by Michael Lamm and Dave Holls

This 100-year history explains why cars looked, and look, the way they do, who designed what, and why. The original hardcover book was voted “must have” by major enthusiast magazines in the U.S. and Europe. The book also won the Society of Automotive Historians’ prestigious Cugnot Award.

The book is now out of print, but you can enjoy the DVD as one of the world’s best automotive reads and then keep it in your library for handy long term reference. The DVD contains the original book in its entirety: 308 pages, more than 900 photos, complete text, captions, sidebars and index. Nothing’s left out. The disc is fully searchable and very easy to use. The DVD remains the “book” of choice for everyone interested or involved in the history of car design.

To order a copy of the DVD, contact Michael Lamm.

Excerpt from the book.

This short selection from the beginning of the book defines the origins of a few of the body design terms studios use in creating surfaces.

It all goes back to shipbuilding

It’s no big secret that a lot of early motorcars took their body design from carriages. But it’s less obvious that carriage design evolved from shipbuilding. As with so many other arts and crafts, it all began with the Greeks.

In the 19th century, archeologists discovered mysterious lines scribed on the floors of Roman temples. What did these odd lines mean? The scholars discovered that they were the outlines of huge Roman ships, drawn in plan view (plan view means “as seen from directly above”). The smooth temple floors made an ideal surface to loft a ship’s hull full size.

The Greeks, Norsemen, Southeast Islanders and even some tribes of American Indians used a variation of this same idea.They would draw a full-sized hull outline on a sandy beach, plant sticks around the perimeter, and then connect the sticks with thongs. Finally they’d string more thongs diagonally across the hull to indicate the ship’s ribbing.The resulting “blueprint,” crude as it was, be-came the working drawing for a trireme, a packet or a war canoe.

These techniques worked well enough for the ancients, but as ships grew larger and more complicated, the blueprints had to be refined. For one thing, a simple plan view drawing gave the shipwright only a two dimensional, incomplete map to work from. What he really needed was a set of plans that showed in a way that workmen could read and follow.

So in the 1600s, European ship designers came up with a system for representing all three dimensions on a flat sheet of paper. This system involved basic geometry. Automobile stylists still use it today to map out autobody surfaces, but they now let computers do the mathematical calculations.

Once a ship’s designer had the ability to indicate to the carpenter or ship-wright exactly how the finished hull ought to be constructed, style started to enter the picture. Ships evolved from the tall, ungainly craft that sailed the ocean blue in 1492 to the sleek clipper ships of the mid-1800s. Amazingly, in that transformation, the fundamentals of ship-building didn’t change. What did change was that the ship designer-call him “stylist”-could and did get involved in the building process.

It’s easy enough to see that the design system that evolved for ships’ hulls carried over first into carriage building and then into auto body design. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the first step in designing a ship’s hull meant carving a scale “half model” from wood. A common scale was one inch to four feet, or 1/48. And the half model was exactly what it sounds like: not a representation of the entire hull but just half of it, split vertically down the middle and flat from the keel line up. This half-hull model was usually carved from a stack of planks, or layers. The planks fit tightly together, one atop the other, and they were held in place with tapered pegs that fit into vertical holes. The model did not have masts or sails.

In the shipyard loft, the “loftsman”—the person in charge of scaling up the half-hull model—would first draw out the lines of each hull section and then, from those drafts, make full-sized templates, or “molds.” The ship’s carpenters and craftsmen in the shop below then used these templates to cut and size the wooden beams that formed the ship’s main framework. By using the same templates first on one side of the hull and then the other, the two halves of the finished framing came together as mirror images.

Now it’s important to recognize that any mistake the hull designer or the master builder might have made in his original scale model got magnified, often by a factor of 48 or more, when that model was lofted full size. And since any scale model always did contain surface flaws, it was up to the loftsman to “fair” the full-sized representations. Fairing meant, first and foremost, making an ungainly or flawed design efficient as it moved through the water. Fairing meant smoothing the surface, sculpting the lines, reshaping, streamlining the hull, because a smooth, streamlined hull made the ship go faster, and speed meant money. Speed made the ship more profitable. So profit became the main motive for fairing a hull.

But fairing also had an aesthetic component. The art of fairing meant that the loftsman had the authority to change the full-scale drawings and templates so the lines looked “right;” so that the hull had what was generally accepted as a “proper” shape. The hull should look pleasing; it should look graceful and “fair,” as in “a fair young maid.” A good loftsman had an eye for fairing, and his aesthetic sense was as critical to the design process as his ability to make the hull efficient. Fairing, then, became the act of combining efficiency with beauty.

In the scaling-up process, the loftsman had the authority to “fair” or smooth outany irregularities in the hull shape, both in terms of fluid dynamics and aesthetics. He thus became the final arbiter of the ship hull’s styling.

Unlike ships’ hulls, the designing of carriages was almost never preceded by a scale model. It’s possible that a few carriage makers did use models, perhaps made of wood or sculptors’ clay, to help customers visualize what they were buying. But models weren’t common in carriage design, even in Europe. Rather, what carriage builders did was to first make detailed sketches, usually 1/10 or 1/12 scale, and the loft those sketches full-size on big, upright wooden panels.

To save space, the technique of lofting a carriage involved drawing a side view and then also superimposing half of a plan view on top of it. Both views were crammed onto the same board, and the drawings were kept separate and readable by being done in different colors. Offsets were called out on separate sheets of paper, and sometimes templates were made for the carriage body, but mostly not. This same technique evolved into the design and construction of automobile bodies and was used well into the 1980s.

A few photos and captions from the book.

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Reviews

SpeedReaders
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…

The Firebird III at the Mesa Proving Grounds.

Motorama Production filming

by Norm James from his book, Of Firebirds and Moonmen

Arriving in Phoenix, I was picked up at the airport by a Firebird team member. On the way to the proving grounds, I heard that the Firebird III was down, and in the shop. Apparently, they were having problems with a small gear in the turbine accessories power train. A gas turbine depends on the natural flow of incoming air to keep cool. This is no problem as long as it is running, however, when it shuts down, it enters a soak period when heat from engine hot spots migrates into adjacent engine parts. What was happening was that this particular gear would heat up above its operating limit, and if they restarted the engine before it cooled down, it would break and have to be replaced. With the engine buried in the center of the vehicle, this turned out to be a five or six-hour job. They had extra gears but they found it more expedient to just keep the engine running, or if they had to shut down, allow it to cool completely before restarting.

Even with this problem, they were okay on their schedule to start shooting the action shots for the Motorama film. They brought in a Hollywood camera truck, which, in addition to the truck bed, had shooting platforms hanging off both bumpers and on top of the cab. Harry Wolfe, the cinematographer, would be behind the 35mm Mitchell camera and Hal Moore would be seated right behind him, when the action started. Any spaces left on the truck were fair game for anyone.

The circular track provided the setting for the opening shot. The camera truck drove on the inside lane, with the camera looking back to see the Firebird I, in the same lane. Panning slowly outward, it would find the Firebird II in the next lane then continuing the pan, pick up the Firebird III in the top outside lane, all while zooming and framing to keep all three cars in that same view.

With the main shot secured, they continued filming over the next several days, taking breaks where they had to reconfigure the car or setup for special shots. One such break was when they needed a camera shot, looking down into both canopies from above and behind. The canopies had special aluminized coatings applied to protect the interior against the sun. Since the reflective coating would have defeated that high-camera view, we also had two canopies made, without coatings, strictly for this one particular shot. Emmett Conklin, the Research Staff engineer who was doing all the driving, said afterward that for the first time, the heat from the Arizona sun was almost unbearable. The Firebird III had a high capacity air-conditioning system that served it well, but only now did we realize how important a function the aluminized coatings had been performing. I felt vindicated, first for going to the trouble of aluminizing the canopies, but most of all, for staying with the short (backward) blisters, instead of changing to the longer teardrops. That would have doubled the heat load on the air-conditioning system. Perhaps it was that intuition that said the teardrop did not look right.

Several times, during the shooting, they had to stop to attend to some mechanical problem with the car. They would pull the car in, under a tent, to shield it from the sun, then open up anything that had a hinge to cool it off. Large fans were set up to blow into the engine compartment while they made their fixes, hoping there would be enough light left to get another action shot. One evening, the shooting ended at dusk, and with its lights on, some of the best photographs were taken. Afterward, we—the lucky ones—could go back to the motel and wash up before a nice night out on the town, while our counterparts at Research Staff had to hunker down and work through the night to be sure the car was ready in the morning.

Our motel, the Sands, was very new and quite modern by the day’s standards. It was the first time I had been in Arizona, and it was like nothing I had ever seen before. The days were hot, some ten to fifteen degrees hotter than anything I was used to, but it was dry and surprisingly bearable—I loved it. The Firebird team was provided with half dozen or so Pontiac convertibles that we divvied up, I, pooling with Stefan [Habsburg] and Bob McLean. We drove around by day under clear skies and a burning sun with the top up, and the air-conditioning going full blast. Almost every evening, huge thunderclouds would build up, and we would have horrendous lightning storms, followed by flash flooding through the downtown streets. The rains cooled everything down for a balmy top-down Detroit-like evening. Then, almost as suddenly, the clouds would break up in time to see a gorgeous sunset.

We would usually look for a nice steak house to have dinner and discuss the events of the day. Afterward, some of the team found relaxation swimming in the motel pool at two in the morning under the pleasant balmy sky; definitely, this was not Detroit. In the morning, after a nice breakfast, we drove back to the proving grounds, eager to see how the night crew had performed. We always found the “bird” ready. We couldn’t help thinking about the coming Saturday. Hopefully, the filming would be behind us and we would be ready for the press conference, wondering if the car would be okay, hoping that some other small mechanical problem would not ruin our day.

Emmett Conklin was Supervisor of Testing for the Firebird program and drove the Firebird III for all the action footage and Mauri Rose was the man in the second seat, mostly for face recognition, as a three-time Indianapolis five-hundred winner, but also as the GM staff engineer that he was. There had been a lot of earlier press footage of him as the driver of the high-speed Firebird I that truly was his forte. Harley Earl appeared toward the end of the week, as did Lawrence Hafstad, VP of Research Staff; and they were both given rides around the track. Our spirits were up because we had completed all of our Motorama footage and all that remained were shots of opportunity—formal and informal—of the team members and the bird. My best shot of the week was of Chuck Ternes, the photographer, about to take the (now classic) photo of Harley Earl and the three Firebirds.

The press arrived early Saturday morning. All of us were hesitant but feeling better because of the good day we had Friday. The Firebird III was shown to the press, first as a static display, then with all of its hoods, decks and doors open so they could get a good view of all the stuffings, more than had ever been done for a Motorama show car before (or concept car since). The engine was then started, and it began a continuous series of rides for VIPs and the media. By noon, the press conference was over, and it was an unqualified success; the car performed flawlessly and we were all ecstatic. Now we could get our own personal photos, posing with the birds. This time, all the big smiles were real On Sunday, after the press conference, we all had an opportunity to relax. McLean, Stefan and I took our convertible for a ride in the Arizona high country, along the Apache Trail. McLean, the westerner, filled us in on the story of the Lost Dutchman’s Mine and the treasure of gold that was supposedly buried nearby. Going up the trail, I was surprised at how the landscape slowly changed from the arid desert with the Soccoro cactus to the rich green pines of the plateaus, as we rose in altitude. It was also the first time I had been exposed to the effects of low pressure at altitude, and how peaceful and quiet it seemed.

From the high ridges and mountain trails along the plateau, we would stop at lookout points for grand views and to take pictures. I was astounded to be able to see so far, and to observe the effects of atmospheric perspective, as the haze diminished the contrast of the distant mountains.

With our task in Phoenix complete, the team began returning to Detroit. McLean and Stefan would fly back earlier and I would leave a day later. At the Motel, as others were already departing; I found myself split from my usual group, and being hungry, was surprised to find myself sitting down and sharing a pizza, one on one, with Mauri Rose. This turned out to be one of the high points of my trip. Back in Detroit, we found ourselves waiting for the press release date for the Firebird III. It happened on Sunday, September 14, and the Detroit Newsmagazine section had a full color cover and four inside pages on the design and building of the car.

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Firebird III during the Motorama production shoot

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Firebird III photos found online

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Of Firebirds & Moonmen: A Designer’s Story from the Golden Age
by Norman J James
Xlibris Corporation, 2007
217 pages, 67 photographs, 43 illustrations
List price: $21.99
ISBN: 978-1-4257-7653-4
Purchase the book through Amazon
Purchase the book through Barnes & Noble

Links:
Download the Acrobat index of Of Firebirds and Moonmen
Firebird III brochure on Dean’s Garage
SpeedReaders book review
About the Author from Xlibris
Description of the book from Xlibris

Theme sketch that started it all.

In this post there is an excerpt from the book and photos from GM Styling including design and construction. Part 2 will include another excerpt from the book and a lot of photos from the Motorama filming at the Mesa Proving Grounds in Arizona (including many candid shots by Norm James). At the end of the post are links to the Firebird III brochure, additional excerpts on the GM Heritage site, a book review by SpeedReaders, where to purchase Norm’s book, and a link to an index of the book.

Excerpt from Of Firebirds & Moonmen

“If we don’t put fins on this car, then someone else will.”

Research Studio drew the assignment for designing the Firebird III because it was under Robert F. (Bob) McLean, who also headed the design of Firebirds I & II. The studio itself was new, created when Styling moved into the new Technical Center in 1956. At that time, the studio was set up with two designers, Stefan Habsburg, a graduate of MIT who’s specialty was mechanical and systems design and myself, a graduate of Pratt Institute and the “Styling” part of the team. We also had a studio engineer, Al Aldrighetti and two clay modelers; the modelers were out on loan to other studios.

Bob McLean would have been more involved with the actual design, as he was with Firebirds I and II, however, he elected not to. He advised Stefan and me of this in a closed-door meeting, saying that from now on he would participate only as a manager. He would give us an assignment and a date for completion. Then he would accept or reject what we presented to him, stating that it would be just like in a fine restaurant; if he didn’t like the food as it was presented, he would send it back to the kitchen to have it done right. He would not go in the kitchen and cook it himself!

Activity had actually begun weeks before, except it was then only known as “a car” for the next Motorama (a year and a half hence). We did not know if it would be a running car or a fiberglass dummy, like most of the Motorama cars were. Nothing further was defined so we started searching for a theme. We converged on a small electric car, developed as a clean simple form, devoid of fins and in good taste, i.e. a potato. We went so far as to build a full size mockup that you could sit in. The mockup was constructed of plywood templates mounted on top of a low wooden platform (on castors). It was like a flying model airplane, except without a skin.

A meeting was called with Mr. Earl to review it and McLean made the presentation, identifying all of its features. Earl patiently waited for McLean to finish and then, without addressing our presentation, began adding new information on the project that had already been committed to:

The (Motorama) car would be a running vehicle representing the Corporation (rather than a Division) and that it would be the third in the Firebird series of cars—designated as the XP73

The body would be a two-seater, similar to the Club de Mer of the 1956 Motorama, except a little bigger, in order to handle all the special features

It would have an upgraded version of the Firebird II Wildfire regenerative gas turbine engine, mounted amidships

It would have a joystick controller, instead of a steering wheel, and an automatic steering system being developed by Research Staff, able to follow a wire in the roadway

It would also have an auxiliary power unit (APU). A small two cylinder 10 HP engine driving a 115 Volt AC electric generator and hydraulic pumps to run the accessories.

The novel feature was that on the show circuit, the generator could be run backwards (as a motor) on 60 cycle house current, to power all systems for show, and not have to run the APU engine indoors

Research Staff had already begun work on the chassis layout, sizing tires, wheelbase and track. We could expect to see preliminary drawings in about a week.

Mr. Earl then began describing the emotional side of the Motorama and what could be expected. He described how New Yorkers would wait in line, four deep, around the block just to get into the Waldorf Astoria to see the free auto show inside, in the Grand Ballroom. He wanted the people around the car to be so deep that they would have to stay for an extra show, just to get a better view (and also making for a more dramatic setting). The key expression he used that summarized everything was when he said, “You know, when you go to see a show in Las Vegas, you don’t expect to see your wife on the stage. You expect to see a real floozy.”

When Earl and McLean left the studio shortly afterwards, and based on his floozy comment, I looked at Stefan and said, “You know, if we don’t put fins on this car, then someone else will.”

Firebird III Styling Development

Firebird III clay model.

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Photos courtesy of GM Media Archives

Based on this thought, I made a simple sketch combining several of the other features I noted in the air show. The body had a “stove pipe” front end like the F100 fighter, only wider to span the full width of the passenger compartment. Because the front end only housed the APU, it did not need the full opening (height) of a large scoop. The Club de Mer roadster had two small windscreens for the passengers and I enlarged these to be full blisters. Behind these, and at the maximum body width, I introduced the quad fins, clocked at 45 degrees. It was a simple sketch but, in essence, it fulfilled Harley Earl’s vision.

With a general theme that seemed workable identified, I thought it was also a good time to try another idea that I had been considering for some time (a design technique). I had been concerned about the standard design routine used when starting new designs, i.e., sketching side views full size on vellum with a soft pencil. In practice, the designer would have to step back from time to time to see what the full view looked like. Necessarily he would have to erase some lines and draw new ones. My concern was that, in trying to assess what he had, erasure smudges would erroneously be contributing to the design, when they really shouldn’t be. I had thought of a technique that addressed this problem and decided this was the time to try it. I called the technique “string drawing.”

Stefan and I agreed that we would go with the quad fin sketch and try the technique. We ordered colored yarns and pushpins (which had to be purchased) and were waiting for them when we started receiving the wheelbase, tire and track data and profiles for the APU, turbine engine and trans-axle. We carefully positioned the profile templates onto our vertical boards (on gridded vellum) and added tire and our 95% Oscar templates.

With the arrival of the pins and yarns, we tied a small loop at the end of the first yarn and pined it to the board as the front of the first horizontal line. We then pulled the yarn to its end point, cut it and tied another loop…pinning that as the end point. There was enough elasticity in the yarn that we could take other pins and stretch that yarn (up or down) with enough pins to give character to the line.

The beauty of the technique was that by just observing the spacing of the pins and the rate of change in that spacing, it was possible to adjust it to a “mathematical purity” for line character. Secondarily, the eye could also judge the angle change between line segments, offering another basis for judgment. In total, this would be an aesthetic metric.

The pins also worked in another manner. Applied to the “form follows function” rule of design, say where a line approached a radiator corner, or other feature in near proximity, one could stage the pins to approach the feature in a regular mathematical progression and then on passing, flip to a retrograde reverse motion in a related regression of that sequence. It would be similar to astronomical physics, where bodies in motion are affected by the gravity of other bodies as they pass by.

String Drawing Technique with Norm James. “I heard that the string drawing technique was picked up and used for a short time in a few of the other studios, but it was quickly replaced by black 3M photo tape drawings because they had a stronger graphic impact. My personal preference remains with the yarn technique, precisely because it is more abstract and more perfectly defines lines in a present day digital [computer] sense.” Photo courtesy of GM Media Archives.

While I was staring at it, Stefan said, “What if we try something like this” and then walked up to the board and pinned a large central (dorsal) fin and lower fins extending outboard, even further aft. I was aghast…thinking, “You can’t do that! You can’t add a three element fin array behind the four fin quad array!” But, I didn’t say anything because it added the balance the design was crying for. I then went to the board and tweaked the lines a little bit. I stepped back to look at it again and thought, “This is starting to look pretty good.”

I then set up other vertical boards to develop a ½ plan, front and rear views. That was to get all the features (mostly fins) correct in all views. In the front view, I set up two passengers in a tight “sports car” like cross-section, leaving enough space to develop the quad fins within the 80-inch street legal width. …It was still looking good.

We called McLean to “Come take a look.” He had an office on the second floor of the administration building, down the hall from Earl’s office, and he said he would be right down. A few minutes later he was in our studio and appeared to be very pleased. The situation was this; when Earl described what he wanted, we began converting our original mock up to the Club de Mer roadster and we were committed to complete it. So, what McLean immediately did was authorize our building a second mockup to the new design. We would have to carry both mockups to a common level for presentation to Earl. My task would be to convert the string drawings to hard straight-line segments and then overlay a clean sheet of vellum to interpret an equivalent in hard line sweeps. I would then have to draw up all the sections as separate details and send them to the woodshop to be made for assembly (in notched egg-crate fashion).

