This comes to you several years after this arcticle was written but I will give it a try anyhow. I have a ’59 T-bird that looks like a custom show car but with fully cut in side vents similar to ones I saw on a sketch attributed to the Advance design studio. The sunvisor on the drivers side has the hand lettered work AVANCIER on it. The roof line has a raised ridge on each side that does so much for the looks of the car but I have never seen another T-bird with that detail. All was done in lead and I have had the car since 1967.

Thank you for any comments you might have.

Sincerely, Mark Mundorff

Previous accounts of the designing of the T-Bird in books and magazine articles were put together from Ford press releases and from interviews with two of the designers involved, Frank Hershey and Bill Boyer, were largely hype. For some reason, the books, magazine articles, and a TV documentary on the ’Bird made it sound as if either Hershey or Boyer had designed the car alone, and failed to mention two other designers involved with the design project—Kornmiller and Samsen. In a recorded interview at the Edsel Ford library of the Ford Museum, Boyer did state “a young gentleman by the name of Dick Samson was in the studio for a while at that time. The major portion of the car—the sketching that was done—was by Dick and myself.”