The Ford orientation studio I started in, where I began my design career in 1952. Photo was taken before I joined.

Future Continentals

All the newcomers started here and the studio chiefs can look them over for production studio assignments. I went to Mercury Exterior from here.  Looking back, I think what a great place to start an automotive career, and how sad to think of what FOMOCO was then, and what it is now. After I got my job here, the first thing I did was buy a 1948 Midnight blue Lincoln Continental with 13,000 miles on it (like the one, lower left) from a Lincoln product planner. I was making $450 a month and the car was $1800. No money down and 1% a month to the Ford credit union. The car had power windows, but it also had a manual choke, 16 years after Oldsmobile introduced automatic chokes! With all it’s chrome, I love it still.

Bob’s ’48 Continental was like this one.

At that time, I dated a senior in Dearborn high school who was a dead ringer for Elizabeth Taylor, no exaggeration. She decided she didn’t want to get serious, but when her mother saw the Continental and found out I was a Ford stylist, her mother had other ideas. When we broke up, I found out the girl had already bought her silverware or dinnerware, whatever soon-to-be-married girls did in those days! Her mother then tried match me up with her younger sister—who was not a Liz Taylor lookalike.

When winter came, to keep it from the salt, I loaned it to the Henry Ford Museum for 18 months, where they displayed it next to the Presidential limousine used by Roosevelt and Truman. No storage costs, I could visit it whenever I wanted. It was kept a room temperature and dusted regularly. What more could one ask for? When I joined Loewy’s Studebaker design office, I sold it and replaced it with a ’52 Studebaker convertible.

What should be of interest in the photos was that in 1951 Ford was designing Lincoln Continentals in versions that haven’t been seen. In the foreground, the barely seen navy blue car on the left apparently is a stock ’48, the three red cars adjacent are three possibilities, three different concepts. One is apparently close to the original, one is a potential body style in the regular Lincoln line and the radical one is similar to the X-100 concept car that was built, and overall a very sharp car. It’s too bad that it never came close to production.

1953 Studebaker Lineup—What Could have Been

Loewy would have been a hero if this had been the lineup in ’53. The 1953–54 Studebaker sedan and ’54 wagons were tall, narrow and uninspiring. There never was a convertible, but there should have been. So I put this together for the Avanti club meeting in Palm Springs two years ago. I figured that they would be interested in what undoubtedly would have been a far more successful lineup in 1953.

I saw a survey in 1953 showing that 20% of the public preferred the Studebaker coupe design over everything that General Motors, Ford, or Chrysler offered at a time when Studebaker had just 3% of the total market, if that. A full line of Starliner-based cars, coupe plus sedan, convertible, and sport wagon, would have certainly been a success and, in all likelihood, changed the fortunes of Studebaker and Raymond Loewy’s contract with them to everyone’s huge benefit.

The Avanti club knew a modelmaker in Brazil who I contacted. He made a model from blueprints I sent him, of the Starliner sedan as it would have looked.

Chrysler K-body FWD cars

I had a personal crusade to increase the comfort in our K-body FWD cars. As Chrysler’s special vehicle projects manager, I proposed and designed the “Executive Sedan” show car and both production versions. They, in turn, led to Chryslers roomier, much-touted “cab-forward” cars and the industry followed suit, for awhile anyway. I proved that you could have small, fuel-efficient cars that had more legroom than the biggest cars on the market.

This is the actual prototype I designed and then supervised it‘s creation for the auto shows. ASC produced the show car, and then the production car conversions.

There never was a design illustration except for a simple side elevation (not even to scale) drawing to show how it was to be fabricated. Including the B pillar forward, it has stock four door sedan components. The rear quarter, from the trailing edge of the rear door, is the back end of a club coupe (the front end was from a LeBaron, the coupe end was a Plymouth Reliant, as I recall). The rear door had to be new. It might well have been fabricated from the leading half of a four door rear door and the trailing half of a two door. door. I learned that from studying old Cadillac limousines.

Here’s the Executive Sedan interior that was actually inspired by my (Art Center, 1951) $125, 1940 Lincoln-Zephyr–foot hassocks and all. Those Zephyrs had 48″ of rear seat legroom!

The Executive Sedan went in to limited production in two versions. The Executive Sedan (like the show car) and a stretched “Limousine” version of with two folding jump seats and a glass divider: a real mini-limo.

Marcks, Hazelquist and Powers Design, Dearborn

Marcks, Hazelquist and Powers would hire Syd Mead whenever he had any downtime and we had something that he could do for us (which was a lot, if we could afford him!). We had worked together with him at Ford and remained good friends. It was 39 years ago when he did these illustrations for us when we had assignments from Toyota’s marketing department. Now, 39 years later, Toyota has hired him again, to do ad illustrations for the 2010 Camry, which is to be introduced very shortly.

A new Corona was first introduced in the Summer 1970 issue of Toyota Today with the attached drawings from my Hollywood design firm and ad agency, Marcks, Hazelquist, and Powers. Who knew at that time what a huge success Toyota would be in the future!?