I decided to do something else different for the mockup. As noted before, mockups were usually built up on gridded platforms. Templates were then mounted to the platform at ten-inch intervals, with the outside line following the exterior body contour and an inside “trim” line offset one inch inside (representing clearance for inside mechanical components.
What I wanted to do was to make a “space sketch” as our 3D sculpture mentor, Rowena Reed, had taught us at Pratt (to define a sculptural concept). To do this, I selected those sections that were most characteristic of the design and then shaped their inside trims to best enhance that character in those template details. The main change, however, was to get rid of the platform base. I replaced it with a deep section wood beam cruciform, mounted on four large castors. The templates would be mounted directly to that cruciform and it would lie entirely within the body profile, yielding “free (negative) space below.” The center beam almost implied a structural centerline spine (which the Firebird III ended up having). Two contoured lounge type seats were fixed tightly into the cruciform.

The drawings were completed and sent to the woodshop to have the parts made. As these parts started coming in, we had two woodworkers assigned to our studio and I had to be available to identify what the parts were and where they went, as I had made no assembly drawing. Some of the features like the nose lip and side air scoops were detailed more accurately and they were hand shaped in poplar wood and painted in a high gloss white lacquer. The intent was that these details were considered to be “dominant” design elements and I wanted the observer’s eye to “linger” on these details. The rest of the templates, after assembly, were hand painted in a flat light gray latex water-base paint. Unusual items like the blister canopies had to be represented by ½ inch wide template sections cut out of ½ inch Plexiglas sheet.

Earl and McLean then left the studio as Stefan and I celebrated. McLean returned somewhat later and told us that Earl had directed the design committee to “stay out of our studio”—the end of a perfect day.

The noteworthy design message turned out to be that following the simple sketch, the string drawing that defined it and then its conversion into a “space sketch”; the design work was “done.” The long tedious process of getting the surfaces right in clay was just a matter of working the problem until it captured the essence of the mockup, which was there every day to be seen as a frame of reference. Even as the designer, I did not feel I had the right to change the basic architecture to solve some small problem that wouldn’t go away. I found that if you didn’t put too much effort in solving problems, they did not attract that much attention and flaws were not that big a deal. The design of the Firebird III was actually complete with the mockup. The execution took a little longer.

There were a few more events worthy of mention that happened leading up to the completion of the clay model. As noted earlier, Harley Earl had prohibited the design committee from entering our studio, but there was a conflicting incident that happened that summer. Earl went to Europe for a combined business trip and one-month vacation leaving Bill Mitchell in charge. Inevitably, Bill Mitchell and the design committee came by and offered their help. The committee was in complete agreement that the three rear fins were excessive and had to go. McLean was not able to dissuade them, so we removed them and cleaned up the surfaces, ending up with a long plain overhanging plank in back. The changes were completed in time for Earl’s return. We were placed on Earl’s busy schedule for a status review of the Firebird III. It would be in the auditorium so the model was transported down the long underground passageway and set up on the center turntable of the elevated stage. McLean and the design committee gathered around it and waited for Earl to appear. Stefan, Larry [Simi – the head clay modeler], and I, with a few other studio people huddled down below on the main floor, out of sight behind some boards. Earl finally arrived and took a position at center stage. McLean drew the task of presenting the change to Earl. McLean began his pitch. “After review . . . it was clear . . . we all agreed,” while Earl very quietly and politely waited for him to finish. After a pause, Earl began speaking. “You know,” he said, following with a pause, “when I came into the studio that day—for the first time—and saw the mockup . . . I actually saw the finished car in the Waldorf Astoria . . . and it was exactly as I had pictured it.” After another pause, he continued, “Now, why don’t you all take the car back and put it back to the way it was when I left.” With that, he turned and walked out.

If you want to read the rest of the story, get the book.

Firebird III Construction

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Links:
Download the Acrobat index of Of Firebirds and Moonmen
Firebird III brochure on Dean’s Garage
SpeedReaders book review
About the Author from Xlibris
Description of the book from Xlibris

Bill Mitchell poses in front of the Styling Administration Building with his 1959 Corvette Stingray race car. I’m not sure when the bronze sculpture on his right was installed, but when I was there it had a nice dark patina. I remember Mitchell had the thing polished and it created a lot of discussion as to whether that was the right thing to do or not. This interview stands in stark contrast at many levels to a similar interview with Irv Rybicki. Anyone who worked under both men would certainly attest to the fact that they were very different. The interview is quite interesting with several behind the scenes views as to how things worked at GM Styling. It’s also obvious in this interview that Mitchell was a bit rough around the edges.

Reminiscence from the 1985 Interview with William L. Mitchell. Automotive Design Oral History, Accession 1673. Benson Ford Research Center. The Henry Ford.

This oral reminiscence is the result of interviews with William L. Mitchell by David R. Crippen during the month of August, 1984, at The Edison Institute, Dearborn, Michigan. These interviews were held under the auspices of the Edsel B. Ford Design History Center, Archives & Library Collections, The Edison Institute. The original interview online can be read here.

“This is Dave Crippen, and this is August 8, 1984, and we’re in Bloomfield Hills [Michigan] on another one of our Design History Oral Interviews, under the sponsorship of The Edison Institute, and today we’re speaking with William L. (Bill) Mitchell, well-known industrial designer and former head of G. M.’s Styling and Design [department], Mr. Mitchell has agreed to tell his story in his own way and at his own pace.”

A:      Well, before you talk about me, I’d like to talk about the man that probably created automobile styling, and that’s Harley Earl. Now, he came from Hollywood, which is a very glamorous place compared to Detroit, and his father had been with a custom body business—coaches—and then went on to cars, and it seems that [at] the custom body show in the Commodore Hotel in New York, Mr. [Alfred P.] Sloan and the Fishers noticed that the best Cadillacs in that show had Earl bodies, so Fred Fisher, the oldest of the Fisher brothers, went out to the Coast and contacted Earl. Then, [Larry] Fisher went out, who was then head of Cadillac. They were called vice presidents of the divisions at that time. He made a deal with Earl, who was a young man in his late ‘twenties, maybe early ‘thirties, to come to Cadillac as a consultant. Earl came out, and coming from Hollywood he was quite a shock to Detroit. Now, this is before I ever came there. He came alone, and he picked up a few people out of Cadillac, Ralph Pew was one, and he created the LaSalle. He went to the Paris [auto] Show with Mr. Knudsen—Bill Knudsen—and was impressed by the Hispano-Suiza and that prompted him to do the design of the LaSalle. That’s when it was practically a cousin of the Cadillac—same size and everything. Not quite as much money, but it had elegance—wind splits in the fenders, and he was impressed by all that.

Well, it seems that Sloan was sold on how it worked, and he said to his board, “My God, if a man can do Cadillac why doesn’t he do all General Motors. And, at that time, Fisher Body built the bodies for Chevrolet, Pontiac, Olds, Buick or Cadillac, and the responsibility of the division was the chassis, and Fisher put the body on it. Now, the general manager of the division had a lot to say of Olds, or the general manager of Buick, at that time they were vice presidents. [No,] They were called presidents at that time, president of Pontiac or Olds, and to think that this man [Earl] took all of this away from the divisions and from Fisher Body, one by one.

Mitchell with his ’59 Stingray posing in the mud. Ah, springtime in Michigan.

Now, the Fisher brothers were small, and I can remember when I came, they wore homburgs, and what a contrast to this 6’4″ man who had a bronze complexion. He’d wear bronze suits, suede shoes–flamboyant was the word and outspoken, a tough man, and he’d cuss those Fisher brothers out. We called them the seven dwarfs. He’d say, “God damn, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” He didn’t have any respect because he was hired by Sloan. Anyway, I hadn’t heard about him, didn’t even know him, but a friend of his saw me at the Colliers’ [advertising agency], and I worked for Barren Collier, and he had three sons, Sam, Barren Jr., and Miles. Miles was my age, Sam was older—no, Sam was my age, Miles was younger, and Barren Jr. was older, and they brought over the road racing from Europe. They had an estate outside of Tarrytown [N.Y.] between the Stillmans and Rockefellers called “Overlook”—beautiful, and they first raced little sports cars like MG’s, and then they got bigger cars, and I was in the art department, and I always drew cars.

My dad was a Buick dealer, and he sent me to Carnegie Tech to draw something else, and as I got into art, one of my instructors said, “If you want to really be an artist, you ought to go to Art Students League in New York.” Well, my father and mother were divorced, and Mother lived in New York, so I went there in the summers, and she knew [the] Colliers, and I got a job as an office boy and finally in the art department. The Collier boys would see me drawing cars along with anything you do in a studio with twenty commercial artists, and I was learning my trade and going to school at night, and they’d take me up to Tarrytown—a little Ford I’d drive up—and I’d race the cars with them and draw sketches. Well, a good friend of Mr. Earl’s, [Walter Carey] who was in the insurance business in Detroit, he insured the plants, and he saw my drawings and he said, “Bill, did you ever think of designing a car?” I said, “No.” He said, “Well, I know a big fellow that’s in charge of all design at General Motors, why don’t you send your drawings out to me, and I’ll get them over to him.” That was in the summer of ’35, and I took the summer off, from water colors and everything, just to work at my free time—to work on these designs. So, I sent them out, and in December I went to work with General Motors in 1935, and within a year, I had the Cadillac studio. But you gotta realize there were less than a hundred in the whole place on the third floor of the General Motors Building. There was no air-conditioning, and I remember the cars were all modeled in a row in a room where, if the temperature dropped, the clay would crack, and the front end would fall off, and the designers were in another room. Now, you could go out and look at the car, but you weren’t right with the car. It was sort of confusing. And, then there were no studios then.

But, I remember I came there before Christmas—I came December 15, 1935—and Paul Meyer, who was one of the cracker jack designers then and there were just a few emerging—He said, “Well, I’ll see you.” This was Christmas Eve, and he said, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I said, “What.” He said, “Oh yeah, we’ll work tomorrow.” And, we did! Earl worked ‘em! Anyway, at that time there were no chief designers. I worked on the Buick and Cadillac and the Oldsmobile. I worked around with different designers. Paul Meyer had been given the Buick for awhile, and then Exner finished it. He was a…

Q:      Virgil Exner was there in those days?

A:      Yeah. He was there ahead of me. He came from Indianapolis. He came with the same background of a commercial art studio. George Snyder was the top man then. He came out of Rolls Royce/Brewster of New York, and Frank Hershey was another senior [designer], and he came out of the West Coast bodies [companies], and they were really older, and pros. I had no experience, except I just loved to draw cars.

Q:       Can I take you back just briefly to the thing that Earl had done which was so unusual in the industry that he had created an overall design complex which transcended, as you said earlier, the several divisions of General Motors. How did he do that? You indicated that by the strength of his personality….

A:      Well, he called us the Art and Colour Department, and there was a DuPont man that handled the interior.

Q:       [Which] about that time owned part of General Motors.

A:      Yes, and they had two/three members on the Board, and I’m trying to think of his name, and he got pneumonia and died, and that’s when Steve McDaniel was put in to run it. Steve was good designer out of Atlanta, but he was more of a detailer than the overall flow of the car. But, in [the] summer of ’36, Earl decided to make studios, and Synder had had 
a wonderful year. He did the Oldsmobile, the eight, which was different from the six. Six had scoop grille, and the eight was egg crate—fine, and he did the Chevrolet. Then he stepped to Cadillac, and he was a high-powered guy then. So, I worked for him on the Cadillac and on the LaSalle, and then there was pieces—louvers, running boards, details, you know. Then that next summer, ’36, they divided the studios. Raymond Loewy took Exner with him, and Exner had had Cadillac and Olds.

Q:      Loewy was just beginning to…

A:      No, he [Exner] hadn’t had Cadillac in there, he didn’t have it. Harry Shaw was over—let’s say this: before I got there, Andrade was the chief designer under Earl, an older man, and he went to Briggs, and Harry Shaw took over, an older man. Exner did a good a job on the Buick and had done the Pontiac, he did the ’38 Pontiac in ’36, but he went with Loewy, and he took (I was talking with Strother MacMinn about him [recently]), he took a good guy who was patterned after him with him, and he ended up doing Sears & Roebuck for Loewy. So, he was destined to get the Cadillac, and I got it! Paul Meyer got LaSalle. Hershey got Pontiac and was responsible for the Silver Streak. I wanted Buick, but a guy named Lawson—I competed with Hershey on the Buick of catwalk cooling it. That summer they set me up in a studio at the back where Fisher Body was, before we moved into the upper floors of Research Building B, in ’38. Catwalk cooling was a grille in between the fender and the hood, that was a vogue that was on. Frank had sort of a boxy version, and I did a flowing type—more like the Cord is, the Cord was that went this way, and I got to know Curtice well, and…

Q:      Harlow Curtice?

A:      Being a Buick man, I was telling them how great it was to sit down and talk to Curtice, and he was then head of Buick. Well, that was the 
first time there were individual studios. Then the next move we went to the seventh, eighth—no, the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh floors in the Research B. Fisher was underneath, and we could work back and forth. I had the Cadillac studio up until I went in the Navy.

Q:     Was this the General Motors Building?

A:      No, Research B.

Q:     Research, where is that?

A:      That’s right back of the G.M. where research was—where Kettering’s people were, and we got the building beside it. They called it Research B, and they put Research A, was all engineering staff, and B was Fisher and art. Then, of course, at the close of the war we went to the Tech Center. But, the things that impress me was the power Earl had. Now, each division, and one thing different from General Motors than Ford, there was individuality which is fading fast. It’s going to be gone. Conglomerate and it’ll become homogenized, as I say. There’s gonna be no great Cadillac royalty. You see, before you could see the moves, like as Gordon moved in Cadillac, Cole came back, and Harry Barr came back, and that went on in Buicks, and Olds, and today, they come from anywhere. A guy can come from Argentina and run Pontiac. There isn’t that pride of ancestry, heraldry. I say that, sentimentally, we’ve always had that over Ford, because at Ford there’s an engineer over transmissions, there’s one over engines, that’s for everything. Mercury’s sort of a mistake, you know, you don’t know what it is. But one thing, Ford did have what you like to get a hold of, some ancestry, a history. You go up to Pontiac or go up to Oldsmobile, you can’t see the history of the Oldsmobile.

Q:     They’ve obliterated [it],

A:      Yeah, it’s gone. As a new manager comes in, he sweeps clean. There’s no history, no—he doesn’t care what the other guy did, he’s going to make a mark of his own. Now, with Earl, he let me know five years ahead that I was going to get his job. You couldn’t do that today. I’ll make a statement that will shock people when they hear it, but, when he retired about the same time that [John] Gordon became president and [Frederic] Donner became chairman, and I had [Tom] Christiansen, who was sort of my—ran the business end of the place. I was right next to Earl’s office, and Earl says, “Gordon’s in there, and he wants to talk to you.” He’d just become president. And, I knew Jack well, because Jack ran Cadillac when—he was chief engineer at Cadillac, and then ran Cadillac when I was designing for them. But, he was a Navy man and a tough guy, and hard, stubborn as hell. He’d not change his mind. Earl said, “He wants to talk you.” He was one of these heavy smokers, and he set there in Earl’s office, and he said, “Harley just told me that you’re going to take his job, and I don’t like it one God damn bit.” There was no voting. Earl had just told Sloan and Curtice that this is the guy I want. And, he said, “Bill, you’re going to have to prove to me that you can do that.” Well, that’s the best thing he could have said, ’cause I took on like hell, and he was very conservative, and I wasn’t. One time when I was pushing the fast-back coupe, and [Clifford] Goad is my immediate boss, and he said…

Q:      Who’s that?

A:      Cliff Goad. He was over all of the Tech Center, and Gordon said, “You’re going to have that over my dead body.” And, I said, “I hate to do that.” I fought him all along, but he was a solid guy. But, Earl would come in a room—he ran the show, there was no doubt about it, and he’d go off with Sloan on a cruise, and we’d make up a beautiful book for him on the future things we wanted to do. But, he had that in with Sloan. He had no great respect for any general manager. He and Gordon never got along—just the hell with it, and he only played up to the top men in New York. He had a button in his office that I inherited where he’d punch Sloan. If he’d had meeting with [Harry] Klingler or somebody at Pontiac, who was stubborn, he’d get Sloan and he’d say, “Alfred,” you know his voice would change, “how are you Alfred.” “Well, fine.” “You know the son-of-bitch Klingler, I want you to fix him.” Shit, you’d go in a meeting, and they’d all be like that. He always had a piece of paper like, “Hello fellas,” and he had it fixed. He wouldn’t take any of that. Another great thing I remember, the first car that I got credit for, and I didn’t do it, because I did it under his direction, was the Cadillac ’60 Special. Now, that started out as a LaSalle, and we had a fender we called the suitcase fender. It was very arty with glass, a V-glass, in front of the headlight. The first car with a headlamp in the fender O. E. Hunt was chief engineer and very conservative, and I’ll never forget ’cause I was new then, and in my studio was the first job I did in the new studios in Research B. I looked around, and I thought, look at the money in this room. There was Sloan, there was Knudsen, the Fisher brothers, and O. E. Hunt, the chief engineer, and I thought, “my God, wow!” Anyway, O. E. was negative on that light in the fender because he said, if you bump the fender, you’d throw the headlight out of kilter. Earl stood up, his belt buckle in 
O. E. Hunt’s mouth, he’s that tall. He looked down—he’d always look down at him, and he said, “O. E., why don’t you call me a son of bitch, I could understand that.” And, he walked out of the studio quietly, and broke up the meeting. And, the next year’s Zephyr had it.

Q:      That’s right.

A:      Oh, he was powerful. God, I admired [him]. He just knocked the tar out of anybody. He’d get it fixed. If he couldn’t, he’d call New York and say, “Fix these…[.]” Then, I inherited some of that. I believe this, and I still do: I think what’s wrong with the G.M. [products], the new ones I see coming out, it’s hard to tailor a dwarf, so you’re going to have these cars that aren’t exotic. But, there should be style leaders. There should be prestige cars, like the Eldorados, Toronados, Rivieras—there’s not gonna be—the new ones are vanilla. I didn’t go to the proving ground [last] Monday because I didn’t want to blow my top, and I’d seen them, and I said, “I’m busy. I can’t go.” It’s not my way of life. Now, a good friend of Earl’s and Sloan’s, I don’t know whether you know him or not, he’s Fred Cody. I was at a party a couple of weeks ago over here, and Murphy was there, and all the G.M. people, and he turned to a group we were talking to and said, “Now, Harley Earl turned this all over to you, didn’t he?” I said, “Yeah.” “Who did you turn it over to? Who is he?” Irv [Rybicki] has been in seven years, and nobody knows him. He won’t speak up, and they’re just taking it away from him. You’ve got to fight for what you want. I had a general manager once that wanted to put, I won’t name him, but he wanted to put a grille in the Toronado, and I wanted it like 
a Cord, you know. I said, “Look, I don’t tell you how to make your car, or run your plant, [but] keep your damn nose out of design. I’m helping you. You don’t go to your tailor and tell him how to make your suit.” I said, “You have no business in design.” I said, “That suit you’ve got on, my wife’s got better linoleum on our kitchen floor than that God damn suit you’re wearing.” Right in front of his whole people. So, I’ve been a great man for that, and, to me, like I have to give talks around to different places. I gave one up in Minneapolis this winter, and I said, “You gotta know me before I talk. First of all, I don’t like modern design, art,” and I said, “Picasso to me is a queer,” and I said, “If God made beautiful things, if you can just imitate ‘em, you’re doing pretty good. I don’t like crazy music, and I don’t like crazy designs in automobiles.” I said, “It took me years to learn how to use sweeps. Now you can design a car with a T square and a triangle.” I threw a bunch of pictures on the screen, and I said, “I’ve been in the business forty years, and I’ll be God damned if I can tell you what they are.” You could take the emblems and move them around. It isn’t just in the United States, but now the Mercedes are trying to look more like us, and the Pontiac looks like a BMW, I mean, God, there’s no heredity. It sickens me, and, having been a disciple of Earl, I didn’t get a disciple. So, it’s the romance, I said, “My cars, any car I had, the paint, everything on it, had to be different.” When somebody said, “Whose car is that.” Jesus, when it goes by—Earl had a great saying, “If you go by a schoolyard, and the kids don’t whistle, back to the drawing board.” And, you’ve got to have designs that, somebody—I made a statement the other day, “Somebody—Ford, General Motors, Chrysler—are going to make an exotic car, and that’ll wake us up again.” We’ve got to get another 
Clark Gable, another…now there’s nothing, nothing.

Q:      If we can take you back to the early ’50′s when you were, Mr. Earl’s assistant…

A:      Oh, that was after I got out of the Navy. That was it. I was a director, yeah.

Q:      And, his career is obviously coming to end about then. He’s thinking of retirement, probably, in a couple of years. How did you work out the post-war product mix in terms of design? Were you stuck with that that face lifting dilemma that everyone else had?

