This is a post for gearheads. And Corvette enthusiasts.

I had a 1965 Corvette Coupe follow me home in March, 2010. A shiny red disaster. It’s not like I don’t have enough to do or was looking for a project car. But this victim of 45 years of abuse adopted me. No, really. Once home, I had lengthy debate with myself about whether or not it had to be taken apart. I lost.

Example. There was the front. No headlights. No headlight inner structure. The top front brace was cut up. The inner fenders were messed up. And to top it off, there was 1/2-inch of fiberglass resin in the fillets where form used to be. So I don’t know if the front had be wrecked or what, but it was really butchered. After I finally got it off, there was evidence that it has been off the car before. Maybe more than once. And the firewall was damaged from previous repairs.

So far there is nothing I’ve taken off that hasn’t been removed before.

On the plus side of the ledger, the frame looks straight and rust free. And it has a 4-bolt main 350 date coded November, 1971. I did find the VIN number on the frame, and it does match the number on the VIN tag. Good things. But it’s not a “numbers matching” car. The fact that the car is so messed up is an advantage. I can’t feel guilty about not keeping it original—it’s not going to end up being a “hose clamp car.” That said, I want the body to look stock. Mid-years were my favorite Corvettes, probably because I was a teenager when they came out, and probably because I used to see them in combat with Cobras at the Riverside International Raceway.

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Happiness is…

from Sports Cars Graphic, August, 1965

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This is an interesting comment I ran across recently about number matching Corvettes: GM did not imagine in their wildest dreams that matching numbers would be so important 40 or 50 years down the road. Say, for instance, engine parts. These parts came in from other manufactures and different GM locations by the thousands. The installers would start using them from the top of the pile and before they got to the bottom of that pile of parts another load came in and got mixed in with the first load and so on. Also, let’s imagine a engine was being assembled, or taped, and a drill and a tap or bolt broke off in the block. The engine was sent to the repair shop that had one employee per shift working in it to repair these problems. The person that told me this was a GM employee that repaired these mistakes and said they were backed up 90 days. When GM got to the end of the year, and they had a thousand carbs left over from 1964, do you think they threw them away or even changed their date codes? No, they put them on the next year’s cars or they went to the parts department and sold or installed as needed. All GM parts have a GM part number on it. That is the important thing. NCRS made the date codes important. Keep in mind most of the Corvettes fresh off the assembly line would not get 70 points if be judged today. There were a lot of variables when these cars were built and many of them outside NCRS’ square.

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Click on the photo to the left to open an Acrobat (.pdf) file of an interview with Bob Gurr scanned from Collectable Automobile, October, 1998. It’s great reading and offers a candid appraisal of what it was like working as a designer for Ford in the early ’50s under George Walker. Read about his great experiences at Disney. If you missed it, go through the illustrations in a previous post of Bob’s book, Automobile Design, published by Post Publications in 1955. Thanks to Geoff Hacker of Forgotten Fiberglass.

A few of the images from the Bob Gurr’s Collectable Automobile interview.

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Student work at Art Center School in the early ’50s.

This was a proposal for the 1956 Lincoln Continental created while working under George Walker.
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Stan Mott kept us going with his outrageous cartoons and great artwork. I’m appreciative of being able to post some of his artwork on Dean’s Garage from time to time. So that we don’t take life too seriously.

From Dark Roasted Blend:

It’s hard to summarize Stan Mott’s interests in a few words. The man is brilliant and has done some really amazing things like ride a go-cart around the world!! Here is an info that appeared in the Road & Track magazine, June 1979:
“It’s impossible to type the zany, crazy Mott (who lives on a yacht—sometimes), one of our readers’ favorite cartoonists/writers and co-founder of Automobili Cyclops, the firm that rocketed to fame in its first appearance in R&T in 1957. When we asked Stan to tell us about his life, he said,