I was a staff designer with Raymond Loewy in 1953-54, and then my own firm produced the color and trim changes for the 1966 Studebaker and the 1967 prototype.

Our 1967 Studebaker prototype proposal is in front of the Marcks, Hazelqist, and Powers office in Dearborn, Michigan, along with drawings for future ’70 proposals. Marcks, Hazelqist, and Powers had a 1967 Studebaker prototype designed, and close to production. The last production car came off the line in March 1966, which was about the time this photo was taken. The Studebakers were necessarily tame because they were to be, at best, major facelifts of a pedestrian body of the period.

Studebaker never built a sedan which was based on the beautiful 1953 coupe. I was a designer there then and since then I have thought that they should have built such a sedan.  Here is my scale line drawing of Starliner based sedan. This drawing was sent to Brazil along with several others which were developed into a 1/15th scale model.

When I had my own firm we designed (sadly) the last (1966) Studebaker, but were working on future possible Studebakers. In this case we were trying to work with an existing platform which included the windshield and doors, etc. That was a problem.

We actually created a more restrained version (we didn’t modify the roof) of this Lincoln with the filigree work  as our company car. In Los Angeles it really did get favorable attention and envy from all the auto exhibitionists and even the hippies gave it a thumbs up. If anyone asked we told the the trim was silver from Tasco, Mexico. That illustration is in color and beautiful, by one of the staff guys.

I was a designer for Ford in 1953, and 1956-1961. Here are two of my Ford proposals, one is of a series for the 1964 Ford ’64 Galaxie, which I also designed. Another of my sketches provided the major inspiration for the ’64 T-Bird. The two Ford drawings I’m proud of because they were part of a series that became the ’64 Ford Galaxie, two years after I left Ford. You can see the beginnings of the rear quarter in one of the drawings. Regrettably, I don’t have the final Galaxie drawing.

Ford leaked this photo of a Thunderbird rendering to a magazine as a preview teaser (from fall 1963 Motorcade) for the ’64 T-Bird. As I recall, it was originally as a metallic red.  I had left Ford in 1961 so it was very unusual for them to use a design that was from someone who had left. Ford had a total staff of 1,000 in the styling building, this just for designers, modelers, support, and a skeleton crew of engineers. The engineering department itself was somewhere else.

This is an Imperial proposal I did later when I was employed by Chrysler.

Here’s the Turbine Car as it turned out. It started life as the Chrysler LeBaron. I changed the whole front end, and refined some of the other elements in the rear quarter and back. The grille texture and  “waterfall”  was similar to the ’76 Imperial, to keep a Chrysler look. I didn’t know if there was a “right’ shape for a turbine engine grille, but I figured it ought to be different so I made it narrow. I like  the center photo because it shows off the execution to best advantage. I supervised it “off-site” with non-union help on the modeling, so I could get involved myself. Unknown to me, the car was selected to be inspiration for the 1980 Imperial (If they liked it so much, how come I wasn’t invited to participate??). I thought the ’80 could have been a lot better, a little crown in the surfaces would have helped for openers.

1977 Turbine Car sketch and photo of it when it was being designed in clay.

The ad campaign for the Chrysler Cordoba, with Ricardo Montalban’s praise for its “fine Corinthian leather,” contributed greatly to its success (the company worried that the car was too small to be a Chrysler!) and it has been called “one of the five best automotive campaigns of all time.” At the time, in 1977, I was a Chrysler designer who had recently moved to Chrysler from California, where I had lived on the beach, at Sunset Boulevard and PCH-1 (Pacific Coast Highway One). So I was familiar with what the affluent residents of Malibu and Beverly Hills drove. With that in mind, I customized a Cordoba for Ricardo Montalban with the objective of making it a car he could really drive with pride in that elite environment.

I studied the classics of the ’30s and ’40s. I settled on an Art Deco-style black and silver motif, that is carried throughout. Gold accents turn up in the pin-striping, hood ornament and tire stripe. I designed custom seats that were trimmed in extremely soft Silver (belly) leather. The carpet is black mouton. The fake woodgrain trim was replaced with silver leather and brushed silver inserts on the instrument panel. I added a Maserati air horn—the “right” sound for Sunset and Wilshire Boulevard traffic. It had a remote starter that died early on. It has wire wheels and Vogue tires, found on classic cars of long ago, and half the Eldorados in Beverly Hills. After appearing at the Detroit and Chicago Auto Shows, it was sent to Ricardo Montalban for his use.

Shortly thereafter, I received a four page hand written letter from Ricardo in which he said, “My reaction to the prototype Cordoba is…I’m in love with it!  It is, without a doubt, the handsomest car I’ve ever had. All my friends, parking boys, gas attendants, express their admiration. It is truly unique.” And the letter winds up with, “I congratulate you on the marvelous job you did on the car and please consider me your devoted fan (a little role reversal there!).”

It was his until the Cordoba model change two years later. At that point I acquired it for just $5,000, as my personalized dream car. It is now in the Chrysler museum in Auburn Hills, Michigan.