A:      Yeah, we added—you see, there was always a budget, and, for instance, some interesting cars, how they came about, in our Motorama cars, he did that, not only to show the public, but to get the Corporation off its ass. You know, to make something—and if you made an exotic car, somebody would say build it, like the Corvette. Any of these. One time, one of the last Motoramas, and the money we spent! [Harlow] Curtice loved shows, and that all stopped. The government got in. The profits weren’t as great, but the shows were glamorous. God, spectacular! We’d have 20 special cars—work our brains off and enjoyed it. There was a great esprit de corps in the whole place. Now, it’s a bore over there, God! Anyway, we had six special, four passenger, not two passenger, Corvette was the two passenger, and the Thunderbird at that time was a two passenger. We made about four specials—Olds, Buicks, Pontiacs—and we noticed, somebody did, that Ford engineers came in there after the show and were taking dimensions, which is all right, but, by God, out comes the Thunderbird. Oh, [they] caught us, and, we didn’t have a four passenger, and that thing took off like that. Well, Earl had retired then, and the dealers got after him, and letters came in, 
so Gordon told me see what we could do.

I worked down in a room with Ned Nickles, who was a good senior designer. His weakness—he’d wanted to do it all himself, but he was a good guy to have for that. We did the Riviera, but I did it as a LaSalle. That’s why those two grilles are on it. Gordon was the only one that didn’t know about it. He came down, and he’d look at it, and he liked it. Where things were wide, he liked the tightness of it. And, by the way, I just restored my mother’s ‘63 [Riviera]—21 years old. It’s beautiful, and Buick gave me a new engine, no catalytic converter, it could go like hell. Anyway, we got it all done, and showed it in the auditorium one night to Donner and Gordon, just the three of us, and Donner said, “Well, I think we should build it, but who’s going to build it.” Cadillac didn’t want it, they didn’t need it. And, Chevrolet was knocking the pants off of Buick, Olds, and Pontiac with the Impala. So, Donner—ever the financial man said, “Jack, where we going to get the money to build this car?” He [Gordon] said, “Take it as an advertisement.” Now, that was pretty good. In other words, two people talk about General Motors having a stylish car. They liked it. So, they let Pontiac, Olds and Buick bid for it. DeLorean was at Pontiac then, and he had some crazy ideas that he was pumping into them, and I wouldn’t let him touch it. It was down in that room finished! [At] Olds, Jack Wolfram, wanted to put a blower on it and do something. I said, “No way,” and Roller! [Edward D., Buick General Manager, 1960's] who owned this house one time, he said, “I’ll take it the way it is.” They did a smart thing. They went over in the Gotham Hotel on Fifth Avenue away from their agency and had their own writers and the illustrator that did the Rolls Royces—Melbourne Brindle. I’ve got a painting he did of mine for me. 
I’ll show it to you down there. He did the illustrations, and they gave it a whole, separate image, and that really was interesting how that was born, and that’s the way a car should be done. I didn’t have any engineers looking down my neck. See, within the studio if you went over there today, there might be a Buick meeting. There would be fifteen engineers in there picking at it. Then going back and saying, “I didn’t like this, I didn’t like that.” Terrible!

Q: The Riviera was one of your great passions, I’ve read.

A:      Yup.

Q:      Would you consider that one of your best creations?

A:       It was the happiest Christmas Eve because I say, “Sold.” The corporation bought that idea, and the Stingray. Those were my two pets, and they both—God, I could have got drunk for a week.

Q:      Tell us about the Stingray. How did it come about?

A:      Now there’s a real story. Chevrolet was racing, and Gordon was on the National Safety Council, and General Motors, to be into racing, didn’t look good, and their last race down in Sebring [Florida], he said, “No, stop it,” I knew they had three or four chassis that Duntov [G.M. design engineer] had built. So, I went to Cole, and said, “Get me one of those.” He said, “Well, I’ll sell it to you for $500.” It was worth $500,000—tubular frame, the Dion suspension, inward brakes, everything!

Q:      Where was Cole at that time?

A:      He was head of Chevrolet. So, Harry Barr was chief engineer, and nobody in the corporation knew about it. I went down in the hammer room and designed this Corvette Stingray image, in clay—built it, in 
fiberglass, and I raced it once in Marlborough. I was on the Engineering Policy Committee. I was on that for twenty years. It later became the Product Planning [Committee], because overseas got in it. So, in that meeting Gordon said, “I thought everybody knew we were out of racing.” So, after the meeting I said, “Jack, were you talking about me?” He said, “You’re damn right I was.” I said, “Do I have to quit?” He said, “You’ve got to quit right now!” And, it just made me feel terrible. I got some word makers, and we wrote a letter to him, I did, saying that I got my job from racing, because that’s what I did. I was in it—it was like a doctor to go to conventions or something. And, he used to come out to studio in those big limousines in those days. So, I took him down to the car, in [an area] they still use at the Tech Center, and I said, “Jack, did you get my letter?” He said, “I sure as hell did, and you’re a good salesman. You can go ahead.” Now, that was a tough guy. Just to show you how honest he was the other way. “Keep it off the property and spend your own money.” Well, today I couldn’t have afforded it, but there was Goodyear giving you tires, it was Firestone, I had to buy them. But, I put a thing in with the government income tax, and I only had to pay 25% in two years. But, it came time to face-lift the Corvette, so I took the lines right off that car, and the sales on the Corvette went like that. And, I had to judge down at Williamsburg three weeks ago, and they sent me a new Corvette to Washington, and I drove down.

Q:      What did you think?

A:      Down there, those Corvettes are beautiful, and the Stingrays were…

Q:      Perfect.

A:      And, I gave them a story. I have a nice way to make a pitch now. I show slides, and then when they come on, I can talk. Like Earl and the Firebirds and what made him and how we did things. Then, the Stingray, you can see the race car and then the other one, you know? Just how I did them. But, that’s what I was trying to say, a car—well, Bill Lyons that owned Jaguar for years and did his own designing, was a wonderful guy. He said the only thing the committee ever designed was a camel.

Q:      You’re right.

A:      You see, you can’t have committee design. You’ve got to go in and say, “This is what I want to do.”

Q:      The giants like Fred Donner and Jack Gordon and Harlow Curtice are no longer with us—and Harley Earl.

A:      No, it’s another—I don’t whether you know [Strother] MacMinn of Art Centre. [Pasadena design school]

Q:      I’d like to.

A:      He’s a wonderful guy. He was here as one of the judges [Meadowbrook] with me, and he sat here…

Q:      Strother MacMinn?

A:      Yeah, Strother MacMinn. Well, I’ve known—he was with G.M., and then he went out and helped form [Art Centre], You see, Earl, the way Art Centre got going, Earl’s from Hollywood, and he drove by this school which was in a mansion somebody gave ‘em on Wilshire, and he wanted to see a design school. It was really founded by a guy that thought he had TB and from Chicago [Tink Adams], He went out there, he was an 
advertising man. So, the basis of the school was advertising and illustration. Well, Earl looked at it, and he said, “Why don’t you do automobile design?” So, they sent MacMinn, Jurgensen, and another guy, a product man, and a modeler out there, and they started the product end, which is a big thing there although Art Centre is now across from the Rose Bowl up in Pasadena. It’s a fabulous school. They come from all over the world. I’ve given talks out there, and it’s so great because it isn’t just design, it’s fine arts, photography, and being in Hollywood, photography is big thing—movie making and all that. But, it’s so contagious, it isn’t just products, it’s everything.

Q:      Sounds perfect.

A:      But, MacMinn and I sat here [last] Monday. He called me up and said, “Can I come over?” But, these Californians, they have three hours difference you know, and I was wondering why I was getting sort of tired, wasn’t drinking or anything, and hell, it was eight o’clock. See, it was five o’clock his time. But we reminisced about—he said, “Bill, the days aren’t—something’s happening—there’s not the same people. There’s no Jack Dempseys, no Babe Ruths over there.” I don’t dare say. Now, Earl, when he retired, never criticized me once, and he was still being paid. He’d come back once or twice a year. He’d have to. Now, Gordon and Donner, especially Gordon, didn’t like that but, Sloan set that all up. His wife gets money ’till she dies, he did, ’cause he made it.’ And, I’ll show you a painting of Sloan that hung in the hall as you go up to the Tech Center. He’s got an inscription that 
I’ve got on my desk around here, and he said, in 1926, “With all cars about alike,” and they weren’t, because some of them and things, but styling meant a great deal to General Motors. He really put—he’s a financial man, and he was a clothes horse. He dressed, and he admired Earl, you see. So, they put it up.

Q:      Alfred Sloan?

A:      Sure, he admired that. See, there’s nobody there to—now, one thing I learned from Earl, boy, if things didn’t go right, I’d just pick up. I’d get right to the guy that left. I would talk to Donner
direct, I could talk to Curtice direct. [Ed] Cole was my baby. I could go to him. I got in a fight with old [Roger] Keyes. I didn’t like him one bit. Earl didn’t like him, and I didn’t like him, and he was criticizing me for something, and I was down in the wood shop, and they said, “Cole’s on the phone.” I got on the phone and he said, “Bill, I’m on the squawk box, and Roger’s sitting here. What is this, Roger that you’re saying about Bill?” And, he said something. He said, “Well, wait a minute, Roger, he doesn’t work for you, he works for me.” And, you heard Roger blow up, and Roger said, “It’s either me or Mitchell,” and he [Cole] said, “Make up your mind, Roger.” So, I had him. From then on I just—I made that Manta Ray. And, he [Kyes] looked at it, and I said, “You know why I made that? So you couldn’t get your ass in it! You couldn’t get in that son of a bitch.”

Q:      He was tall and angular, wasn’t he?

A:      But, I think what fixed him [was] he was [C.E.] Wilson’s hatchet man in Washington. In those pictures that Look magazine made up, I often said to my wife, “He must look at himself when he shaves and…[.]” I know there’s one incident where [Pete] Estes told me that we had a guy named [Harold] Warner, who had run the truck division, and they moved him into Cadillac. I mean, I came back from Europe and had a bad back, and Knudsen called me at the hospital and said, “If you feel bad, how would you like to hear Warner running Cadillac?” God! Well, anyway he couldn’t cut the mustard, but he was a nice guy. So, Estes was telling me that Keyes came in Tuesday and was going to fire him. I wouldn’t fire him. I wouldn’t think of it. He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll do it.” He was a hatchet man.

Q:      He later got involved with Ferguson in the mid-Forties.

A:      Before that. Before he came to G.M. Then Wilson brought him.

Q:      That’s right, Wilson brought him in the Fifties, late Fifties, or late Forties. In the immediate post-war era, there was an exodus of G.M. [design] people to Ford largely because of Breech.

A:      Yeah.

Q:      And, as you well remember…

A:      And, I liked Ernie too.

Q:      Did you?

A:      Oh yeah, he’s a good friend of mine. I’d go hunting with him, I knew his son. My wife—and I was out playing golf with his son’s ex-wife.

Q:      As you well remember, Breech seemed to bring several G.M. junior stylists along with—well, not along with him, but about a year or 30 later. How did that work? How did that come about? Do you remember the details?

A:      Well, Snyder…

Q:      That’s George Snyder?

A:      Yeah. There’s a guy named Lauve, and he’s still around. Henry Lauve. [Howard] O’Leary was the director then, and he was great on— but a wonderful personality. There’s a great, terrible story about if anybody drank, it just ruined him, but he sponsored Lauve over some of these other guys. And, Lauve was good artist, one of the best. I hired him in New York.

Q:      O’Leary was who?

A:      He was [administrative] director of styling. But he was not a stylist. He came from Fisher Body, and L. P. Fisher liked him and got him in, and was friend of Earl’s and said, “He’ll run it.” Earl had a terrible temper. God, he’d fire and hire. Something about our chemistry, he never whipped me. I remember he’d demoralize some guys so that one night I came into his office after hours, 6 o’clock, and he was quiet, and I said, “Mr. Earl, can I talk to you for a minute?” This was before he retired. He said, “Sure.” And, I said, “You know, you’re a big man, and you’re volatile, and you’ve got a couple fellas that I can’t work with. You just scared them to death. They’re 
going to psychiatrists.” He said, “Is that right?” I said, “Yeah.” “God,” he said, “I’m glad you told me that.” I went home and I thought, boy, I’ve made a major victory. Next Monday he called me in, “God damn son of a bitch, they don’t like the work, throw their ass out of here.” You know, he didn’t like to be told.

Q:      So, you had almost—it seemed to be sort of a mass exodus of several junior…

A:      Yeah, ’cause they didn’t like who he was moving in. [Frank] Hershey, he fired Hershey, and he fired Anderson. Anderson went to American Motors, and Hershey went to…

Q:      Frank was pretty good, wasn’t he? Frank Hershey?

A:      From the old school, yeah, but he was good, yeah. But, he was running his own business, and Earl didn’t like that. You couldn’t run your business and work there.

Q:      What about Tom Hibbard at that period?

A:      Tom, well, he was an older man. He just came in and out. He had been a great body designer in the days when Earl, you know, when they—in fact when I came there, [Virgil] Exner and I were the only guys that could draw perspective. Everything was done on the side, and, you know, that could really get in and do it. But, Hibbard was a good guy in those days, but he couldn’t fit into these new styles. Earl really brought in guys with no—like me—no background in designing, just guys that loved cars.

Q:      I guess [Eugene] Bordinat left General Motors right after the war too, didn’t he?

A:      He was with Fisher.

Q:      Oh, he was at Fisher.

A:      Well, coordinated with it—sometimes Fisher’s would do interiors, and Gene has been a friend of mine for years. In fact, he gave me a job. He called me up a couple of years ago, and Fiat, Ciat, that’s the Spanish version of Fiat, had a law suit they were to defend against Fiat, and they wanted to pay him to come over and show the…they had taken the car and changed it, but Fiat didn’t think they changed it enough to sell it under another name. He had been dismissed by [Donald] Petersen, who is a good friend of mine, who’s president [of Ford], and they made a deal with him when they let him out where he’s got good money for years, but he couldn’t do anything. So, he said, “I can’t do this, and I gave them your name.” So, I took it on. I got paid well. I got a good history of—like our Chevette that is made in Argentina, Brazil, Germany, England—same car but just different pieces and how you could do this.

Q:      So, you and Mr. Earl were gearing up for the post-war onslaught and streamlining the department, and weeding out a few…?

A:      Well, there was Lauve and [Art] Ross who he let go before I took over, and he didn’t want anybody that was across from my thinking. It was pretty good.

Q:      That really set it up for you?

A:      Yeah. Whenever he’d come back, he’d have to come back a couple times a year to look the cars over, they gave him a courtesy car. Really, it was embarrassing ’cause Gordon and Donner didn’t even ask him anything. But, he’d come to me and say—a few days ahead come up from Florida, and he’d say “Now, what are you selling? Where are the ones?” And, then he’d back me up. He was wonderful. So, I don’t 
feel I should take Irv [Rybicki] and Chuck [Jordan] and tell them what to do. They’re running it their way, and that’s the way it’s going to be. Now, [Strother] MacMinn called me yesterday. He wanted me to have a little séance with some of the new men, I said, “No, no, I can’t do that. I’m not there,” I mean. “They don’t have the esprit de corps,” is what he’s saying. I said, “That’s another day. Coolidge wasn’t like the guy that he followed,”

Q:      So, in ’48 Mr. Earl retired for all intents and purposes, and gave…

A:      That’s not ’48, it’s ’58.

Q:      Oh, it’s not until ’58, I beg your pardon.

A:      See, I was in-between he, Ed, and myself, was over forty years. I was twenty years vice president—nineteen years—from ’58 to ’77.

Q:      Well, let’s take you back to 1948 then, you got a couple of face-lifts out of the way, and now you’ve got to gear up for…

A:      ’58 you mean.

Q:      Well, I really want to go back to ’48. You’ve got a couple of— it’s a seller’s market, and you’ve had a couple of facelifts in ’46 and ’47, now you’ve got to gear up for a really new post-war car. What did you come up with?

A:      Well, really, what happened, when I came out of the Navy and came back, there was a movement on to cover the front wheels—to cover the car up, and I’ve got sketches all around. Some will be in the Museum that I was doing during the war, and I had the guys shooting guns out of it and all this, but Earl had a great faculty. He’d fight when others would give up and yet he would drop something when he saw it was wrong. He had enough guts to say, “That’s no good. Stop it.” He went from 
this car that was like the Nash that came out and some of them. I said it looked like a horseshoe crab on a roller skate. Everything was covered over. Well, if you do that, you’ve got a balloon. You don’t have any anatomy showing, and all of a sudden he did the other. He dropped the belt, put the belt down below the window, and the car looked longer. See, the more lines you get—in other words, you got a sausage, and we just cleaned the hell out of it. Everybody was going this way, and he went that way. He was a master at the cross up.

Q:      Can you detail some of those models that were successful in those days?

A:      The cross up, yes. Well, the Zephyr sort of got us into this fine grille and catwalk cooling, and one of my designers, Art Ross, came up with this more powerful front on the ’41, and what I’d do at night in the studio, I’d put a light by the one I’m selling, ’cause he didn’t like to come in and you were there. He’d come in Sundays, and come around, and he grabbed that thing and ran, just like take a fix, and we made overnight—Lincoln and everybody went our way with a strong front—’41 Cadillac. One other interesting story was the taillight under the gas cap, or the gas cap under the taillight, and we had a car ready to go up in the elevator to show Knudsen, who was president [of G.M.], and one of the fellas figured you didn’t have to show a gas cap. We used to take a gas cap and just stick it in the clay model. Then, he realized that the taillight we had at the time, if it was an inch wider, you could lift the top and put the gas in the taillight. Old Knudsen thought that was great, and it was a great conversation piece. You’d pull in the gas station, and kids would go around, “Where do you put the gas in this damn thing? And, we went clear up to where it 
went in under the fin. Another great story there, Gordon was chief engineer, and once again he was like this, and Dreysfcadt [Nicholas, General Manager, Cadillac, late 1940's), former submarine commander in Germany, was the general manager at Cadillac, and he liked the idea of the taillight under the gas cap under the taillight. And, Gordon didn't because he saw the danger of the wiring in the lighting. But, I’ll never forget [what] Dreystadt said—Gordon had been running the tank plant during the war—he said, “Jack, you make a tank, you make a taillight, yeah?” Wonderful!

Q:      As I recall, it lifted up, right?

A:      Yeah.

Q:      That was great.

A:      And then later on when…

Q:      This still the Cadillac?

A:      Yeah, the fins, that we put the fins on, and we got the inspiration by going to Selfridge Field and seeing the P-38′s. You know, the engine came back to the fins. Frank Hershey, while I was in the Navy, he started this thing over in—then he was in the Navy for a while too, no, he was in the Army, but, anyway, at Forty-one Milwaukee was a separate building where they had a [design] school, and he started that. They were little nubbins, but they went on to become these tails. Well, Gordon never liked them, and he’d sit in the wastebasket in the studio, and he was head of Cadillac, and Cole was chief engineer. Cole and I wanted to raise him, and we pulled a trick on him. We took the drawing, and instead of saying we’d raise the other drawing every day, and it looked like we were lowering it. And, Gordon heard of that later. He said, “You bastards you.” And, we got it over—
well, anyway, Sloan at the proving ground turned to Earl at the back, and he looked at the Cadillac, and he said, “Harley, now you got a Cadillac in the back as well as the front.” It was the first car with rear identity. They’re all rounded, and round taillights, but all of a sudden, it was the beginning of knowing a car from the back, and, now they’re losing it. I say if you take the fins off the Cadillac, it’s like the taking the antlers off a deer, you got a big rabbit!

Q:      But, you’re back with Mr. Earl, and you’ve got a decade ahead of you before you take over from ’48 to ’58. Those must have been very exciting, tumultuous years for you—the immediate post-war new cars.

A:      Well, I’ll tell you, the fins things—two years it was the worst in General Motors—’58 and ’59, back to back. In ’58 we were putting the chrome on with a trowel. In ’59, Chrysler scared the hell out of us—Exner. He tried to out-fin them. We had fins. So, when I took over my job was to get them down, and I did. I cleaned them down. But, I’ve got to say this, they had some identity. They were doing that then. Exner was a flamboyant stylist. Now, it’s just like fights. If you go to see a fight, one guys a puncher, and the other guy isn’t—it’s not a fight, it’s just a—but, if they’re both punching, and he was exotic. Right now there isn’t any of that going on. Nobody’s challenging anybody. This new Ford, I said [to] [Jack] Telnack, [Ford design head] I know him, and I said, I don’t what to say, but I tried to think what it reminds me of, and then I saw it the other day—a seal, little eyes and big fat ass!

Q:      Which one? You mean the Sierra?

A:      Thunderbird.

Q:      Oh, the Thunderbird.

A:      The little grille, the little thing down the road and the big round back.

Q:      What did he say?

A:      Oh, he laughed.

Q:      They’re having some problems with it.