“Well, I escaped Flint, Michigan at an early age, owned 50-percent interest in a Cragar flathead A-bone roadster at 12, ran at El Mirage at 15, had first automotive cartoons published in Rosetta Timing Association’s program in 1948. Went to Art Center College, developed sense of humor working in World’s Greatest Rolling Clown Show (GM Styling Section). Then worked as fry cook, mercenary, airline pilot, art director of R&T, farmer, Wall Street broker, poet. Drove go kart around the world, became an Alpine guide, did freelance art work and smuggled. Helped found Automobili Cyclops SpA and hold position of propaganda minister in perpetuity. Now working philantropically to solve moral situations in Southern Mediterranian waters for the U.N.”

Stan refuses to talk about his CIA work, arctic exploration or his stint as a human cannon ball.”

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Modern Mechanics by Stan Mott. Published in Road & Track, January, 1987. Posted here by permission.

Gallery Instructions: Start at the first image in the gallery to view the cartoon in order.

R. Henry Gurr’s book played an important role in my interest in car design. After seeing GM’s show car display in the infield at a USRRC road race at the Riverside International Raceway in 1964 (which included the Monza GT), I had a letter on its way to GM Design Staff the next morning inquiring about how to become a car designer. GM’s response included photos of several of the cars I mentioned seeing, a list of schools I might consider, and a recommendation to purchase the book, Automobile Design by Henry Gurr. I ordered the book and still have it.

R.H. Gurr had quite a career with Disney after leaving Ford. There is a great interview with Bob Gurr at the Walt Disney Imagineering Fan Club site, and a candid biography at the LaughingPlace which connects Disney fans throughout the world. You’ll really enjoy reading Bob’s the interview and biography.

In Automobile Design are illustrations and renderings by Henry Gurr, Ron Hill, Stan Parker, Bob Caderet, and others. There are several great examples of bold pencil renderings, sports cars in action illustrations, and Prismacolor pencil on Canson.

Be sure to check out the comments for more information and images!

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Back cover copy:
Automobile Design, Subtitle: The Complete Styling Book

Published in 1955 by Dan R. Post Publications, Arcadia, California

Text and Illustrations by R. H. Gurr

Here is the book to open new fields of thought and action for anyone interested in the design and styling of car.

Whether used a the handbook for comprehensive drawing and design instruction, for gaining a qualified background of manufacturers’ view and professional design approach and technique in preparation for automobile styling as a career, for reference to it gold mine of fascinating illustrations in the development of a single glass fiber or steel-bodied custom car, or only to elect from it beautiful renderings suitable for framing Automobile Design is the kind of book you’ll not only enjoy but will be proud to share with friends.
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Alumni: Email photos from your time and experience at Art Center or any other design school for a future post!

Style Conscious: The Art Center College of Design at 70

by Chris Poole

Source: Collectible Automobile magazine, August 2000, courtesy of Forgotten Fiberglass

Subtitle: America’s premier design school remains the world’s most renowned, alma mater to more star auto designers than any other single institution. Here’s a look at the unique college where design is both art and science-and dreaming is always part of the curriculum.

It’s true what they say: Experience is usually the best teacher, and practice tends to make one proficient. For 70 years, there’s been no better place for would-be car designers to get healthy helpings of experience and practice than the Art Center College of Design (ACCD) in Pasadena, California.

There’s certainly no better school for an aspiring designer to have on a resume. It’s estimated that Art Center graduates account for at least 50 percent of all the designers who’ve ever worked in Detroit and there have been dozens more at companies from Audi to Volvo. Is it any wonder, then, that Art Center alumni have popped up so often in Collectible Automobile—personality profiles over the years?

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In 1946, Art Center SchooI, as it was then named, moved from its or original First Street campus in downtown Los Angeles to this large, rather palatial-looking facility on Third Street to accommodate a burgeoning postwar student body. It would remain the School’s home until 1975.

