After I graduated from high school and without my knowing it, my dad packed up some of the work I’d done he thought was the best, and he went to General Motors on his own. He had an interview with a fellow who was Jules Andrade, who was one of Harley Earl’s assistants. Jules suggested that I come in to see him. So, that particular weekend—my dad always came out on weekends out to the cottage because he was a working man—he told me this: “You’ve an appointment with General Motors on such and such a date.” I couldn’t believe that my dad would go out and do a thing like this, and that someone in the industry might be interested in my work. So I took the sketches down to General Motors. This was just prior to World War II, and, while they had an interest in me, Jules told me that, at the time, they weren’t hiring because of the developing situation in the world and in Europe, but they would keep my name on file.
The war came along, and I didn’t go to work for General Motors. I went into the service instead. I wound up in an armored division, was injured here in the States and never did get overseas and was discharged. After the discharge, I thought I’d better position myself somewhere within General Motors so that I’ll be within striking distance of what I wanted to do—design automobiles. I managed to get a job at the General Motors proving grounds in an engineering data office. And, in that office, I kept drawing automobiles and far-out military vehicles, and I had them all over the walls. A fellow named Hubbell was the number two man out at the [proving] grounds at the time the war concluded. He came into my office one day and said, “You know, you really don’t belong here. You belong on Harley Earl’s staff. Do you mind if I take some of your work and send it down there?” I told him about what had happened [several] years before. He said, “I can help you.”
So he sent them down here, and it wasn’t two weeks [before] I found myself working on General Motors’ design staff. It was called the Styling Section at that time. That was one of the happiest moments in my life, and they put me in what they called Forty Milwaukee. That was a school for trainee designers, and there were many young men in that class. There were fifteen who were all striving for positions. We were told that we had a year to prove ourselves and [would be] audited every quarter.
Three and a half quarters had passed, and this is another scene I shall never forget. It is very clear in my mind. It was a Friday morning toward the end of the month, and the phone rang. One of the young designers in the group of trainee designers got a call to come to the 10th floor in the research buildings’ administrative offices. He came back, and he had tears running down his cheeks. He was let go. Before we got to 5 o’clock in the afternoon, there were just two of us left—a chap named Carl Renner and Irv Rybicki, and we sat there wondering. That was the most traumatic weekend I’ve ever gone through wondering whether they ran out of time and hadn’t got to us or were we in. Monday came around and nothing had happened. It just cruised by, and we did our work. Carl and I congratulated ourselves and felt now we’re a part of the team. We had a few of the chief designers running divisional studios come through the school—one was Bill Mitchell of Cadillac, and the other was a fellow named Anderson. He was running Chevrolet. The following week Carl Renner found himself in Chevrolet, and Irv found himself in Cadillac.

The Design team gets ready to play. Back row, L to R: Frank Soraka, Walter Cattell, Harley Earl, George Snyder, Howard O’Leary, George DuJardin, Al Boca. Front row, L to R: Unidentified, Bill Hodge, Irv Rybicki, Mike Sitowski, John Kutchka, Leonard Stobar
Q: Had you, up to this time, encountered, Harley Earl?
A: I had seen seen Mr. Earl only once. He came by the school to look at the trainees’ work and some scale models we happened to be doing. He spent an hour in the school and left. That was my only encounter with Earl until I became a part of the Cadillac studio.
Q: Who was the head of the trainee program?
A: A fellow named Ned Nickles who [later] became chief designer, of Buick. Then Frank Hershey came in to run the school. Frank finally left General Motors and went on to Ford. He’s somewhere in New Mexico now.
Q: In Arizona.
A: In Arizona? I haven’t seen Frank in thirty-five years, but he was a very fast-moving, aggressive, fast-talking fellow. I enjoyed him very much. My career in the Cadillac studio began. I spent six years in Cadillac with Bill [Mitchell].
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