A:      Well, at least I say this. Now, this is interesting. The president, [Donald] Petersen, he told me once, he said, “You know,” we were giving a talk down at some college here. He’s a good friend of mine anyway. He said, “I asked [Jack] Telnack was he happy, and he said ‘No. I don’t like committees telling me how to do things.’” He said, “Well, you do what you want to do now.” So, he did this. Now, if it’s a success, he’s won a lot of points for designers. If it isn’t, back to the committees. Now, I’ve worked in my own business. I worked with Yamaha for five years, and I had an idea beforehand that they were more like Ed Cole but, they’re not. They’re great committee people. Oh my God, yeah. I had to work with Yamaha because Honda had a car. See, any business I got on the side had to be approved by the Bonus and Salary Committee. They let me have Yamaha, but not Honda. I was going to get Massey-Ferguson, and they didn’t buy that because of diesel engines. John Mitchell was head—he’s passed away now. I couldn’t get North American Rockwell because—and I knew Bob Anderson well. He just had me out to see the B-1 again. God damn, that’s something! But, anyway, the Japs surprised me. Now, they did ask me two years ago to come to Japan, and Hiroshima was the president then, and Sam Shimomoda, chief engineer, and he said, “Would you give us a talk on what made the automobile number one industry? Number two, what made General Motors the number one automobile industry?” So, this is just like asking someone to kick them in the pants. So, I took two or three months and taped this all with slides, had the artist—they paid for it, you know they did, I pumped them a lot. But, my big pitch was diversification. I said, “I got motorcycles. Hell, I had seven or eight, now I’ve got four. I ride them. But, you’re at a disadvantage. A motorcycle isn’t accepted in society,” and I said, “You got to admit it, on the highway, you got to drive, you’ve got to watch out, because you’re at a disadvantage, and any day the government could take you off the road. You’re not safe. You get in a wreck, the guy gets a dinged fender, and you get a dinged head. If I was to go out—you know, you gotta get geared up for ‘em, you can’t pick your nose and ride a motorcycle.” But, they had—I gave it in English, and then they had another projector, and the guy talked in Japanese. By the way, they had the most fabulous place down there outside of Toyko, about forty miles near their plant. Like a country club. Polo fields, ten swimming pools, auditoriums, golf courses, and the inn I stayed at was better than any I ever saw in California. And, motorcycle track—I rode on the track, Jesus, beautiful! But, anyway, the club room, which was like a country club, we set in a V, and I spoke here, and the two groups of directors, the head man was up at the—big glasses. When I made a presentation, I had an idea of a good three-wheeler. They could make it. You could do a lot of things with that. I had all kinds of farm equipment—motorcycle snowmobile. So, the snowmobile. And, anyway, I got done, and some fine men, nice looking men. They could be on any board, and they said, “Well, the committee, they’d have to study 
it.” I said, “You don’t get anywhere with a committee. Henry Ford made what he wanted.” And, I said, “I don’t give a God damn about committees.” And, the old man didn’t get what I said, and they had to tell him, and he set there and he went, “Haw, haw!” I’ll never forget that.

Q:      Oswald and Snyder came over to Ford.

A:      Yeah. Well, Oswald brought Snyder.

Q:      Oh, is that how it was?

A:      Oswald was an Olds engineer, and his brother still stayed at Olds, and George and he were buddies, and George got mad at [Henry] Lauve. He didn’t like Lauve, so he went.

Q:      They didn’t last too long.

A:      Well, George—and then they sent George to Europe. And, he was for years a personal friend of mine, and I was with him when he died, and for a big man, he just withered away, but he got heart trouble, and he would drink and not eat—terrific temper, and he killed himself, but he was a great designer.

Q:      Was he?

A:      He was one of the top men when I was a young man.

Q:      You’ve seemed to have good relationships with key people, not only Donner and Gordon, but also with key people like Ed Cole.

A:      Oh yeah, I made it my business. Pete Estes, who followed him. Knudsen was a good friend of mine. He still is. I’m with him a lot of times. In fact, he was thinking of doing something about that Avanti. He had me flown down, and we drove one back, and I drew it up 
in the studio what I’d do with it, and I said, “I wouldn’t do much. I’d just take that big back light, that bubble back light, and make it sharp.” But, it is, on its own, it wears well. No, I found out from Earl that you’ve got to have the top guys on your side, and I always went in to a meeting backed up. Like that one meeting I had on Olds, and the guy says, “Well, if I won’t agree, you’ll probably go right to the phone and call Ed, won’t ya?” I said, “You’re right.”

Corvair

Q:      Could you give us a rather lengthy description of you and Ed [Cole] and the Corvair? Give us sort of a….

A:      Well, that was his—I’ll tell you one thing about Cole, he was probably his own worst enemy. In a sense, Earl was that way. You couldn’t criticize Earl, he’d scare the hell out of you, so you get so you wouldn’t tell him if he was wrong. Now, Cole was like that. He’d design the car, the carburetor, the suspension. Instead of bringing in Fisher to do something, Chevrolet, he did it, and all I did was the styling, and he got Porsches out there and Volkswagens. What you call it was always a great help—the guy that was head of engineering staff [Frank J. Winchell] who’s now retired—I’m getting old when those names go by me. He was head of engineering, he just surfaced a little bit on this air bag thing. But, anyway, he did most of the stuff with Cole, but Cole just liked the rotary engine, he got General Motors to spend millions of dollars, and he’d go to those board meetings and sell. And, that big thing he had after he retired, you know, I got smuggled drawings out for him and did that stuff. One of my men that worked with me later, Bill Armstrong, who was set to fly with him that day that he crashed. But Ed, when he died, at his funeral, his wife had this guy that sings at ballgames, sing “I’ll Do It My Way,” and Henry Ford, all of us, the tears just came down, because that’s the way he was. He shouldn’t have been flying a twin-engine plane alone, but that’s the way he ran things. My God, and while I loved him and worked with him, if I wanted to sell this and didn’t come with him on something, he wouldn’t back me on this one. You had to play ball.

Q:      Why did he think the Corvair would go?

A:      If it was here today, it’d be better than ever. It was economical, but what killed it, those were the days of dragster cars where you’d take, not just Corvettes, but you’d put big engines in the A bodies—all those Pontiacs and Olds that would rip the stones out of the street. Corvair couldn’t do that. I built one for my daughter, and she was afraid to drive it, because you go to shoot across the street, and it wouldn’t go, and even the blowers they put on acted like a slip and clutch. I built a couple cuties—the Monza, took ‘en to Florida, six carburetors on it, a lot of fun; but the car wasn’t timed right. Today, they’re good looking. I got one for George Russell [former G.M. vice chairman], he’s got it down in Palm Beach. He just told me the other night he’s got it all restored. Good styling—is classic, it lasts forever.

Q:      Did Ed come to you and say, “Bill, I’ve got an idea I want you to…”? How did that work out?

A:      Earl was still there. We went into a separate room—nobody knew anything about it. We worked just with Cole, and Ned Nickles was the designer, and we worked with him. Nobody in General Motors knew it. Earl liked Cole, and he liked Knudsen, Then, the funny thing, he liked DeLorean.

Q:      Really?

A:      Well, DeLorean was a good guy.

Q:      In those days he was fabulous from what I hear.

A:      No, Cole, he was a great dreamer. This last thing he had that would carry freight—this big—God, he’d get on to something 
like that, and he’d just go! And, the thing is, he’d be 95 years old before it ever was born. But, he was a great pusher.

Q:      The rear engine was quite a sensation in those days.

A:      Yeah.

Q:      How did that come about?

A:      Well, he saw the advantages of a Porsche and the Volkswagen, see, and actually the one thing that defeated it was the 
[Corvair] wagon. See, you had to have high floors in it for space under even the front-wheel drive. You know an interesting thing, under my direction, which Earl didn’t have much to do [with] before, but after Europe it got to be a big thing, they came to me and said, “Can you put a good designer in Opel?” And, they named one, and I said, “Well, he isn’t good, you’ve got to take the best man we got. Opel is second to Chevrolet.” So, I brought in [Irvin] Rybicki and let the overseas people talk to him, and I brought in [Chuck] Jordan, and I brought in [Clare] MacKichan, and they didn’t know what their interview [was], they just thought they were talking to them—the designers did, but they selected Rybicki because (A) he was in between. Jordan was too young, and they thought Mac was too old, he had kids in college, he didn’t want to go over there. Well, Rybicki didn’t want it. He turned it down, and so they chose Mac, and he wanted it, he liked it, and he was over there five years and did a hell of a job!

Q:      What was his full name again?

A:      Clare MacKichan. He’s retired in Florida now. How did we get into that—Opel?

Q:      The Corvair and the Opel.

A:      No. The rear engine—oh, I was studying with Vauxhall and Opel—future cars—and we knew we were going to make a small car here, so we made all layouts—conventional, front-wheel drive, rear engine. Front-wheel drive proved the best because a little engine could be turned crossways, which they’re doing now, and you had all that floor down here. In fact, the Toronado—Charlie Chayne and Earl—Earl wanted to build a front-wheel drive, and Earl saw it as a sports car, but Chayne was chief engineer, and he saw it as a wagon. The first that was ever built was an Olds wagon. Nobody ever saw it. I mean drawn around. Then, the Riviera was already out, so they took the Riviera chassis, and I remember going to the proving ground, and you could always see a Toronado ’cause the hood was that much longer. Wow, that looked spooky! But, we studied every way, and the front-wheel drive was the best. You knew it was coming. The rear engine is just not the way for people and passengers, luggage. You see, the big thing, you can’t put the luggage up front, because wheels turn, and your package space isn’t good. Funny, [at] Indianapolis they got rid of front-wheel drive after a few years. They said it wasn’t the best. On sports cars—I’ve got a model downstairs of the—I’ll have to show you my studio—of the Corvette the way it was going before I left. It was mid-engine, and they just couldn’t spend the money, but that’s the way to do a sports car because it handles. Indianapolis, anything, Formula 1, they’re all mid-engine.

Monza GT, Monza SS, Silver Arrows

Q:      Out of the Corvair came something which people—some commentators describe as one of your finest creations—the Monza.

A:      Yeah, that’s beautiful.

Q:      Could you tell us a bit about that?

A:      Well, I wanted to get something that would go up against the Mustang, and I wanted it to be more exotic. So, I built the one where the hatch came up, and show car, and it’s still a beautiful car, but it was heavy, so then I built the open job. They just couldn’t see putting that out, that’s all, but it went around to shows everywhere.

Q:      Does it still exist?

A:      Yeah. One nice thing they’ve done for me at the [G.M.] Tech Center, I’ve got like a museum over there in the warehouse. My Manta Rays, and all that. Up at Flint are the two Rivieras I did. I put that much on the hood, lowered the roof four inches.

Q:      [Alfred] Sloan Museum?

A:      Yeah, the Silver Arrow I and II.

Q:      I was going to ask you about the Silver Arrow. But, before we get to the Silver Arrow, tell me a bit more about how the Monza was created.

A:      Well, they just couldn’t get born. Cole was for it, everybody was for it—a sports car. But it’s funny, the corporation—now they’re seeing more of this, but there was a time when Roche wanted to wash out the Corvette. Financially it wasn’t—you know, they—now, I said to my wife, she said, “Don’t talk like that.” But, I said, “Kroger’s makes more money than Tiffany’s.” That’s why G.M.’s into all these funny-looking things. They’re not out for prestige, they don’t give a God damn about that—money, money!!! And, they would go from a—look at these conglomerates, that one that’s called Beatrice or something, and they make snow shovels and gems, breakfast food, dog collars.

Q:      And peanut butter.

A:      Oh God, that makes me sick. That just turns my stomach, and that’s what [Roger] Smith’s doing.

Q:      But you couldn’t get the Monza off the drawing board or off the prototype?

A:      No, we just made two prototypes.

Q:      That was marvelous.

A:      I loved it too.

Q:      It’s gorgeous. I saw it the other day, and I was really impressed.

A:      They’re at the Tech Center.

Q:      Good. What about the S. S.—the one that you had out at Elkhart Lake?

A:      Well, I made a lot of those. Well, first I made—the cheapest you way you could make one is chop the production job. So, I 
chopped it, put headrests on it, brought the pipes outside, and I was always making those. God, I had them coming out of my ears. Now, they haven’t made a show car since I left.

Q:      Haven’t they really?

A:      That makes me just—nauseates me. They made aerodynamic studies, but aerodynamics and I don’t get along. Hell, they were running at Daytona down there 200 miles an hour without that kind of aerodynamics.

Q:      Right. Was the Super Spyder, was that…?

A:      That was one.

Q:      That’s gorgeous—is that still available?

A:      That’s out there. Yeah.

Q:      That’s marvelous.

A:      I didn’t have anybody to report to. I’d just go make them. One time [James] Roche did say, “Before you do a show car, write what it ought to be.” I said, “I couldn’t do that,” because I could never finish—like writing a story, you change it all the time, and I said-why, I did one, I did a two-passenger Toronado. Oh, that was something. Put that in the show, but I learned from Earl to do these. You see, you have no committees. That’s how I sold a lot of stuff. As you came in to get on the elevator to go in my office—I only drove those kind of cars—so they’d look at it and say, “Jeez,” and I’d have them bidding on it. “Let us make them,” see.

Q:      The Fifties were good years for General Motors. You made a lot of money, you outsold Ford, except for maybe one year, and Chevrolet was riding high, did you still have that crew together that I read about? Clare MacKichan?

A:      Rybicki was Olds, and MacKichan was Chevrolet.

Q:      And Dave Holls?

A:      Dave Holls was Cadillac.

Q:      That’s a pretty good team, wasn’t it?

A:      Yeah. Then well, Mac retired, but Dave Holls is now got sort of—there’s Rybicki and then Jordan, and then I’d say Holls. 
Then, on the West Coast they’ve started a studio, you know, a design thing, run by
 [Henry] Haga, and Haga had run Opel for years. My plan was to have them go—I’d put them in Australia, then I’d put them in England, and Germany. The only thing is is one designer that I loved, Wayne Cherry—big, tall, handsome guy—he loved England, and he did not want to move. I was getting ready before I retired to get him to Australia, because when they came back, they were stronger.

Q:      Ford copied that technique.

A:      Yeah. So, anyway, God damn it, he married a nice English girl. My wife and I had dinner with them, and just when we were having dinner we got word that he was transferred to Opel, and as much as he loved England…Well, Opel’s the big fish. Vauxhall has just gone down like that. But, our chief designer at Opel was up by the Lorelei, you know that tower on the Rhine where they used to pay a toll to go by, and he was out on a cliff to take some pictures, and he dropped part of his camera, and he went over the safety line to get it and fell, got killed. So, they took Wayne and moved him to Opel.

Q:      Now, who’s that died again?

A:      His name was…no, no, this guy was head of Opel [design] [Gordon M. Brown].

Q:      Is [Clare] MacKichan still…?

A:      No, no, he’s in Florida, yeah, he’s retired.

Q:      He’s in Florida. And Rybicki?

A:      Rybicki is—has my job [Vice President of Design].

Q:      He’s there now?

A:      Yeah. That’s why you don’t hear about him, see.

Q:      Right, you were the one—he’s kept the low profile since you left.

A:      Dave Holls is right behind…no, Chuck Jordan is the head stylist under Rybicki.

Q:      And Dave Holls?

A:      Dave Holls is under him.

Q:      Good. So, you’ve a had good decade [1948-1958] and the immediate post-war decade has been good for G. M., they’re 
selling well, and the cars are very well accepted, and now it’s ’58, and Mr. Earl decides to retire. Was there any reason for it?

A:      Oh, 65, that’s a G. M. law.

Q:      Oh. That was it.

A:      He died when he was 75. My wife and I just had dinner with him, too, the next day had a stroke, yeah—Palm Beach—great guy, like a father to me. I was 23 when I started with him, and I was 46 when he turned it over to me. That was half of my life.

Q:      He never changed, he was always the same.

A:      Yup. Wonderful personality, powerful. He wouldn’t yes anybody.

Q:      The era of Alfred Sloan had passed just about this time, had it not?

A:      Well, yeah. You see, Sloan was such a dictator, and he ran it, always did.

Q:      Didn’t delegate much, except Earl.

A:      Well, it was delegated around, but he built this structure for the whole thing. A car for each and every person, purpose—Chevrolet, Pontiac, Olds. Then along came [William] Knudsen, and he was a fixit guy. He didn’t have it, [C.E.] Wilson, I can’t remember what he looked like. He didn’t have any personality. [Harlow] Curtice was flamboyant, but he was his own worst enemy ’cause he never wanted to come to Detroit. He had a Lockheed Vega that they’d fly back and forth to Flint, and he was so pro-Buick that he tried to make a million Buicks before Chevrolet did, and probably made the worst ’55 Buick, the worst Buicks ever made. They made so many of them. He was president then, too. But, he reminded me of my father. His Scotch, you know, reddish complexion, and I loved it. I personally thought the world of him, and, of course, when he shot Anderson (that accident at the club), he died right after. That took everything out of him.

Q:      It shattered him, didn’t it?

A:      Oh yeah.

Q:      Yes, right. So, who has succeeded Curtice then at this time?

A:      Oh, I’ve got a book—what I did, I went to another room down-stairs in one of the studios and put an engineer on this, took about a year and a half, and I’ll show you I’ve got everybody from Sloan, to directors, to the president, the chief engineers, the general manager, from when I took over to when I retired. And, I’ve got every car ’cause I knew I couldn’t, If I ever wrote a book, I couldn’t go back and ask somebody to dig it out, so I got it. You forget, you know, what year….[.]

Q:      Oh heavens, yes. You’ve taken over for Mr. Earl, and you’ve been working for him by then about ten/twelve years?

A:      No, 23 years. I came when I was 23, and was 46 when…

Q:      That’s right. What sort of a situation did you find at General Motors in terms of…?

A:      Well, I had my plan of what I was going to do. One thing I did, instead of a having a studio of ten people in one studio, I’d have five studios with two people. I mean, get more ideas, and I didn’t believe in a lot of people in a room because the imposters could get away with murder. You never knew who did what, and if there’s just a couple guys—l these special cars I did, just cut one or two designers. Sometimes only one, because you can’t have a melting pot and do a car. You pick pieces and put them together, but you can’t paint a watercolor in Grand Central Station, you know. You can’t have all that. I think there’s a lot of that today.

Q:      Did you find that it was different? Was the committee approach taking over about this time?

A:      Oh, when Earl left, they thought they had me, ’cause they couldn’t run him, so the first couple of years, I had to watch it. They were moving in on me, and I fought like hell, and I made it. I used to think I’ll never make it, but I did, and I had his picture back of me in my office. I thought I’ll never let you down, whether it was Murphy or who it was. I got the guys that loved cars like Knudsen and Cole to back me up. Even in John’s book, he tried to make the—John DeLorean. In his book, one of them, he said that he tried to get the Camaro and Firebird out of the A body, and I got Cole, and Pete knocked him down—Estes, and he said, “Mitchell fixed it.” I never got on [with him]. I didn’t like him. I didn’t like his aloof egotism. He’d sit in a meeting and open his briefcase and brush his hair, and he’d dress floozy, you know, and he called us the establishment. He was a queer guy. But, you know, where he changed—I’ll never forget this—in my dining room he’d come up, they’d all come up and eat at different times. I inherited that from Earl—beautiful dining room, push-button lazy Susan, control the music and everything. And, he’d been gone a week or two, and he’d go away being a vice president, and nobody knew where the hell he was! Nobody else would dare do that. But, he’d just like to flaunt this, and he was sitting to my left, and I was looking into the sun, and I couldn’t see him too well, but he was talking, and he always ate fast and left. I got up, I called Knudsen on the phone, and I said, “Bunkie, have you seen John?” I said, “He doesn’t look the same. It’s like—I don’t know, he’s like a guy that’s changed.” The Dorian Gray story, you know. I said, “What the hell is it.” So, went the other way—he had had his teeth pulled out and all screwed in, had his face lifted, and then he said that he’d been in a wreck. Well, hell, he didn’t—and when his face changed, he changed. He had an outfit in California who were making their commercial movies for Pontiac, and that’s when he met Kelley Harmon, and the guys I knew out there that got him into wearing shoes with no socks, turtleneck sweaters, he just changed. He just went the other way.

Q:      The people like Ed Cole, Pete Estes, and Bunkie Knudsen, you’ve made friends with and made them your professional…

A:      Yeah, real car guys.

Q:      Right, really car guys, and that got you over maybe the rough spots of Earl leaving and the…

A:      Yeah, and they backed me up against Kyes and some of those other guys.

Q:      What about Keyes’ boss, we mentioned briefly earlier that…

A:      Wilson? [C.E.]

Q:      Yeah, who went to work in Elsenhower’s administration.

A:      He was nothing. I can’t remember him.

Q:      Really, where had he come from? Did he come up through the ranks?

A:      He came from—was ahead of my time, so I don’t remember.