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Not that this is a mere vocational school where students doodle nothing but cars. The college currently offers bachelor’s and/or masters programs in 10 areas of study besides transportation design. These comprise advertising, art theory and criticism, film, fine art (painting), graphic design, environmental (interior) design, illustration, digital “new media,” photography, and product design. There’s also a special “track” in entertainment design (special effects and characters, theme parks, toys, games, etc.), no surprise for a school in the literal shadow of Hollywood.

Still, it’s the glamorous “Trans Design” program that continues to give Art Center much of its high public visibility and a formidable reputation that has automakers scrambling over each other to hire its graduates year after year. Of course, the graduates themselves have had much to do with that, and their achievements testify as much to the quality of their education as to their personal abilities and talent.

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George Jergenson (left) was co-founder of the Industrial Design Department and its chairman through 1969. He was also an active instructor, as seen in this early-Fifties photo.

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Delve into the styling background of most any postwar U.S. car-and quite a few foreign models too—and you’re likely to find an Art Center alumnus (or, increasingly, an alumna). Among those familiar to CA readers: the late Henry Haga of General Motors fame, class of ’53; Wayne Kady, a 1961 graduate and one-time design domo at Cadillac; Jack Telnack (CA, June 1998), the former head of Ford North American design, a 1958 alum; and former Volvo chief designer Jan Wilsgaard, class of ’66. Among the younger generation are Chris Bangle, current design chief at BMW in Munich; Wayne Cherry, now design vice president for GM; his Ford counterpart, J. Mays; Mazda executive design vice president Tom Matano, a major force behind the Miata; and Freeman Thomas, a onetime Mays colleague at VW/Audi who now heads advanced design for DaimlerChrysler. In addition, ACCD graduates are found in the wider motor industry at companies like Winnebago and American Sunroof. They also work at various general design firms, and are heavily represented in the advertising and entertainment fields.
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Sports Car Design Realized

Road & Track’s Le Mans Sports Car Design, as built by a small group of enthusiasts

By Strother MacMinn

This article was first published in Road & Track magazine, August, 1960. It is interesting to me how a styling exercise can turn into a major project with so little to really go on as to the odds of success, either as a competition car or a design that could be successful in the marketplace. There were so many unknowns and uncertainties. But that is the charm of that era, that people were caught up in their dream and willing to invest their money, time, and talent. Those days are long gone.

Illustration from Stother MacMinn’s book, Sports Cars of the Future.

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When John Bond, publisher of Road & Track. began to visualize an ideal American car to compete at Le Mans, he based his hypothesis on the idea that possibly someone of limited means but immense ambition would build it. Under the title of Sports Car Design and as No. 39 in that series, the description commenced in November 1957, and ran through the January, February, and April issues of 1958, with a complete analysis of structure, detail, accommodation, and body form, all carefully coordinated toward creating a serious contender for the famed 24-hour race. Chassis components were all derived from available manufactured items, with the exception of the frame itself, and this custom-fabricated item was kept as simple and inexpensive as possible, being merely two parallel box-section rails.

A number of people wrote, expressing definite interest in attempting the project, and the series of articles actually did trigger three dedicated Southern California enthusiasts into action. Marvin Hortan, an electronics technician for a ram-jet manufacturing corporation, father of three, and a solidly qualified amateur sports car engineer, had long had dreams of an ideal sports competition car that was far from anything offered by current manufacturers. Although his chassis concept differed somewhat from Bond’s, he felt that the general body envelope suited his purpose very well, an opinion shared by friend and electronics co-worker Ed Monegan, whose long experience in high-speed boat building was to provide invaluable. Using the published body drawings as a rough basis, they completed a full-size lines loft in June of 1958 and began a wood frame for the male body plug, which was three-quarters complete in August, when they contacted the author. A clay model that had been used as a basis for the design was transferred to Horton’s Pacoima home where the work was being done. In consideration of the high-speed runs to be attempted with the car, Hortan decided to raise progressively the rear of the body, beginning amidships, in order to cancel more of the top surface negative pressure behind the cab, and add more in the underpan area. This change, accomplished in the wood frame stage, resulted in an upswept “platform line” crease on the body’s side, but provided a more efficient tail conformation.
Clay, as a mold plug medium, was prohibitively expensive, so plaster was used to fill in the frame. It took several months to refine the surfaces and general shape with a grinder, primer, putty, and endless hours of patient work.