Q:      He must have come up from engineering, apparently.

A:      He was—oh, Deloo, I think. He was one of those guys, and I never knew a general manager that came from one of these outlying divisions that was worth a damn.

Q:      Really.

A:      That’s what scared me to death. No heritage of moving up.

Q:      Curtice was flamboyant, but he was a good car man.

A:      Well, he loved it. He knew sales, and he came to Earl, and he said, when he was head of Buick, and he was really a bookkeeper, you know, financial man, and he said, “I don’t know a damn thing about styling.” And, Earl made him. I remember I put the—the Cadillac studio was right across the hall from Buick in the Research B, and you could open up the doors and move cars in and out. We had that through fender on the Cadillac, and Cadillac didn’t want it. Earl gave it to Buick. And, after the war, the convertibles were hot. Buick and convertible became synonymous—a through fender and everything. And, the gun sight he took. Quite a few things we had that he took—the instrument panel, engine turning, and things like that.

Q:      And, then the Riviera, and after he’d made…

A:      Well, that wasn’t Curtice though, that was…

Q:      No, but I mean, you…

A:      Yeah.

Q:      Gordon and Donner were pretty much bean counters, weren’t they?

A:      Well, Gordon, let’s say, [was] conservative. The rumor is that— you see, when Cole was president, before that when 
Curtice was president, and Curtice was president and the chairman was (he came after Sloan from New York), he lived, he stayed in New York. You see, Sloan never would come out. He was in New York, and Bradley…

Q:      Oh, Albert Bradley, yes.

A:      But Cole ran everything, and they didn’t want this to happen again, so when they got Donner, they picked Gordon, and he could run Gordon. I remember the phone would ring, and Gordon would say, “Oh, God damn, he called me again.” He’d just run it from New York, but Gordon couldn’t get away with anything. So, then when Cole came on as President, for chief engineer under Gordon, he had a time, but when he became.president, [Chairman Richard C.] Gerstenberg couldn’t run him, but they liked each other. When they retired, they both said, it’s a shame. They were only together a couple years, but Cole was running it. The plan is never again to have—now the minute [Chairman Thomas A.] Murphy got in, he never got any publicity out of Pete Estes. But now with [Chairman Roger] Smith, he’s running the show, and [President F. James] McDonald, you don’t where he is. He’s a fixit guy, but it’s going back to the Sloan control.

Q:      The one man control?

A:      I remember one time I said to Donner (we were flying on a plane), and I said, “The difference between Ford and General Motors is Ford is decentralized, or General Motors is decentralized, and Ford’s centralized.” And he said, “Decentralized with centralized control.” Then, everytime I’d exalt the fact that what made Earl run it was a big man move, Donner wasn’t a big man, he’d always talk about Ernie Breech, but Ernie was small. I got along good with Donner, oh yeah.

Q:      Fred Donner?

A:      I’d go over Gordon if he wouldn’t do something.

Q:      I think Donner was probably a very fair person.

A:      Oh yeah. And I went to Europe a lot with him.

Q:      Did you?

A:      We’d swap ties and have some drinks, you know, dinners. Just wine, but he liked that. God, they tell me all that’s gone now—all those nice things overseas.

Q:      They cut them all out.

A:      One guy I wanted that Ford got was Lutz.

Q:      Bob Lutz?

A:      Bob Lutz was head of Fiat in Paris, and then he went with Opel as sales manager, and then he couldn’t get going like he 
wanted to ’cause he was under Earl’s dominance. Some of those old guys—he went with BMW, and then he’d get me motorcycles from BMW. They got a new one out now I’ve got to get a hold of. I gave a talk, with the chairman of—I had lunch with him and telling him about my philosophy, and he was writing it down on the tablecloth. I said, “I’ll send you a film—sound film,” and I sent one of the men over, and he invited all the Germans in, sent him to London, they did it. I did a film on the government trying to take over the industry.

Q:      Did you find in 1958 when you took over, you’d mentioned that the committee mentality began to impinge on your area. Were you able to hold them off?

A:      Oh, it took a little while, but I did.

Q:      How did you do that?

A:      I surrounded myself with people that wanted to go—Cole and [Semon "Bunkie"] Knudsen—the new breed. Oh, they were ready…’cause I had a seating committee that were all big, tall guys—tall uppers—and, you know, they were hell to package, and they went through in ‘61. God, we had to raise the coupes. They were awful. The next year we kicked them out, but there was a time there where I had a hell of a battle. Cause Earl, while he’s 6′ 4″, he was all legs. He could sit in a car and say, “Look, what are designing?” There’s some stories of if he had an accident, you know, and some guy would jump out of a car to come over, by the time he got out of the car, the guy ran, jumped back into his car, and he’d get out—he had a car, a low car, you know, and then he’d get up like that—Jesus Christ.

Q:      That is intimidating, isn’t it?

A:      Yeah.

Q:      Ernie Breech’s defection, if you can call it that, bringing a lot of G.M. people with him, did that cause any dislocation?

A:      Ernie was always liked by everybody, and he did a lot for TWA, you know, and that other stuff. He was a great man, and he got sort of sidetracked by G.M.

Q:      He was at Bendix, and he didn’t think he was going anywhere. So, he brought over Earle MacPherson as I recall.

A:      Yeah, yeah.

Q:      And Del Harder.

A:       Yeah, yeah.

Q:      And, of course, the design…

A:      He brought all the books—he brought the books right out of Fisher Body.

Q:      Really?

A:      He was with Fisher, what was his name? He was one of the top men he brought—he took the books and everything—how to run it, yeah. [Lewis D. Crusoe]

Q:      It became sort of a miniature G.M. in a way.
A:      And, then, well, we had a reverse when Knudsen went with Ford, and then Iacocca belonged to the club over here, and he didn’t want to be—I remember, I was down in Hawaii, and my daughters came over to see me, and I was staying in a place, a hotel on the ocean there—he was next door—Iacocca, and he swore this was my girlfriend, and I said, “It’s my daughter.” I’ll never forget, he’d go out in the ocean, and he grabbed a cigar, and he wouldn’t realize it till he got out there that he couldn’t swim. But, he kicked Knudsen out. No doubt about that.

Q:      Knudsen had a pretty good track record at Chevrolet and Pontiac as I recall, and with your help…

A:      There he was, I remember one day [James] Roche, who was president said, “Well, what made Knudsen leave? I said, “Jim, don’t you know. He and Cole just couldn’t be both, and when Cole got it, he lived in the story that his father was president once, he’s going to be president.” Cole didn’t like him, and I said to the guy that’s over me [Clifford Goad]—it’s not [C. L.] McCuen. Anyway, I said, “Who’s going to get the job.” He said, “Well, Bunkie’s lazy, and that’s it.” Bunkie was slow talking—he lived in the past a lot, “Now my dad did this.” He was born with a silver spoon, you see, and Cole wasn’t. Cole came up the hard way.

Q:      He was a good mechanic.

A:      So, Bunkie left, and I remember when it happened. I knew something was going on ’cause at the engineering policy meeting, he was half loaded, and he threw a book over to me, “Read the book,” and interrupted the thing, and acted funny, and he had left then. He’d seen Ford. But, I was in the middle when he was there because Cole and he were my buddies, and I’d always have to watch. He’d talk about Cole, and Cole would talk about him.

Q:      I think the board made a wise choice. I think Cole was far superior. Couldn’t Knudsen have stayed around?

A:      He could have stayed. He could have had it [GM presidency].

Q:      He could have had it eventually, yeah, but he was impatient. He was ticked off because he was passed over.

A:      Yeah.

Q:      Did either Cole or Knudsen have any impact on design?

A:      Oh, both of them. Knudsen loved cars. Now, I’ve often said this, with all the executives, and I always felt guilty come Friday, I’d have four or five special cars to take home. In fact, [Clifford] Goad—he was the guy I was thinking of. One time Goad called me in his office, and he said….

Q:      Now, who was he again?

A:      He was over the Tech Center. He was the guy they thought should have been brought in after Curtice. He said, “You know something, I got some people telling me that you take five and six special cars around your house on the weekend.” I said, “You’re damn right. You don’t see me playing golf. God damn, I bet I know more about cars than you or anybody else.” He shut up. He never said another word. But, getting back to that, I could have all these special cars, and I’d be ashamed. I’d say to people walking out, I’d say to Cole, “You want to use this weekend?” “No, I’m going fishing.” Now, Curtice, you could fix a car up for. We had the Italian [designer Pnin] Farina build a couple for him. We’d design them, and they’d build them. But, Knudsen would. He had special pickups, special colors, everything. He loved cars, but there weren’t many executives that liked the car, as a car. You’d have trouble fixing one up for them.

Q:      Ford had the Ghia connection, and you had the [Pnin] Farina.

A:      Yeah, but before Ford, Chrysler had Ghia, and Ford had—LaMans, those formula cars, racers. Ford finally bought him out, and he went and he bought Motagusi and some other motorcycle companies. What the hell was his name? He got his money from a wealthy American. He was in Argentina, and he worked for Ford and then went to LaMans.

Q:      But you had the Pnin Farina connection there for a time.

A:      Oh yes. Well, he’d build low. I loved that.

Q:      Some of these models I think I’ve seen.

A:      Well, he didn’t design them. We’d design them, and he’d build them, and what’s upset me since, is that, through Murphy, he’s building a new two-seater Cadillac [Allante]. *

Q:      Oh is he? I’ve heard about that.

Cadillac Allante

A:      And, to me, I purposely had Smith—he met me out at the Tech Center. We had a meeting. It was before I went to Florida last year. Irv told me, he’d been to Europe, and I said, “Why did you come back so soon?” He said he went over to look at this car. It’s all done, and he said he made one too, but his was only in clay. The other one was finished. It was Smith that did it. He wanted that imported champagne stuff. I’ve heard it isn’t any knockout, but I told MacDonald, I said, “You know, my budget was $58,000,000 when I worked there, and the esprit de corps that’s going to go out of that place when you got a little out-fit in Italy makes something.” Wayne Kady, who’s the head of Cadillac studio, it just broke his heart.
* Editor’s Note: The Allante was introduced in the summer of 1986 just before the GM belt tightening. It faces an uncertain future.

Q:      Are they going to bring it out?

A:      Yeah.

Q:      Yeah, they’ve said it. It’s set, huh?

A:      That’s why I didn’t go to the proving ground. I’m bitter about all—I didn’t want to say anything, hell. It’s another day and age. Harley Earl wouldn’t have stood for it, and I wouldn’t. I knew Farina, and I liked him, because he’s built couple rotors that MacKichan designed, but he did that Rolls Royce which was a hell of a looking thing.

Q:      Chevy was, of course, the big success story. What was behind that?

A:      What do you mean? Chevrolet car?

Q:      The car and the design and the acceptance.

A:      Well, the big story of—you mean the history of the Chevrolet?

Q:      Well, no, the post-war continuance.

A:      Oh, the Impala.

Q:      Right.

A:      Those cars. But, you know, the big story I think on Chevrolet is [that] old man Knudsen worked for Ford, and he didn’t get 
along, and he left and came to Chevrolet. Before he got to be president, he was head of Chevrolet. And, he said he knew he couldn’t make a car as cheap as Ford, but he’d make a better one, and that’s what made Chevrolet. It was a better car, better looking, and I think there was one year in between the whole thing there that caught them. Chevrolet just…but the story was make a better car, not a cheaper one.

Q:      Of course, at that time, Sloan and Knudsen were thinking about annual style changes, and more colors, more pizazz, and….

A:      I’ll tell you an interesting thing—you’re bound to get that some way or another—Earl’s chief engineer, [Vincent] Kaptur, showed him, before I came to G.M., and his son was my chief engineer. He came to Earl and showed him where Pontiac, Buick and Olds were within decimals of the same body, and that’s how the BOP body was born. Then, later on, Cole was head of Chevrolet; Pontiac, Bunkie Knudsen was head of; and the A Body, which Chevrolet and Pontiac had, they didn’t have the B Body. Buick, Olds and Cadillac, and they’d come out different years. Well, the year that they didn’t come out, they’d be Old, see. So, they got me in the corner and they made up—I did a design where you’d have a new roof and new pieces, but it would look new. It was more money than the budget would allow. And, Kaptur, he’s the son of the guy that did the BOP thing, he said, “You know, I think we can put Chevrolet in the B Body, and I’ll show you a drawing.” And, I’ll never forget, I looked at it, and I was not in charge then, Earl was down in Haiti, and I didn’t know what to do, so I called him on the phone, and he’s usually rough as hell, and he says, “Hello Bill, how are you?” He was half clobbered. He said, “I’ve got a little card in my pocket, and I pull it out every now and then to see who the hell I am.” I’ll never forget that, and that was a Sunday afternoon, and I called, he said, “Call Bud Goodman and Charlie Booth, the controller at Fisher, and tell them what you think about it.” It was a rainy Sunday, and Booth said, “My God, you’ve saved hundreds of million dollars.” I said, “Well, I’m modeling it.” Didn’t tell Cole or Knudsen—had them come over and look at it. They said, “That’s it.” So, we went to the proving ground. It was raining, and Cole and Knudsen had the cars that were at a decision, it was a proving ground board meeting—engineering policy meeting. The story was that they wanted approval to build this. So, we’re sitting in the car, and I’m sitting back with Charlie Chayne, and Bud Goodman is sitting up with Curtice, and he’d seen it. He said, “Bill, tell the boss what you got.” Curtice looked back, “What you got, Bill?” I said, “Well, I can show you how Chevrolet and Pontiac can go right into B Body.” “Where is it?” “My studio.” “Let’s go,” he told the driver. And, hell, Knudsen and Cole were standing out in the rain, and we left. They could have killed me. Oh, Jesus, they were mad at me, but he took one look at it, and that’s how Earl got on. And, right away Chrysler and Ford did it. Now, at first they looked like under-tooled, like a crab on a roller skate because the wheels [are] inboard, but then next year they widened them. With Bunk, the way we got the wide track….

Q:      The Pontiac?

A:      That we engineered as a wagon with the idea of putting the wheel on it, so the window could drop inside the wheel. Wasn’t for wide-track stability, and they bought the wide track story.

Q:      At Ford, as you well know, in the ‘Fifties, they were still under the thumb of body engineers, and I guess Gene Bordinat and maybe George Walker brought them gradually back to a concept of a design center. Did you have that same problem at G.M.?

A:      Oh, Earl had that all set. Oh, that was all set, I had no trouble there. Earl just took it all away. You’d still have negatives. Fisher would come over to look at something that we were going to build, and I say to the chief engineer, “How do you like it?” Well, you know, they didn’t come over here to say, “I like it.” They’d never entered it, sour [grapes] and “not invented here.” Carlos Dean, who was retired, and he and I have given talks together, and the head of Rolls Royce and Farina were out to have lunch with me one day, and Knudsen was there, and they’d just shown their $100,000 Rolls out at Palm Springs or somewhere. We’re having lunch, and the head of Rolls, who used to be with Vauxhall, and now he’s with Rolls, and he said, “Estes, how do you let Mitchell get away with what he does? He just does as he damn pleases.” And, Estes says, “You know, Christ if I don’t, he’ll blow his top!” And, Carlos Dean said, “You know that sign out here over Fisher Body on Van Dyke?” he says, “Well, he’s going to change that sign to God Damn Fisher Body!” But, my dad taught me one thing—you got to know how to call a guy a son of bitch and smile, and I never had any hate in it. I’d have an argument, and it was dinner that night, and the hell with it.

Q:      So, you were able to continue the Earl tradition of centralized design, a position that you continued to hold.

A:      When I left, they just moved in on the boards like they tried to move in on me when Earl left. Earl was the golden days, and I got the last of the golden days. Now, these poor bastards are terrible.

Q:      Have you talked to Rybicki at all?

A:      I did, but I can’t blame him for something. He hasn’t got it in him to do it.

Corvette

Q:      The Corvette, of course, is a fabulous success story. Can you give us a little…?

A:      Well, Earl—General LeMay was a good friend of his, and after the war all the Air Force bases had a hobby of racing and sports car things to keep them busy, and big companies would give them money to have tool shops and things like that. We fixed a jeep for Lamay with a Cadillac engine, and he’d drive it on the highway and had fun. So, he came to Earl one day and he said, “Why don’t you make the American sports car? You haven’t any.” They were driving Ferraris and Maseratis and Porsches. So, that’s what Earl came about when he, at the proving ground, he showed Bradley and Sloan some of this car. And, they said, God, he said, “Well, it’s fiberglass model. How can we make it?” They couldn’t see how they could spend the tool money. He said, “We could make it out of fiberglass.” That was the first fiberglass car ever made. It was shown in the Waldorf—everybody liked it—it went.

Q:      You’ve had, of course, you had done fiberglass prototypes for years, hadn’t you?

A:      No, that has just started.

Q:      Just beginning, okay.

A:      Before then our models were wood models, and then there were plaster models.

Q:      Plaster models, that’s right. So, really Earl pioneered the fiberglass model. There were some misgivings at first, were there not?

A:      Yeah, anybody had one, and then no dealer wanted to monkey with it—they’re not used to that. So, you’d have to go to a specialty shop, and even today the Corvette is looked upon as a, you know, it isn’t one—now it’s very high-tech engine and everything.

Q:      Aside from the Stingray, which you pioneered, who’s original design was the Corvette? Was that Barley’s?

A:      No. Well, the original design was his.

Q:      Right.

A:      Then it evoluted, and then like we got dual headlights, and that wasn’t fitting for a sports car. Then I’d change the back and change the front. Then, finally we did the whole car.

Q:      Do you think that’s one of the best things to come out of General Motors?

A:      Well, I think from a designer’s viewpoint, it’s what I like where you do the car, and then they buy it. You don’t committee a car. Now, a good example, the first Camaro and Firebird, I can’t remember what the hell they look like, because [Cliff] Goad, [James E. "Bud"] Goodman and [Jack] Gordon, I said, killed it. Each one said, “Shorten this, do this.” A three G engine. It’s a committee car. Where the new Firebird, the ones that ran up until this one’s come out, they ran for ten years, because I got the right dash to axle, the right cowl height, and it’s like good clothes. A woman with a good build is ageless, and this baby, it still looks good. I won my points. That’s where a designer has to have an engineer that’s sympathetic, because you can’t tailor something if you can’t get them to get the cowl down and get the dash to axle, and get things where you want them. That’s why at the Tech Center, in the styling is where it’s all settled—right there in the wind tunnels, it’s styling, not an engineer, because everything dictates what you’re—you can’t have a guy like they have give talks at Greenbrier on it. Years ago the chassis rolled in, and you’d decorate it. That’s what it was. You know, that’s the frame, what can you do with it? This way you can get in and say, “I want that down. I want that.” That was Earl’s way. He knew how to—and at the Engineering Policy Committee is where we’d settle it.

Q:      So, you really had to battle the engineers?

A:      Oh, all the time. In the later years, we got such respect from the engineers because if they had good engineering, they wanted to look good. The worst we had were sales—the sales people, because if something is selling, “Oh, don’t change it.” Oh, God damn, sales people were the worst!

Q:      The problem at Ford today seems to be the product planners. Did you have problems with product planners?

A:      Yeah. I had a great story, and you know [Donald] Petersen was a product planner, and I gave a talk once, he had to follow me, and he was a friend of mine, and I said, “Well, Mitchell introduced me all right.” I said, “You know, in life, if you’re not a good engineer, you’re not a good designer, you’re not good at sales, not good at research, don’t feel bad, you can always be a product planner!” And, in our place we had guys that couldn’t—it’s like Nader, you can always criticize, but, if you could product plan, and win, anybody could open a hot dog stand and be a millionaire, but you’ve got to have guts and go out and do it.

Q:      The ideal product planner can seize a project and bring it to the design center.

A:      Well, it’s good that—I say this, the only thing you can do, you can’t have a crystal ball, you can’t look ahead. Nobody has that kind of imagination. Dream, you’ve got to dream at it. The only thing you can do is find out what not to do. You find out what’s good, what’s not, but don’t make the same mistake again. But, you can’t look ahead. Hell, if you made a car the way the committee wanted, and then you went over here and made one on your own, they’d say, “Oh, that’s what I really meant.” My whole makeup, it just destroys me to see these committees—oh, and I’d rip them apart. “What the hell are you talking about, you dumb son of a bitch, you don’t know anything.” You know, like Nader, he couldn’t—he couldn’t even have a license.

Q:      He didn’t drive. Well, something you said reminds me that I wanted to ask you about those marvelous dream cars that you and Harley Earl dreamed of in the ‘Fifties and ‘Sixties. Tell us something about those.

Dream Cars

A:      Oh, we had them coming out of our ears.

Q:      Did you have a special studio for that?

A:      No, every studio did their own. We didn’t have special studios. In fact, one thing Earl didn’t have before I left, he didn’t have advanced design.

Q:      He didn’t? That’s interesting.

A:      His advanced design were the Firebirds, and you couldn’t use them. I mean, they were real exotic, way out; so I started getting an advanced design [studio] which they have today—there’s an advanced room for Buick, Cadillac, Olds, Chevrolet and Pontiac, and the divisions aren’t allowed in there. ‘Cause you want to dream without somebody looking over your back. Then, when they got ready, you’d move them up into a room, and that’s how the Firebirds are born, that’s how the Camaro, that’s how the Eldorado/Toronado/Riviera—all of them done that.

Q:      So you pushed that on a division basis rather than a…

A:      Because there’s two weaknesses: one, you hang on to something too long, like I said in ’58, you didn’t know what to do but decorate it with chrome. Then, ’59, we got panicked by Chrysler and made crazy things, and wings, and everything—ashamed to look at. So, you need advanced studios, because you may look at something, and then come in on a weekend, and say, “Ah, I don’t like that.” You’ve got to have time. I remember a Cadillac. This was not a show car that we were doing. That Sunday, it was being finished—the model—it was all approved, except for a final approval, and I was out driving with my family, and I saw a Cadillac coming at me. I thought, God, that new one we got hasn’t got that road value, and I drove on home, came right out to the Tech Center, went down in the shop, praying I was wrong. I wasn’t. I called Cadillac the next day, “We’re going to rip her apart.” They thanked me. You’ve got to look back.

Q:      The tradition seems to have disappeared, hasn’t it? I mean, the….

A:      Well, [ Strother] MacMinn wanted me to talk to a bunch of new students. I said, “No, no. I don’t want to do that. They’re down there working. That’s their job, and it’ll be out in a year and a half.” Chuck now is different, he’s got a Ferrari—Chuck Jordan. And the boy that’s out with the [G.M. Advance Design] school on the Coast [Hank] Haga. There’s Haga and Holls and Jordan. It’s sort of a three-way run at Rybicki.

Q:      Oh, I see.

A:      Chuck should have it for seniority. But, there’s another bad thing there in that organization—I’m giving you a lot of spilled milk here—but, [Howard] Kehrl is over all that, and he followed the guy that was head of Olds [Johnny Beltz], he died of cancer, young. I did the Toronado with him, and he gave it to me at dinner one night, he said, “That Mitchell, I’ve got to give it to him.” He said, “We couldn’t cool it. We wanted to open that front up, and he didn’t want—he sent some spies in the wind tunnel, and found out we could. We wouldn’t have had it today if it hadn’t been for that.” But Kehrl followed him when he died, and he’s a school teacher, and he’s now over the Tech Center— terrible. Unimaginative.

Q:      Tell us about the impact that—am I interrupting you?

A:      No.

GM Tech Center

Q:      Tell us about the impact that the [G.M.] Tech Center had on design.

A:      It was wonderful. You know, we moved out there, it was like moving from Titusville to Park Avenue. Everything changed. I mean, guys dressed better. The shop would put a tie on to go lunch. You know, and then that campus atmosphere. You’ve been out there. And, I’d look out of my office, there’d be a college campus—the young girls and guys walking around, the ducks in the water. All your work got better. The whole place went up like that.

Q:      And, of course, design was there too as an integral part of that?

A:      Oh, that’s—you see, that came—Earl went to Sloan. It was really his idea, and said, “We ought to get the hell….” You see, down at the General Motors Building, they could come in from anywhere. They could walk over. They could say, “I’m going to be over,” and they’d be there. Jesus, they’d be on your back. They’d show the cars up on the roof.

Q:      Oh, really?

A:      Yeah. So, Earl wanted that, so then Sloan said, “Well, I think you and Kettering ought to get together.” So, it became the two of their’s responsibility, and then as it went in, Fisher Body was across the railroad track, of course. I always wanted to bring the General Motors Building out there before it went to New York, and Gordon did. Of course, Donner was a New Yorker, and these other boys, but there’s nobody in New York. Now, Overseas [Division] is in Detroit. They brought them not only back from Europe—the main offices—but they’re in Detroit. The only time there’s a meeting, once a month is the meetings in New York, and you go down there, and otherwise those secretaries are sitting there looking at the wall. Terrible! And, we designed it and built it up, in styling, we did it.

Q:      They still have the general headquarters in New York, even though local activity is in Detroit?

A:      Yeah.

Q:      What about the foreign…

A:      Smith’s here though, he isn’t—Smith is here.

Q:      Yeah, he’s here. He’s the first one that we have. What about the foreign affiliation, did more design come out of your shop?

A:      Oh yeah.

Q:      Holden, Vauxhall and Opel?

A:      I said, first they came to me once and said, “We need somebody to run Opel,” and Rybicki didn’t want it, and [Clare] MacKichan got it. So, then they said, “We need somebody…” Davy Jones ran England, and we got him a top guy—he was English—”to follow him when he retired.” That was Wayne Cherry, and then [Hank] Haga—no, Dave Holls followed MacKichan, and then they wanted somebody in South America, and I put Lou Stier down in Brazil, and I put Joe Schemansky in Australia, and there was a new guy following him, and then we’d rotate them, see, it was good.

Q:      That worked out very well.

A:      Yeah, it did.

Q:      Vauxhall is coming up strong at the moment.

A:      Yeah, they need to, but they’ve had a lot of tough—and the big trouble is the English business, labor. I was there once—twenty-three suppliers are striking, you know—strike, strike, strike!! In England, you read that, it’s sad, it’s sick. I remember when Margaret Thatcher spoke, I’d go every year to there, it was like a SAE dinner—black tie, and big—250 people there, and they’d talk about their business. It was a big dinner, and Margaret Thatcher spoke once, and my wife said, “Now, be sure and get up there at the cocktail party, at the speaker’s table, get the mater.” And, there was no G.M. guy outranking me, so Henry Ford introduced me to her. And, I said, “You know, my wife is anxious to know what you’re going say as much as I am, and we’re very proud of you.” Well, she got up and lambasted me. She said, “How can your labor want more money when your company’s going broke? You got to get [your] back up.” She said what a man couldn’t say. So, afterwards I wrote her a letter, and I said, “You were terrific, and I want to thank you.” I said, “Would you send me a copy?” She sent me the tape, and I had Murphy and all of them go down there and hear it. England’s sick.

Q:      Opel’s a different kettle of fish, isn’t it?

A:      Yeah, the Germans are funny. With two nations that were our enemies—Japan and Germany are global. The Germans are having a little trouble now too.

Q:      Are they?

A:      Yeah. But, you could see it. A German is a German, and the Japs are like that.

Q:      What cars did you have for Bob Lutz?

A:      Well, I was going to tell you. I always liked Lutz at lot, so when he was [at] BMW, and he was wanting to get out of it, he was hard to work with the Germans—really, language thing—although he can speak Swiss, he can speak any of them. So, I got a hold of Estes, and one thing about—I like Pete, he’s a personal friend of mine, but he’s a gonna be a guy, like a party, leaving, he’ll stand at the door and talk all night, you know. He’s not a pusher, and I said, “Get Lutz. God damn it, he’s in New York now.” I had Lutz on the phone, and he [Estes] was going to talk to him, and Lutz says, “I can’t talk right now, somebody’s coming in.” In his hotel. That turned out to be Petersen. Petersen flew him right here to meet in Henry Ford’s office, and that was it.

Q:      That was it. Apparently Henry likes him. He’s one of his champions. [1984]

A:      Well, Petersen liked him. They would always talk, but then he said, from what I read, I haven’t talked to Petersen about it since, but it seems that he riled them over there. He’s a tough guy—he’s an Ed Cole type. “Get off your ass, or get out,” and that’s what he said, and some of them got out. So, here he is building a house out here in Dearborn, and he has to go back and forth, and he has to stay over there, and he’s at a social disadvantage. His wife’s German, or Swiss, and she’s not an extrovert. She’s not like—she isn’t like Petersen’s wife or Red Poling’s wife. I think, my wife does too, she’s his second wife, she’s not taken to him—helping him.

Q:      That’s a big part of it.

A:      My second wife, she’d go to Europe, go anywhere with me. It’s part of—it’s a battle.

Q:      In the time we have left, Mr. Mitchell, can you give us a somewhat detailed discourse on the design philosophy of Earl and Mitchell?

A:      Yeah, I think design—I’d put it this way, in a business cog, it’s as equally important as sales, advertising, engineering, finance or anything. Should be as strong a message as to what sells a car. A car is a silent salesman. You look at a Cadillac, you don’t know who the hell runs Cadillac or anything else. It’s an image, and the designer should be given more authority, more—don’t have somebody get reports of what sold last year, what people like. No way—a designer’s an artist. I’ve got some plaques down here. In the Roman Empire, nobody remembers their financial peak. The Romans and the Greeks, it was the artists, and you leave something to history, and all of a sudden, just like architecture, houses are all—the only building that looks [like] any history in New York is the Chrysler Building. They are boxes. You go to New York, you go to Europe, bridges are getting that way. So, the artist can leave something. I looked at that classic car show out there. I said to some of the designers, “God, I hope this rubs off on them.” Earl would talk about an emblem that Cartier would make, you know, and the paint, the trim, and the—I looked at this new Corvette that I drove down to the show.

Q:      What did you think?

A:      Now, I’ve got special cars here with carmine leather, and beautiful paint. That square box is pretty near plastic. God, I reached to open the door, it’s like a box. The instrument panel—black plastic—Dracula’s dressing room! My wife said, “I don’t want to sit in here any longer and look at it!” I saw some boys down in Palm Beach, where they painted my Corvettes up, that had money, that had them re-do them—wood paneling, nice soft—but the car, it rides like a truck.

Q:      European suspension?

A:      Well, it’s all right to go at Indianapolis, but you can’t take a lady for a ride. And, those big taillights, they’re for A. J. Foyt. I told them, I said, “Women drive these cars, and it ought to be—I’ve a Jaguar down in Florida, a convertible, beautiful, smooth, nice, fast as hell, but it ought to be nice. No, this is too, too crude.

Q:      Where did they go wrong and how?

A:      It’s engineered. They asked me, and [Zora Arkus] Duntov and some other lady that did a survey on Jaguars, some agency on the outside. Chevrolet wanted an outside input on how to sell it. I said, “Don’t talk about styling, just eliminate it, don’t talk about it, it isn’t a style car, it’s a machine car.” There’s where the engineers are running it. Earl would never let that—I would never let that [happen], and I condemn the guys for it. I said to Chuck, or Irv, and to [Jerry] Palmer (the Chevrolet Corvette designer), “Do like I did, don’t argue with them, go make one of your own.” They said, “Jesus.” Make it for yourself.

Q:      It’s all compromise now.

A:      Yeah.

Q:      Is there anything in the modern trend that you approve of? Now, I don’t mean to say that sarcastically, but you did say that aerodynamics wasn’t your bag.

A:      Well, I like aerodynamics if it looks good. You can take it, but where the hell are you going to run at 155 miles an hour?

Q:      Germany [is] about the only place.

A:      Well, they talk safety all the time. No, I think cars should be beautiful, and you ought to make a car—somebody—Ford, Chrysler, G.M.—somebody’s going to bring out one, and they’ll say, “Wow, look at that,” and that’ll get them all out. Until that happens, they’re a bore. There’s more cars than there’s ever been, but whether it’s Japanese, German, Italian, I’ve got the books, I’ve looked at them, and threw them out. I can’t see anything going in them. That’s why these older boattail, beautiful things that are out there—yeah, that’s the stuff—Duesenbergs.

Q:      You must have enjoyed yourself on the weekend—this weekend [at Meadowbrook's Concours D'Elegance].

A:      Oh yeah.

Q:      Did you run into any of your old acquaintances?

A:      Oh yeah, that’s what I said, “I hope some of this rubs off on them.”

Q:      Gordon Buehrig said he saw you out there.

A:      Oh yeah, I know—we’ve been—we were at a thing up at St. Ignace—custom body show.

Q:      Oh yeah, you had a great time up there.

A:      Come on down, and I’ll show you my place down there [Florida].

Q:      I’d like to. One more question—General Motors seems to have succumbed to the pressures from Europe as Ford has. This 
could have been a good thing if they had handled it right, don’t you think in terms of taking the best of aerodynamic styling?

A:      Oh yeah. But, this potato, I think the Ford [Thunderbird styling] looks like a cake of soap, you know, there’s nothing like 
anything good, like music, it’s got to be accent, like an airplane, you’ve got to have that windsplit soft, not rubbery. I come back—I’ll say this, for years you can tell a Thunderbird a mile away. Now, I see it [with] my wife driving back from Florida, “What the hell is—you know that thing, that rounded-off thing?” That’s a Thunderbird.

Q:      Well, I think their argument is that they want to get away from angles.

A:      Well, it isn’t the case of angles. You can’t—that’s philosophy. That’s bullshit. Make a painting. You don’t describe a painting. Either you walk in and like it—you can’t say, “Well, I put the house over there because the light would hit it.” Hell, it’s got it or it hasn’t. Those cars out there at Meadowbrook, they’re all statements.

Q:      But, basically, they said they wanted to get away from the boxy look—they’d had it.

A:      Another thing they did, they said the door opens into the roof. Well, I had that on the Corvette—one car—but that’s back to the one-piece door. You get in there, the pillars are that thick. We went for years to get—that’s how the hardtop was born—to have little, thin upper. Now that—you get inside and stick your head around, all these portholes, it’s going back—heavy, rounded.

Q:      If you were asked, as I’m sure you are, to talk to students of design or design students, what would you tell them?

A:      Well, we need imagination—see the future—new ideas. That’s why they hire—what gets me, here General Motors has got that school over in California, they’re thinking of getting one in Europe, what the hell good is it if you don’t get it out at the top? There’s a vice president of sales at General Motors [who] once said, “You can have all the creative people in industry, but if the man at the top doesn’t unlock the door, you can’t get out.”

A:      Right, and that’s really the key.

Q:      Yes sir.

Q:      Well, thank you Mr. Mitchell. It’s been a marvelous interview.

A:      Well, it’s easy to talk about what you like, what’s going on. I’m really heartsick that—and I don’t want to say anything, my days are over, but I know Earl would roll over in his grave.

Editor’s Note: In late 1986, Chuck Jordan succeeded Irv Rybicki as Vice President for Design, who retired, and Dave Holls succeeded Jordan. Ken Pickering became administrative head of the Tech Center succeeding Howard Kehrl, and Jerry Palmer was moved into Advanced Design.

Styling The Look of Things in Gallery Format

[Show as slideshow]

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].

Mitchell and Earl

Q: Tell us about the atmosphere at the design center in those days right after the war—the divisional setup as far as design work involved. Who were the studio heads?

A: I don’t know that I can remember them all. Anderson was the chief designer of Chevrolet at that time. Pontiac was run by a chap named Robert Lauer who was essentially an engineer and not a design artist. He later became Harley Earl’s man in charge of engineering in the styling section. Bill Mitchell ran Cadillac, Art Ross ran Oldsmobile, and Henry Lauve ran Buick when I became a member of the Cadillac team.

Q: Jules Andrade, was he a…?

A: I don’t know what title he carried at the time, but he was Harley Earl’s man on surface. Jules’ background was in sculpturing. He wasn’t an artist as such, but he had a good eye for surface and 3-D. Earl kept Jules close to him when we were discussing surface and highlights and how a surface should flow or should not twist. That was his expertise.

Q: Was Howard O’Leary still with the company?

A: Howard O’Leary was Harley Earl’s administrative assistant and stayed apart from the design process all together.

Q: There you are a fledgling designer working with Bill Mitchell at Cadillac…?

A: That’s right, and I was getting the feel for what happens in a General Motors’ divisional studio.

Cadillac Studio

Q: You were at the top of the line studio?

A: I started in the Cadillac studio, and the people in design called members of the Cadillac studio the “Blue Bloods” at the time. We were the royalty doing this top-line automobile, but I hadn’t done anything for General Motors at all. A year had passed, and I’d contributed nothing but artwork up on the walls. But I can remember the very first thing I ever did that became part of the Cadillac automobile. That was back in the days when, if the customer wanted backup lights—little, pointed beehive spheres—they were bolted to the back of the car. We were doing the 1950 Cadillac. The car had fins in the ’48. We carried those fins in ’49, and, in ’50, we were looking to change the fins. I made this sketch of a backup light integrated with the taillight. The taillight flipped up and revealed a gas cap that was concealed under the taillight. Bill looked at the sketch, and he said, “Jesus, I like that. Let’s do that in the clay.”

Q: That was yours?

A: It was mine, and it was the very first piece I ever sold. I have a large photo of that car in my office at home along with a montage of all the vehicles I had influenced as a designer. The vehicles that have been produced while I was vice-president are in picture-frame form. I want that as a record. That was the first contribution, and then there were many. Like a ball player who might hit .150 for two or three seasons, I suddenly became a .350 hitter. I’d get a face here and body side there and an upper in another program, and I was moving at a pretty good rate. But they had a policy—a correct one at the time—that five or six years for a designer in any one room was enough. He ought to work on another product with another image and test his skills there. So I was moved on to….

Q: Before we leave Cadillac, [can I ask you a question]?

A: Sure.

Q: How was Bill Mitchell to work for? What kind of a boss was he for a young designer?

A: He was a terrific boss. Very inspirational. He gave you a lot of room to move in—didn’t hold your hand. I can remember that first day when I walked in there. I put my gear away, and he said, “You’re ready to go to work?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “See that layout of a full sized Cadillac right there?” They had it all drawn up on black paper on a full-size board. I said, “Yeah, it’s a good-looking car.” He said, “I want you to illustrate it.” I said, “I’ve never done a full-sized rendering.” He said, “Don’t give me your excuses, just go up there and illustrate it.” If the man didn’t worry about destroying the piece, I thought, my God, I can do it. He gave you that kind of confidence. So I did the illustration, and it wasn’t totally professional, but I did get through it. As a result, I gained confidence in the medium, and, inside of a year, I was one of the better men in the studio doing full sized illustrations. Bill was a terrific boss. He was also very enter taining. When the room got quiet, he’d go into a one-man show. [It was] like you [were] in a theater on Broadway, and [he would] do this skit. It would have everybody in the aisles for a half hour, and it was a good lift. He [was] that type of personality.

Q: It broke the tension?

A: It broke the tension. You were refreshed as a result and went back to work.

Q: Do you think it was a calculated device of his?

A: I don’t know whether it was calculated or Bill, himself, needed to cut loose. We just enjoyed the performance. I have no idea. He never said to me that he did that to lift the troops. It was, perhaps, bore­dom on his part, and he needed to do this to refresh himself, and we gained the benefit. But he was a good man to work for—no question about it. I can’t fault Bill in any way, shape or form. He was fair, he was just, he gave the creative staff a lot of room, and he wouldn’t sort out your work. When you did something, he’d put it up on the wall and say, “Let’s have a look at them and then we’ll decide what direction we’ll take.” Yes, I enjoyed my five or six years in Cadillac very much. It was a worthwhile experience. I gained a lot from it.

Q: Did Mr. Earl come in the Cadillac studio often?

A: Mr. Earl came in frequently. On some occasions, he made several visits a day if we were in the heart of a program and it wasn’t moving to his satisfaction. Or there might be something radically wrong with the face of the car as far as he was concerned. He’d live with you. I can recall Mr. Earl coming in—I can’t remember the year when we were doing a Cadillac with a vertical sash on the rear quarter panel in chrome. That’s the way it wound up, but when we were searching for a theme, nothing seemed to satisfy him. So one day he came in after lunch, and he said, “Fellows, I’m not leaving until we find it.” There were five designers in the studio at the time, and I happened to have the lead desk. He’d sit right on the bench with you, and here’s the Vice-President of General Motors, 6′ 4″, 250 pounds [with] little Irv sitting there. I picked up a pencil, and I started sketching. I’d make about three lines, and Earl put his big hand on the pad, wrinkled up the paper and threw in the basket. He looked at me: “Let’s try again.” So everything was winding up in the basket. When he decided this fellow isn’t going to get it, he’d move down to the next desk. Everything wound up in the basket that day. But inside of two or three days, we found the solution to the problem. Once Earl was satisfied that you were on the right track, he’d move down the hall into another room which was having a problem, such as Olds or Buick.

Q: You would call him an instinctive reactor, rather than a finished designer—Mr. Earl?

A: He had a gut feeling for what he wanted—absolutely. It was instinctive, but we have to remember that when I compare those days to what we face today, it was relatively simple back then because each of our divisions had one car. The time frames were stretched. When I was in the Cadillac room, we’d be sketching for five/six months, and suddenly a plaster body would move into the room, which Mr. Earl did in a room he called the Body Development Studio. It was everything from the windshield back except for the rear quarter panels—or rear fenders in those days. All the studio had to do was create the face of the car, the rear quarter panels, the taillights, put bumpers on both ends, and you were finished. The process is entirely different today. A division like Chevrolet has eight or nine cars and trucks, and we’re into com puters and all sorts of other techniques. The business is very complex as a result, and we’re working night and day in this place. When I started in at General Motors, we had 400 people on the staff. Today, we have 1367, and we’re under-staffed. We can’t get everything done they’re asking us to do.