About February of 1959, Alton Johnson, another enthusiast with real and individual ambitions and extensive fiberglass experience with the Victress Manufacturing Company, had nearly completed a chassis of his own, with dimensions coincidentally close to the original Bond idea. He contacted Horton, and it was agreed that for his help in finishing the body plug and mold he would receive the first shell.
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Dean’s Garage receives many interesting photos from readers—snapshots from another time and era. Not enough content on any one subject for a single post, but important enough to be posted. Many thanks to those who email me and to those who contribute photos and other content.

This post contains a gallery with photos from Steve Sicklick, whose dad owned Dorwin Chevrolet in East Harford, Connecticut from 1955 through 1982. Brad King sent photos of his Dad, Maury King, who was a designer for Ford in the ’50s and ’60s and worked on the 1956 Thunderbird facelift. Brian Jackson contributed photos of several interesting Buicks from the ’70s and ’80s.

Also included in the gallery are photos of Mark Donohue by Mike Parris and myself. And a photo taken in November, 2009 of Molly Sanders who died in April. Molly played an important part of the development of several Buick promotional cars including the Buick Grand National.

SpeedReaders presents authoritative reviews of transportation books and media. Reviewers include Sabu Advani, Frank Barrett, Kevin Clemens, Helen Hutchings, and David M. Woodhouse. The reviews are candid, well written, informative—a very useful reference for the historian and enthusiast alike. There are so many great book reviews on SpeedReaders that it was very difficult deciding on a few excerpts to include in this post.

Categories include: Adventure, travel, Art, Artists and Design, Automobiles, Aviation, Award Winner, Biography/ Autobiography, Construction, Earthmoving and Heavy Equipment, DVD, video, Fiction, Garage and tools, History, Maritime, Motorcycles, Multilingual and/or Published in a Language other than English, Out of Print, Racing, Rally, Technology, Trains, Trucks and Buses, and Youth and Young Adult.

Plan on spending a some time at SpeedReaders!

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Of Firebirds and Moonmen

by Norman J. James

If you were a newly-minted designer in the 1950s, the place you would want to go to work would be General Motors. Legendary Harley Earl ran his design division as his own private fiefdom, and his Knight’s Errant were his designers. Assuming you were lucky and talented enough to become a part of Earl’s design staff, what could be better than to be chosen to create a gas turbine-powered concept car for the General Motors Motorama? That was the position Norman James found himself in when the 25 year-old designer was put in charge of the Firebird III project in 1957. More…

Download the Acrobat index of Of Firebirds and Moonmen.

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Century of Automotive Style

by Michael Lamm and Dave Holls

(I have a copy of this book signed by Dave Holls. It is a treasure and a serious resource—Gary). On the chance that this is the first you’ve known about this book—that it’s all brand new news to you—you may not be familiar with the co-authors. Dave Holls was a professional designer, employed his entire 39-year career at General Motors. At the time of his retirement, he had risen to the number two man at GM Design with the official title Director of Design. But more than merely a working designer, Holls was a life-long student of design, maintaining voluminous personal files and photos on design and design history. Mike Lamm, co-founder and first editor of Special Interest Autos, is the author of many books. He is known and respected for his carefully researched and very readable prose. Together Lamm and Holls covered in detail, that amazed even the most knowledgeable, the story and history of the automobile in America in their seminal work A Century of Automotive Style; 100 Years of American Car Design. More…

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Sports Cars of the Future

by Strother MacMinn

(Dean’s Garage featured a post on this book.) First impression is this is a modest little book (especially if comparing it to some of the multi-pound coffee table picture books). But once read, especially if reading now in the 21st century, it is virtually impossible to forget. It is more than what is printed on the pages of Sports Cars of the Future. It is the realization of when it was written—in the latter part of the 1950s—and by whom, that simply stuns the thinking reader today.

The prescience of MacMinn’s writings is startling. Ostensibly the book is about sports cars. But the cars, those real as well as those he hypothesizes for the future, are the ones that are today, a half century later, the most revered. Thus it is the principles beyond the specific, individual cars that form the overriding value of the book; design and engineering concepts that have been proven timeless due in part to the respect they demonstrate for the unchanging realities of nature’s laws. More…

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Porsche Rennsport: The Definitive Photographic Record of the Racing Sports Cars of Porsche 1949–2004

by Jeffrey R Zwart

This is one of those books that will make you break out in a sweat—hot, cold, who cares—but you absolutely must have dry hands to handle this book so as to avoid getting sticky fingerprints all over the glossy pages. If you have an excitable bone in your body, if you are even a little bit of a visual person, the photos in this book are eyeball-warping sensory overload. From their sheer size (open the book is 30″ wide) to their sharpness, the photos are so in-your-face you’ll end up wanting to hold the book at arm’s length. So there. More…

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Ford in the Service of America: Mass Production for the Military during the World Wars

by Timothy J. O’Callaghan

World War Two now lies approximately two-thirds of a century in the past. It must be incomprehensible to those not alive then, that there was a time when virtually all the resources of our domestic life were directed towards a single goal; victory over clearly identified enemies.

Preparedness for the eventual conflict began slowly in 1940. There was fear even before Pearl Harbor of a German air attack from hidden bases in countries south of the US and from enemy planes operating from aircraft carriers off the coastlines. Even though Henry Ford was anti-war (after all, there were Ford plants and facilities in England, Germany, and seven other European countries under Hitler’s control), he became fully engaged in rearming for national defense. The story of the Ford Motor Company’s contributions to the war effort 1940-45 is the theme of Ford in the Service of America. More…

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Hot Rods and Custom Cars, Los Angeles and the Dry Lakes: The Early Years

by Ken Gross and Robert Ames featuring period photos by Strother MacMinn

I like this book despite a few oversights, errors, and uncorrected typos And while I’m not all that knowledgeable about the dry lakes, to me those pages look very much like a black-and-white Tom Fritz treatise. (For readers who do not recognize the names of either Fritz or reviewer Lord—both are accomplished fine artists and members of AFAS, the Automotive Fine Arts Society. Much of Fritz’s art shows iconic dry lake and hot rod scenes, while the subjects of Lord’s work are more open wheel race-oriented.) I reacted to the images esthetically rather than to what was hot rodded or run at the dry lakes. There are some great machines—hot rods, customs and dry lakes runners which include many with those wonderful belly tank bodies—that were thankfully recorded for us to see today because Strother MacMinn was exploring in and around the LA area during the 40s and 50s, composing beautiful shots. More…

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The Art of Dexter Brown

by Robert Edwards

Brown’s renditions of speed and noise and light are not just those of an observant spectator but are informed by his own experience running a heavily modified, cobbled-together Jaguar XK120 in sprints and hill-climbs. In Brown’s signature racing scenes not just the speeding car but the entire canvas is disjointed—foreground, background, everything—as if all the molecules that hold the universe together have become unhinged by the assault of a ferocious racecar ripping the fabric of time. (Just like Pointillism might tempt a viewer to grumble “Anyone could do that!” try doing Brown’s sparse, purposeful style yourself and realize that using “fewer strokes” makes it harder, not easier.)