Q: The impression I have was that Mr. Earl’s personality was such that he got his way largely through the strength of that personality in terms of….

A: To run the [design staff] and deal with the general managers?

Q: Is that a fair statement?

A: I think his personality played a large part in Earl getting what he wanted out on the street. I also think that back then, as well as today, the design staff were the experts. We’re the tailors in the cor­poration, and I’ve worked with a lot of general managers in my career. I’ve been here forty years doing this work, and I’ve met a few who had reasonable taste and could understand what we’re doing. I’m not faulting these people when I say that, because their skills are in another area. They may be engineers, they may be sales people, they may be manufacturing people running car divisions. I don’t think they should be expected to understand the aesthetics as we do. We spend a lifetime at it. Yes, it was Earl’s personality and the fact that Earl and his team were the tailors in the corporation. They never doubted what we were trying to do. Even today they say, “Are you convinced Irv—you and your team?” “Yes, we’re convinced. That’s the way, the car should be.” “Fine. We’ll do it.”

Q: One more question from that era. How did the body engineering fit into the product development scheme at that point?

A: Which body engineering do you have reference to? We have had an engineering group here in the building on the [design] staff.

Q: Did General Motors, in those days, have a team approach where body engineering and design sat down and worked out the product outline—the Package?

A: We had a body engineering group in that styling section. We have today. It’s called the Vehicle Packaging Group. Back in those days, we had one in the building, and there was Fisher Body, of course, and they were the people we were going to release the body to. Yes, they had a body engineering group that worked on glass drop and structures. To give you some broad perspectives of where new ideas came from, I can remember back in the ‘Forties or ‘Fifties when Earl had the idea that he wanted to do a steel car that looked like a convertible, and it shouldn’t have a number two pillar in it. The problem became how do you drop the glass in the four-door sedan if it doesn’t have a pillar and get by the locks and door releases? Fisher Body said it was impossible—you couldn’t build a car like that. So Earl went to our body engi­neering group, and we had a German chap there who spoke with a heavy German accent—he was the leader of the band. His name was Freddy Walther. He sat down with a group, and they worked out this articulated glass drop. It dropped at the back, and the nose dropped in and cleared the door. We put a working mockup together, and Earl, with a big smile, invited the Fisher people over. He said, “I want to show you how impossible that is. Demonstrate Freddy.” And there it was. So the four-door hardtop was invented at the styling section back then and not at Fisher Body or anywhere else. It’s like hidden wipers at the base of the windshield. We created a lot of those devices in this building.

Q: That’s good to know that you had your own in-house, body engineering group.

A: Earl did this. He didn’t have it in the beginning, but he did this so that he would not find himself at the mercy of the production engineers. He felt they were never reaching out far enough, and they were always comfortable with what they understood. So the opportunity to do something new wasn’t in that group, and he made the decision—a conscious decision—to go out and hire what he called far-out, creative engineers that are willing to take the risks that the designer is shooting at, and we maintain that group today. It’s absolutely necessary. As a matter of fact, people downtown on the 14th floor say, “You’ve got to have them, Irv, because you guys are always pushing technology right to the very edge.” And that’s part of our responsibility of how to create new and interesting products.

Q: You don’t want to stand still, obviously?

A: You can’t stand still in this business. Hell, it was easier then than it is today. Our competitors are all over the world. This is an international market. It isn’t domestic any more. We don’t often think about people in Dearborn or Highland Park , we’re looking at Honda and Toyota , Mercedes, BMW—they’re all here.

Oldsmobile Studio

Q: You’ve had an interesting eight years at Cadillac?

A: Six, then I moved on to Olds. I was in the Oldsmobile studio about five years.

Q: Who headed that up?

A: Art Ross. Art was a terrific designer. He is the chap that created the broad hood on the Cadillac. Up until that time, all were quite needle-nosed, and he was working for Bill Mitchell in the Cadillac room. I think that development alone got him the job as chief designer of Oldsmobile. He’s a very creative chap. I learned a lot in that room.

Q: The Oldsmobile was a good line in the ‘Fifties?

A: Good line. Always has been and still is. They build quality products, and they have a good reputation up there. We had some good designers in that room, and if you can’t absorb things like a sponge…. First of all, it is necessary for an individual to be totally honest with himself and understand where his weaknesses are. If you do that, and you look around you and see where the strengths are in other people that can plug your weaknesses, you focus on those individuals. I learned a lot that way. I didn’t have the tools that a lot of young people had, but I had the desire to learn, and my experience in Cadillac, Olds and Pontiac brought me to a point where I became a pro fessional designer. I moved out of Olds after about five years to become the assistant chief designer in Pontiac.

Motorama

Q: Before we leave the Olds [studio], do you remember any specific model or part of a model that sticks in your mind that you’re very proud of?

A: Back in those days, we were doing a lot of Motorama cars when I was in Olds. We’d work on the production programs during the course of the day, and in, the evening hours, we’d work on these Motorama vehicles, I can remember a very hilarious incident that took place in Olds.

Q: Could you describe the Motorama setup? What it was and what G.M. was trying to do with it?

A: We were trying to nudge the future with these vehicles, entertain the public with these efforts, learn from them, and get the public to focus on General Motors.

Q: So, usually, they were advanced vehicles?

A: They were advanced vehicles. What we believed might happen in five to ten years didn’t necessarily track in that direction, but it does give you a feel for where you may want to go. But we were doing this Olds. I can’t remember which Olds show car it was—there were four or five of them—and the face of the vehicle was a problem. That evening I got back from dinner, and I sat down with the studio engineer. We’re going over all the dimensions on the face of the car on the drawing—headlights to the ground, bumper to ground, header bar to ground. Mr. Earl dealt with the numbers, and I just about finished with the studio engineer when Harley Earl came in. He pulled up a chair, and he sat down in front of that Motorama car, and Art Ross was still out at dinner. So I walked over, and he said, “Young man, get me the dimension from the header peak to the ground.” I gave him the dimension, and he looked up at me, and he said, “Now I’d like center of headlamp to ground.” I gave him that dimension. He asked for still another—bottom of bumper to ground—and I gave him that number. He finally turned to the studio engineer, and he said, “Come over here. I want you to check these numbers for me. I think he’s guessing.” They went over to the engineering drawing, and Frank gave him all the numbers, and they corresponded with mine. Of course, I’d just gone through the drawing, and I knew them. I might of made a few points with Harley Earl right there, but that was coincidence. We made some adjustments in the front end, and that front end went into the Motorama as it was done that evening. When Art Ross got back, we had it locked up. I brought him up to speed. That happened often.

Q: He didn’t mind?

A: No, he didn’t mind. Not if Earl dictated that one of these were to go. Mr. Earl did have complete control of the aesthetics within the staff because it was simpler to do then. There were five cars—one for each car division. If anybody, sitting in this office I occupy today, tried to do the very same thing and go out in each of these studios—there are 33 of them in the building now—we had five back then—and design every automobile, it couldn’t be done. Secondly, you don’t build a strong staff by doing it yourself. You’ve got to inspire the people and create the right environment and let these young chaps go out and do it. If they make a mistake, you’re going to tell them about it. “Cover that up, and let’s start over, gentlemen. That’s not the direction we’re going to take.” But back in Earl’s day, it was an easy thing to do. I might have done it that way myself in that environment. Today we’re a people world. You’ve got to give everybody a chance to do their thing. You’ve got to push responsibility downward. That was the outstanding incident for me in Olds, and I’m certain if I thought about it at great length, I could come up with many [more], but we’re digging into a long-gone past, and my memory doesn’t serve me very well at the moment.

Q: Do any of the Motorama cars that you were particularly fond of stick in your mind as something you had contributed to?

A: I contributed to a few, yes. There was a Cadillac LeMans conver tible. It was called LeMans. I did the instrument panel and the interior in that car, and I was pretty proud of that. Back then, no one designer did an entire automobile. You did a piece here and a piece there if you were fortunate enough to get it in. Today, it’s a dif ferent story. The present Camaro was done by one chap in our building. He did a full-sized illustration on his own, and we took one look at it and decided that was the direction we were going to take, and it evolved into the car you see on the street. But it didn’t work that way in days gone by. My stay in Pontiac was very short. I think it might have been something like a year when Harley Earl decided he wanted a change in the assistant chief designer [of Oldsmobile]. I cannot recall his name now. I think it was Don Hoag. He wanted someone else in there because Art Ross was, at times, a very difficult individual to work for, and this chap couldn’t handle it. Earl called me to this office and said, “I’d like you to go in there, and here are the reasons why.” I said, “I know, Mr. Earl. I’ve worked for Art Ross several years as a designer.” He said, “Do you think you can handle it?” I said, “I certainly can,” so he moved me in there, and I spent about a year and a half as Art Ross’ assistant. Then Earl made a change in Pontiac, and he transferred me back into Pontiac as chief designer. Now, that was the shortest tenure as chief designer of any individual in our business.

Pontiac Studio for an hour and a half

Q: Really?

A: Yes. I was chief designer of Pontiac for an hour and a half, and that’s it. I moved into the office, and I was unpacking. An hour and a half has transpired. I didn’t even didn’t get a chance to go out and talk to the people in the studio. I received this call from Earl to come up to his office. He’d just gotten a call from Lansing . The general manager of Oldsmobile was extremely unhappy that the chief designer, Art Ross, and his assistant had been moved out of Olds design, and he wasn’t going to buy that. If there was to be a change in the chief designer job in Oldsmobile studio, he wanted Irv in there. So, Earl looked at me and said, “Are you prepared to pack up and move back into Oldsmobile?” I said, “Yes, sir, if that’s where you want me.” So that was my tenure in Pontiac–one hour and a half. I packed my gear, went back into Oldsmobile, and I ran that room for five or six years. We did a string of cars….

Q: What years were these?

A: We were wrapping up the ’59, at the time. Must have been late 1956 or early 1957. That was the bizarre time of fins and tubes and rockets, and we went into more sophisticated vehicles in the ‘Sixties. Earl had retired just shortly after I became chief designer of Olds. That was in 1958. Bill Mitchell took over, and we wrapped up those models. When we had those on the road, most of us decided we were moving away from automobiles into other forms that none of us really understood. So Bill, in his wisdom, decided we’d better start cleaning up our act. We got rid of the fins and started moving back toward auto motive shapes. Bill was a fellow who liked hard-edged cars, and he had to have creases in fenders and uppers, so we were taking a different direction. Earl came from the school of round, and Bill Mitchell was more toward the shear. He called it it the shear look, and we moved down that path through the ‘Sixties and into the ‘Seventies.

The Fin Era

Q: Can I ask you to backtrack a bit and give us an idea of how the fin era evolved as you saw it at General Motors?

A: The fin, as I saw it in the industry back then, evolved as a result of World War II and some of the wild aircraft that happened at the time. I know that Harley Earl had a warm spot in his heart for the P-38. It was a twin-fuselaged aircraft, single-wing fighter. There was a canopy in the center between the two fuselages [that had] dual fins.

He took a-team of chief designers out to Selfridge Air Force Base with him about the time they were getting into the ’48 products, and what evolved was a ’48 Cadillac. It was the first car with what you might call a fin. Then as we moved into the late ‘Fifties, it started getting out of hand. Earlier, our friends in Highland Park came out with some fins that were a foot and a half over the fender crown lines, and that put fear in the G.M. design staff, so we did wild fins, rockets and tubes. I often sat back when all of this was happening and wondered where we would go from there, because that was pretty far out. I never saw an automobile [designed] that way. Recently, driving home from the office down one of the mile roads, I happened to [see] a vehicle setting on a lawn with a For Sale sign in it. It was the 1959 Chevrolet with the wings and the oriental eye shapes for taillamps, and it is bizarre and gross-looking by today’s standards. It appeared that way to me at that time, but this was the mood and the trend within the building, and there was no way anyone was going to stop it.

Q: Was Earl in sympathy with it?

A: He was pushing in that direction. He wanted the lead. He wanted to do something well beyond what our competitors were doing. We tried vehicles with the headlights mounted in the center and rounding off in the ends, and they looked like a train coming at you. The sky was the limit then. We toned it down, fortunately, [from] what we were doing in some of our [design] rooms, but, nevertheless, it was still pretty far out. However, the public bought the vehicles. I wondered just what you can sell out there. We come from another school today. It has to be in good taste. If it isn’t in good taste, there’s no point in doing it.

Q: Earl had taste, but he also had a vision that went beyond good taste.

A: You have to ask yourself, Dave, after you spend a great deal of time in this career, whether you might not lose sight of where the future is. I caution myself each day about this and spend time going through the rooms looking at what the young people are doing. What are they saying with their work, because they are the future? What Irv believes may belong to the era of the ‘Fifties, ‘Sixties, ‘Seventies and early ‘Eighties. Now I’ve got to focus in on what the young people are telling me with their work, and I don’t want to get caught up leaving automobiles behind with Earl’s fins. So we’re looking at what the young people are telling us and experimenting with in our advanced rooms. We’re finding that the young chaps today are far beyond us when we came into this business—they’re bright, they’re creative, they’re hard working, they’re dedicated, they’re fun to work with.

Q: So, you are in 1958. Earl is retiring, Bill Mitchell is taking over, and you’re pretty much his chief assistant at that point?

A: Bill takes over. Then Bill, not too long after he was running this place, decided that one of our operations in Europe—Opel—was being run by a few German engineers who weren’t doing the job. So he sold the corporation the idea that we ought to take an American designer and put him over there as director. Then an Opel management team came through the building one day, and I thought it was just a casual visit, because they visited all the rooms. They came into Olds. I took them around the room, and we chatted and had a lot of fun. A month later, I’m invited to go to Opel and run that operation.

Q: What was your reaction?

A: I thought it was fine until one day Bill asked me to go downtown and talk to Hoaglin—his son is now president of Saturn Corporation [1985]—who was Executive Vice-President in charge of overseas opera­tions. I sat down with him, and when he outlined for me what it was they wanted me to do, I wasn’t too sure of it because they were offering this as a career opportunity to spend the rest of my days in Germany designing Opels. When I went back to my wife and children, they were opposed. They were not about to spend the next twenty years in Germany. I had to bring that message back to Bill, and he was not very happy about it. But the Opel people came back and selected the chief designer of Chevrolet—Clare MacKichan. Clare took the job, but he took the job because Bill had sent me back to tell Mr. Hoaglin that no designer in our organization was going to take it on as a career. A service stint of three to five years would probably be practical, but that most of our people would want to come back here, and that’s what they offered MacKichan. I thought if they offered me that, I would take it, but they never came back to me a second time.

Q: There was always tension when you refused Bill’s suggestions?

A: Yes. I had a lot of people tell me that it was going to affect my career and the future, and that I had made the wrong decision. But if that’s the way it is, that’s the way it is. I made a decision, and I’m going to have to live with it. Mac went on to Opel, and I got transferred out of Olds into Chevrolet to run those operations.

Chevrolet

Q: What was the reason for that?

A: MacKichan had left Chevrolet, and the studio was vacant. Bill decided I was the logical man to run that operation, so I spent another five or six years in there. It seems that’s the span of time I’ve used in every [major] transfer I’ve made within the organization.

Q: This is a different thing for you. You’ve worked largely with the luxury cars, and now you’re….

A: I worked the top-line automobiles at General Motors. Now I’m down at the bread and butter end. I’m glad you brought that up, Dave. The first week I looked at what was being done in the studio, meeting all the people, understanding what the program was and what direction it was taking. I looked at the way bumpers, grilles, taillights were being designed, and I wasn’t happy with that at all. I got the whole staff out of the room and into the hallway outside the studio. Each of our studios had a divisional symbol impressed on the door: the Chevrolet bow tie, the Pontiac arrowhead, and the Cadillac crest and so forth. I said, “Gentlemen, I’m going to do something here this afternoon, and I want you to pay attention.” I had the maintenance people loosen the nuts and bolts on the metal crest, and I took the bow tie off the door, and I put in my pocket, and I said, “When you walk into this studio from now on, think Cadillac, think Buick. I don’t want to see any rubber stamp grilles on this damned automobile. We’re going to move off in another direction.”

It was about that time that Bunkie Knudsen became General Manager of Chevrolet. Bunkie was far out. He was always reaching for the best. When we did this, he was very sympathetic. He said, “Damn it, Irv, you’re on the right track. Keep ‘em going.” So we turned out the ’65 Chevrolet that had a bumper up in the middle of a grille. The following year we went into plastic grilles and got detail just like a Cadillac diecast grille. We had trapped hoods that had never been done on a Chevrolet before. I think we broke new ground in that room. I can’t say that I was largely responsible for it, because we had a good team of designers, and those were interesting days. I learned how to deal with nickels and dimes, not dollars, and still create an interesting product. It was a valuable experience for me moving through the system. As a matter of fact, if it hadn’t been for that, I would not have been prepared to take on this present position. I had dealt with truck design, the low end of the vehicle market, the high end of the vehicle market, the middle range, commercial vehicles, buses, interiors–it was a complete career, to say the least. Anyway, the stint in Chevrolet was a good one. It was a good learning experience, and I think we produced some very interesting automobiles.

Q: What you had done was to bring Chevrolet out of the meat and potatoes era and [make] it into what we now call an upscale automobile.

A: Yes. A Caprice Classic today is on a par with the top-line vehicles in trim and options and appointments and quality. We moved it in that direction, and there was good reason to because Chevrolet was filling in under that Caprice automobile. We had a Chevelle at that time, and they were doing other cars. There was a Corvair out there, and a Chevy II.

The last thing Chevrolet needs is another car

I do recall another incident in Chevrolet that I think you will find interesting. Buick had just taken on the Riviera –the four-place, luxury, sport coupe, and they were out there in the market doing quite well with that. One night after dinner with the team, we were sitting around chatting about is there any possibility for Chevrolet with a car like that? If Buick can sell thousands of cars at that price, if we did it smaller, less expensive, we could probably sell three or four hundred thousand. Why don’t we make a proposal? We had a warehouse across the street, and the studio was jammed with production work, so I took a few designers over there, and we started creating this full-clay, sports, luxury Chevrolet. It evolved nicely, and it became a hell of a good-looking package. I took Bill down one day—he hadn’t seen it—and he took one look at it, and he said, “Jeez, we’ve got to show this to Bunkie. It’s a dramatic car!” About a week later, we got Bunkie in and took him over to the warehouse. He walked around it, and, with a big smile on his face, he said, “Damned good-looking car, fellows, but I want to tell you something, the last thing Chevrolet needs is another car.” We had five or six at the time, and everybody was talking about deproliferating rather than adding, so the program got shelved.

It wasn’t any more than nine or ten months later that Ford announced the Mustang at the World’s Fair in New York , and the car took off like a rocket. They sold 400,000 the first year, and everybody was back knocking on our door, “Where is that—we’d better get things moving here now.” We were a little late coming in with the Camaro, and the first one wasn’t all that exciting, because it was a rush project, and we did it off the Chevrolet X platform. We couldn’t get the cowl heights where we wanted or anything else to create a logical sports machine. But [on] the second-generation car, we had a blank sheet of paper. We got that one done right. It set the image for what we’re going to do on through the next decade or two.

Q: That’s been a fantastic car.

A: But we should have had it the first time out. We might have beaten those other fellows to the punch, but we didn’t.

Q: What was the reason?

A: Why we didn’t do it?

Q: Yes.

A: It was Bunkie, himself. He never did show it to anyone. He was convinced he couldn’t sell another body. He had five or six cars at the time, and the 14th floor pressure was on deproliferating, and he was convinced he couldn’t sell it. He probably could not have if we hadn’t been nudged by another source. But those things happen in the industry. They have the Mustang. We created vehicles like Corvettes and Rivieras and Toronados. They have a first, and we have some firsts. We do one, and they copy it. They do one, and we jump off and do something along those lines. It’s a highly competitive game. You can’t stand still in this business. You don’t dare look back because somebody might be chasing you.

Q: What about the Corvette? Did you have any input into that?

A: I had no input into the Corvette at all. As a matter of fact, I’m not sure any designer did, because that vehicle was done in a faci lity that was called Plan 8 at the corner of John R and Brush. It was an old Fisher Body plant that the styling section utilized a couple of floors in. Earl placed the studio in there, and he was the only one that had the key to it. He put a few modelers and engineers in there and created the Corvette. I can’t ever recall a young designer being assigned to that room.

Q: It was a creation by [several] hands?