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The Alphabet and The Automobile

by Murray L. Smith. Illustrations by Charles W. Queener

Queener’s brush strokes do more than merely put watercolor to paper—they sing, they talk—and others recognize this too for his paintings hang in some pretty prestigious collections. He’s well steeped in all-things automotive having raced for a short time, and instructed others to drive competitively as a Jim Russell Racing School instructor. Before moving east, as he describes it, he “got involved with the Ferrari Owner’s Club and this evolved into my founding Cavallino”. Plus he’s held staff positions at publications like Road & Track, Motor Trend, and Ski. There’s more, but you get the idea. More…

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Zany Afternoons

by Bruce McCall

(I have this book and never tire looking though it—Gary). McCall’s 1982 book, Zany Afternoons, presents a collection of brief articles about an imaginary society from the 1920s to the 1950s, often populated by uber-wealthy and spoiled sophisticates who enjoyed such diversions as autogiro jousts, wing dining, zeppelin shoots (“they fell so much more gracefully than grouse”), and tank polo. You’ll learn about such delightful spoof devices as the RMS Tyrannic and the 1934 Airdreme Nabob V-16 Sleekster. The “Somewhere East of Laramie” automotive ad parodies are as accurate as they are funny, matched by the 1958 Bulgemobile sales brochure (think bejeweled Buicks on heavy doses of steroids). Text appears in the form of fanciful captions describing the action in McCall’s amazingly-detailed, large-format paintings, which perfectly capture the ambience of both subject and period. More…

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Porsche 917 – The Heroes, the Victories, the Myth


by Thomas Födisch, Jost Neßhöver, Rainer Roßbach, Harold Schwarz

(German/English side by side) This is an expanded second edition of a book first published in 2006. That edition had won quick acclaim and sold out just as quick. What distinguishes this large-format book from the many others on this model is its approach. While the car and its history are described in all pertinent detail, it is first and foremost an appraisal, or, better, an appreciation of the car, written by the very people who knew it best, warts and all—the engineers and drivers. Where other books reduce such commentary to excerpts and pithy one-liners, often all the more pithy by being stripped of their context, here you have pages-long insights from the primary sources in a first-person voice. Another unique dimension of this book is that it is published by German photojournalist Reinhard Klein’s company, which means it takes its photography seriously. The first edition already contained previously unseen photos; here there are more still! Expanded by three chapters/24 pages the book now adds the reminiscences of Vic Elford and David Piper on the driving side and Helmut Flegl, Norbert Singer, and Herbert Linge on the engineering/management side. Not everyone experienced the car the same way and by encircling its subject in this manner there is naturally some overlap and also some discrepancy in these accounts. More…

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Avanti: The Complete Story


by John Hull

There have been a number of books that have attempted to chronicle the history and lineage of the Avanti. But until now few have given accurate or chronological details. Some on my bookshelf are merely pages and pages of already published magazine articles, while others simply gloss over the highlights and report nothing news.

Hull does mention that the title of his book is a bit presumptuous, as a truly complete history could take up multiple volumes. Within the 128-page limitation of this book, he presents an accurate overview of the “evolution of this incredible automobile and the cast of owners, characters, and fanatics it has attracted.” The eight chapters trace the car’s history beginning with Sherwood Egbert and Raymond Loewy’s first conversations and rough sketches. Anecdotes that only an Avanti insider would have known are told, and rarely seen original promotional photographs and factory advertisements are included. More…

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The Cobra-Ferrari Wars, 1963-1965, Second Edition


by Michael L Shoen

First published twenty-five years after the “war”, Michael Shoen’s account, is still considered the definitive work on what is one of America’s greatest motorsports accomplishments of the sixties.

This book takes us to all events, large and small, and tells us what we missed. Happily, in both words and pictures, it also tells us about Ferrari’s most successful racing GT, the glorious GTO and the men who drove it, factory racers and privateers who raced well and yet still lost to the Cobras.

The Cobra-Ferrari Wars is reflective, in many ways, of the cars it celebrates. It is Ferrari, elegant and thoroughly European, in its pictures and the settings they depict. It is more Cobra, rough hewn and determined, in its story and candid shots. The pictures are wonderful; several are gorgeous. Justifiably so, as many were taken by the famed photographer, Bernard Cahier. More…

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