Ed Cole

A: Yes. It was he and Ed Cole. Ed Cole was chief engineer of Chevrolet, and he was pushing hard to get a two-place, sports car. He and Earl got together and created this thing.

Q: Ed Cole looms large, in retrospect, as a body engineer who worked directly with designers.

A: He spent a lot of time in our organization. We talk about people at the top: Ed spent a lot of time here. Pete Estes was a weekly visi tor, and even though he is retired today, he still comes back to the design staff. “What are you fellows up to? Let me see what the future holds.” Pete was always a product guy, and he found a good deal of excitement in the shapes and the moods we could create here. We have people like that today.

Q: Was Ed Cole the first to come up from the engineering ranks? Had most of your previous presidents been either finance people or sales people?

A: No. Finance people were largely the board chairmen. Presidents were generally engineers. Pete Estes was a body engineer. John Gordon was an engineer. Harlow Curtice was a salesman.

Q: Ed had a certain flair?

A: He had a love of product.

Q: It meshed with the design staff.

A: He spent a lot of time with us, and he’d tell us about what he was trying to do with the running gear, and the suspension, and how we needed to come to up with some shapes that were exciting to complement what he had underneath. He gave long-winded speeches, but they were interesting. You could feel that the man really had a love affair going with the product, and people like that are always interesting to us. There are individuals within the automobile industry that might be designing a computer console or a refrigerator and be just as happy. These are all automobile fanatics. They love cars. They wouldn’t go out and design one other product under any circumstance. I happen to one of those.

Monte Carlo

Q: [What about] the Monte Carlo ? There’s a prestige, top-of-line [vehicle]. How did that come about? What sort of thinking went into that? Would your product planner come in, and say, “We need this kind of thing?”

A: No, no. A lot of those things evolve right here at design staff. The need for a prestigious luxury coupe created the first Monte Carlo shapes which we weren’t too happy about. It was a ’73 car that we loved very well, and that came together from one illustration on the board by one designer. We modeled that vehicle out. John DeLorean was then General Manager of Chevrolet, and I never did show it to him. We kept it concealed until we finished the clay and di-noced the car in black with silver glass. John liked to travel with a large entourage. When he came over here, it was a group of 40/45 people. They’d fill up a studio. He walked in, and I told him, “John, you and your team stay right there. I’m going to show you something.” We pulled the full sized boards away, and this black jewel was sitting there. There was total silence for thirty seconds, and then they started applauding. They applauded like nothing you’d ever heard in a theater, and, naturally, we were all very happy. John said to me, “Don’t touch it, just release it the way it is, will you?” [That was] their first look at the car. We were pretty proud of that. That’s a hell of an accomplishment, because usually you’re in the with a car division–they like this, and they don’t like that. Sometimes we’ll bend for them, and other times we will not. I take it to a higher court.

Q: You’re able to do that now?

A: Oh, yes. We could do it then.

Q: Who would have been a higher court?

A: Fourteenth floor people. I’ll take it up as high as I have to go to get what I believe to be correct for a certain time frame. Bill did that. Harley Earl never had to do it very often because his size would overwhelm you. I’m not that big, so I have to use other devices. But that was one of our successes in Chevrolet putting that car together.

Q: It has remained so.

Opera Windows

A: It has remained so. I can tell you a little story about that car. That automobile was supposed to be introduced to the public in 1971. Then General Motors was hit by a UAW strike, and the whole program was postponed. In the meantime, they were tooling a new Eldorado that was done a few years before in Cadillac, and it had conventional side glass. We had this little opera window in the Monte Carlo—big quarter panel with a little opera window. We were talking in the hallway one day, and I said to Bill and Ed Cole, “You know now that this A Car is stalled—this new Monte Carlo—I think it would be good marketing strategy to put that opera window in the Cadillac Eldorado in ’71. Get it out there, and then let it appear on this lower-priced car. It’s going to give that car a lift.” Ed Cole said to Bill, “I like that. Get Fisher Body on the phone.” The Cadillac was already on its way, and he put a lot of pressure on a lot of people, and they got that opera window in the Cadillac. We modeled it quickly—took us about four days—had the Fisher people over and gave them rough drawings. They went back and changed tools and dies and got it into production, and it did precisely what we believed it would do. When those A Cars came out with the little opera windows, everybody thought, “My, I’ve got a little. Cadillac here.” That’s good marketing. Earl used that strategy continuously. He started with Cadillac, and then let it drift down through the ranks.

Q: A very smooth technique. I had a personal experience. I bought a 1960 Chevrolet station wagon, and you’d gotten rid of the fin era pretty much and had come up with a very sharp, utilitarian, family style.

A: It was a clean, clean vehicle. I remember that very well.

Q: Very clean and crisp. I’d seen them go by for a year, and I said, “I’ve got to have one of those.” I had a growing family, and I drove that car for ten years. I drove it everywhere-—all over the country. We went on several vacations with it.

A: A 120,000 miles?

Q: A 135,000. I had never had a bit of trouble with it. I had no major overhauls. It was a fantastic car, and I’ve often wondered who was responsible for that gorgeous family machine of that era?

A: Parents-wise?

Q: [Designers and engineers].

A: Dave, I’d have a hell of a time going all the way back to 1960. That means we were designing the automobile about [1957]. It would have to be Clare MacKichan and that team, because I was in Olds. Clare was running Chevrolet, and Earl was still there, so he had influenced what was done as well.

Q: Crisp and clean and the engineering, [partly] because of its longevity, [must have been] incredible.

A: They didn’t have the problems back in those days with machinery that you do today. Of course, [there are] very sound reasons for the problems we have today being pushed by CAFE and having to do the smaller vehicles overnight without pre-testing on the marketplace. I suspect you know something about this industry, and if General Motors did a new transmission in 1949 or ’50, they’d put 10,000 of them in the customers’ hands after testing them for years in our proving grounds. You’d let the customer know that he’s got a new device as a transmission. If it failed, we brought it back in, corrected the problem until we had the damned thing working right, and then it went into full production. You don’t have the time to do that with any more. It has to be done tomorrow. The car has got to come down in size. You’ve got to downsize transmissions, engines, all the systems, along with the size of the car with no test time. It’s costing the industry in many, many ways. Our customers are unhappy, and the Japanese make inroads as a result. But we’re getting by that. We are totally dedicated to doing this thing right. If you have driven some of our cars in recent years and looked [carefully] at them, the sheet metal is coming together right, the paint has been enhanced 200%. The new C Cars—the new luxury sedans. I’m driving a Buick Park Avenue and a Cadillac, occasionally. They are fine automobiles.

Q: You’ve come a long way.

A: We’re not finished. We’re going to be number one when we’re finished.

Q: What about product proliferation which had been part of somebody’s antipathy back in those days?

A: It has exploded, and contined to explode as you can see and read about future products that are going to hit the market such as two-place Cadillacs and two-place Buicks, and Pontiac has a Fiero. There are many more things that’ll happen in the next five or six years in the way of new products, but that market out there is so diversified, that you couldn’t possibly play it with a standard line of vehicles, and the need for two-place cars today is quite evident. There are so many single people in the United States today that there’s a need for that kind of machine. While we’re doing it, I’m sure all our competitors will come into the market with similar products, and, hopefully, we’ll be out front.

Q: You’ve been successful at Chevrolet. Things are going very well. I’m putting you back in the [past].

A: Yes, I know you are. I have a hell of a time going all way back, but I’ll work at it.

Q: What seems to be in the offing for you? You’ve been with almost all the divisions except Buick. How do you feel about your career at this point?

A: At this point, I’m running Chevrolet? I’m feeling very good about my career. This may be very difficult for anyone to believe who may listen to this tape, but I have never set goals for myself. The only goal I had was to be the best at what I did. When I was a designer in the studio, I wanted to produce a better design than any other designer sitting at those boards. When I was chief running a room, I wanted to be sure that the Oldsmobile led all the other General Motors’ products. If it was Chevrolet, by God, I was going to beat Pontiac, Olds, Buick and Cadillac, and they were going to copy what we did in Chevrolet.

Q: There was a competition there at that time?

A: Constantly, and management created it. They promoted it.

Q: Encouraged it?

A: Yes. And they encouraged it. Earl would walk into a room in his day and look around the studio and say, “Fellows, you’re pretty proud of that?” “Yes sir.” “Well, I want to tell you something. I just came out of Oldsmobile, and what you’ve got isn’t worth a damn,” and he’d turn around and walk out. Now if you don’t think that gets a team moving in one hell of a hurry. We’re not doing things necessarily in that fashion any more. But I had never set goals for myself, and if my work was recognized, and corporate people as well as my boss of design staff felt I was doing well and wanted to move me on, fine. I was willing to accept it, and that’s precisely what happened. A fellow that Bill Mitchell had as his director of design—Ed Glowacke—died at an early age—41 or 42—so Bill moved Chuck Jordan up from Cadillac to fill that spot, and about six months later moved me up to assist Jordan. Chuck was in charge of all divisional design operations, and I was his assistant. Then Chuck got moved to Germany to run Opel, and MacKichan came back, and I took over all of the divisional rooms, and Clare MacKichan took over all advanced design—Bill split it up. When Chuck came back, Bill split the production divisional studios between the two of us. I took Chevrolet, Pontiac , and commercial vehicles, and Chuck got Olds, Buick and Cadillac, and four or five years later, Bill switched us again. I took over Olds, Buick and Cadillac, and Charlie took the low end and commercial vehicles.

Q: That’s [interesting].

A: It was, and it’s a neat technique. But at the same time, when you get in the shared body parts in a program between the two men—the one running Chevrolet/Pontiac and the other one running Olds/Buick, it slowed the process because you couldn’t get them to agree. No one would make a decision that this is the way to go, the process slowed, and time was passing us. One of the first things I did when I came into this office was to eliminate that process. I put one man in charge of all of it. We got rid of that lost time and went ahead in a hurry. But things moved fast. When I drift [back] over all these years, it’s astounding to me that I’m sitting here. I’m delighted, Dave, that you remind me that it was ’72 when I moved from Chevrolet, Pontiac, and commercial vehicles to Olds, Buick and Cadillac—BOC as we call it in house. As I’ve told you, I have a very poor memory. I think of the future and not of the past.

Oil Embargo

I came into the upper level of the market just about the time the oil embargo hit. There was a lot of discussion within the corporation about whether our products were right and were we going to deliver the kind of fuel efficiency the customer was going to look for because everyone expected the price of gasoline to rise dramatically. So sizes were looked at, and the first one I can recall coming into this building as a result of that oil embargo was the need to create a small Cadillac.

President Ed Cole was very strongly behind that. He was pushing hard, and for some years prior to ’73, we had done some fiberglass models of a small Cadillac. We were experimenting here in the building, because on and off over the years, people in this building have believed Cadillac ought to have a smaller, very sophisticated package, and I don’t mean a car that would compete with Chevrolet by any means.

Then the embargo came along, and the word came down that we’d better start on a small Cadillac. It is a bonafide, corporate program, and we looked at everything we had done and determined for ourselves. But it wasn’t more than a week later that we were told we had something like six weeks to create the car in. We normally take nine to fourteen months, depending on how many divisions are involved, and in six weeks you can do nothing but make mistakes. So people like myself, and Jack Humbert was my assistant at the time, were damned concerned about how we were going to do this in six weeks. The Cadillac studio was busily occupied with other programs, so we went down into what we call our Advanced Design One Studio, which was also reporting to me at the time, and elected to do the car there. A fellow named Stan Parker was chief designer in the studio at the time, and we got busy in a hurry–it was six weeks.

It didn’t look like we were going to have the opportunity to ever take the car out of the platform and get it out in its natural setting in daylight. As a matter of fact, we never did. The car never moved out of that studio. We designed it, we refined it, we tuned it, we had meetings with Cadillac, and I can’t recall now who the general manager was. But the release date came, and we cut the car loose. I can remember sitting in the office I occupied down the hall here with Humbert and talking about this, and we were very concerned that we were releasing a car we had never seen outdoors.

Q: Humbert was?

A: Jack Humbert was my assistant. He used to run the Pontiac room in the Sixties. He created some very good-looking Pontiacs . Jack was an excellent designer, and he could refine an automobile like nobody in this building, but we thought, what the hell, they didn’t give us the time, we did the best we could, and that’s it. We’ve got to live with it. The car was finally released. Every surface and every detail was released to our drafting room, and the day came when we could now clean it up, di-noc it, and take it outdoors and see what in hell we’ve got.

We got it out there, and we were all pleasantly surprised. It was a darned good-looking car in our view. There were a few lines we might have adjusted. As a matter of fact, there were a few lines I tried to adjust. I took the car back in the building and made some corrections in the rear end, but Cadillac couldn’t accept it based on their engineering tooling time frame. It wasn’t in that block of time, so we had to live with what we had. Fortunately, the car got into the marketplace and did beautifully. As a matter of fact, you go out to California today, you’ll see that original Seville everywhere in mint condition, and it seems that California likes that car better than what we have currently. So that was an interesting experience. I’ve never been involved in a program where we had to do it that fast without checking our papers outdoors.

And once we had launched that, then the corporation set a goal for themselves to downsize all their vehicles. The next series of cars that we were to downsize were the standard-size, family sedans and coupes and the luxury sedans–what we called BOC in the corporation. That program went on for a long time. It might have gone on for as long as 14 to 18 months. There were five car divisions involved from Chevrolet through Cadillac, and the concern, on the part of the corporation and design staff as to how small we make it, was great. People like Pete Estes, who was our president at the time, would come by once a week and say, “Do you think we’re too small? Should we go a little larger?” And we were not quite sure either, because when you took the clay out and looked at it with a current car–1971–there was a lot of shrink in the package. They were a lot lighter than the fuel efficiency targets we had set for ourself. It looked good based on what we were doing, and, after much trepidation, the decision was made to go.

Right up until the car got into the dealer showrooms, everyone was concerned, and we got started a little slowly that first year. The customer wasn’t totally accepting the package size, and, as a result, our competitors gained some market share that first year. But as we got into the second year, the car got stronger, and the third year we were right back where we should have been with our volumes. So, it does take the consumer some time to adjust. It’s a cultural shock, and Americans have been driving large vehicles for so darn long that they found it difficult to accept this package size.

Q: It’s hard for them to equate smallness with quality and….

A: And price. If somebody’s spending, by today’s standards, $15,000/$18,000 for a luxury sedan, there are people out there that still believe it ought to be 230 inches long–that you can’t buy quality on a small package. But it’s not necessarily true. You can spend a million dollars on a tiny diamond. We went on from there to downsize our personalized coupes such as the Eldorado, Toronado , Riviera and the Seville , and the process continued right up until today.

Q: Was there anyone having any second thoughts as you got into it? “Jeez, we shouldn’t have done this,” or “But Ford made the right decision?”

A: Never. I have never heard that from any member of the corporate team—from any general managers. Once we launched the program, everyone got behind it and worked like hell to get the products sold and believed in them. We saw no other course to pursue. As a matter of fact, when the car was out on the road for about two years, we started planning the next generation. But it, apparently, had to be a little smaller because these CAFE targets became tougher. The current target for next year is 27 miles to the gallon for fuel economy average for a corporation. And the industry—Ford and General Motors, especially—are in Washington trying to bring that down to 26 or we are not going to build a larger automobile. And if we don’t build a larger automobile, a lot of people will be unemployed. In our view, the customer doesn’t have choices, and he should.

Q: My impression is that [the Transportation Department] will be sympathetic to both yours and Ford’s request.

A: We certainly hope so, because we’d love to supply a full line of vehicles. We are a full-line builder here at General Motors. I suspect Chrysler’s position is proper for them because they’re not a full-line builder, and they’ve got a lot of small, fuel-efficient cars. They want the standard to remain where it is.

Q: Is it my recollection that, although Ford rejoiced in the fact that their competitive position was enhanced by your decision—at least the first year—but, in truth, they didn’t have the money to downsize?

A: They had made a decision not to do it. I wouldn’t know why. It may have been financial, but you got to bite the bullet at a time like that, because the game is moving in one direction, congress had passed a CAFE standards, and there was no other way to go.

Q: G.M. borrowed, as Ford should have done?

A: Yes. If you want to remain in business, you’re going to have to do it. The programs were planned over a period of time, so we weren’t doing three or four in one year. First, the B Cars, and the per­sonalized coupes, and then we went into the A. The Citation was the first thing we brought out.

We downsized the large cars, and then we came in with the small, transverse, front-wheel drive Citation which did a lot for us from a fuel economy point of view. We had a few recalls that didn’t help, but the car was rushed to market because there was a need for it out there. Downsizing continues even today. We’re doing vehicles for the late eighties that will be lighter and far more fuel efficient with the eye on one target and that is to maintain interior comfort. We trying as hard as we know how not to shrink those internal dimensions. The American consumer is not going to buy a tighter car. He wants all the space he get inside. He wants leg room, he wants head room and torso room, and we’re trying to maintain that even though we reduce the exterior dimensions of the vehicle.

Q: How are you solving that?

A: By working with a 9H pencil as we look at the occupants in the vehicle and finding every little millimeter and doing thinner doors and thinning up the outside of the shapes. By reducing length which takes weight out. We’ve dropped 1,500 to 1,800 pounds since we’ve started this downsizing process with most of our products. That, along with a lot of attention to aerodynamics, is giving the customer far more fuel-­efficient vehicles. I’m currently driving a Buick Park Avenue, and when I go back to about 1971 or 1972, that large luxury sedan—and I drove those—would take me two tank fulls a week to get from the office to home. This current Park Avenue , I can drive all week long from office to home and back again, and I’ve still got fuel in the tank. So, we’ve made some great gains.

If you take the lower end of our lines and measure them with the low end of everyone else’s lines, such as Chrysler or Ford or the Japanese, you’ll find our cars are just as fuel efficient as theirs are. But we have so many top-line automobiles that bring our average down. However, the customer is demanding that automobile. There are people out there buying the rear-wheel drive Chevrolet with V-8 engines in them. They’ve got to have that V-8.

Q: You’ve conditioned them to ask for it.

A: I don’t think that we conditioned them. I think they were demanding more power back in the ’thirties and the ’forties and the ’fifties. And the hot rod generation in the ’fifties and ’sixties.

Q: They’ve never gotten over that?

A: No. We’re getting back into more performance because the customer is demanding it. We brought out a J automobile with a focus entirely on fuel efficiency, and because the car didn’t have the performance the customer expected, they turned away from us in that first year or two until we fixed the performance. Now the car is selling extremely well. The American consumer demands performance along with fuel efficiency, and that is not an easy target.

Q: It must drive you crazy trying to figure out exactly what will be the most saleable in terms of…?

A: You try to offer the customer a wide variety of engines and transmissions so that they can select and put together the package they are personally interested in.

Q: So you were very flexible in that area?

A: Yes. In paint, in trims, in options, in engines, transmissions, and that you must do today if you want to remain competitive.

Q: Moving you back to the mid-’seventies, you’re the chief assistant to Mitchell.

A: Yes. I’m reporting directly to Bill.

Q: And you’re handling the upper end of the line, and Mitchell is probably thinking about retirement about this time. What was the situation in the design center at that time in terms of…?

A: You mean in terms of human relationships within the organization?

Q: Yes.

A: You’d have to speak to Bill about what his thoughts were in that time frame because he was three or four years away from retirement. He never revealed his inner thoughts to me.

Q: He never said anything?

“He backed off and let them run it.”

A: No, and he tried to stay active around the studios; and, of course, when we did something out in the rooms, we never released anything without inviting Bill in. If I changed the entire side of the car, and then the studio and Jack Humbert and myself were happy with what we had, and we did it in a week, I’d invite him in and say, “This is what we like, Bill. This is the way we’d like to run. He’d either say, “Yes,” or “I don’t think you have it, you’d better keep working.” So that’s the way we were operating in that time frame. When Bill first took over after Earl left, he was extremely active in the rooms and pretty much dictating design. As he became more comfortable with his position and the people and their talents, he backed off and let them run it, which is, in my view, the proper way to do it.

Q: Is that your technique today?

A: I have been operating that way from day one. I don’t go out there and hold anybody’s hand nor do I go out there and dictate design. I will go out there, as I did yesterday, and stop something because I don’t think they have it, but I won’t tell them how to do it. We may, in discussions in the room with the team, paint a word picture of where we may go, but I don’t want to take my work in there because you don’t build people that way. They’ve got to face the problem, they’ve got to shoulder the responsibility. Irv spent a lot of years in those studios and created a lot of cars. Now I find myself in a different position, and I firmly believe that the way we’re running this place is correct. I wouldn’t change it.

Q: Mitchell, by this time, has reached the senior executive level, like you have today, and sitting back and letting the teams do the work?

A: Pretty much.

Q: And he is beginning to think about retirement a year or two before he retired.

A: I imagine he was thinking about it. He had developed, in his last five or eight years, a love of motorcycles.

Q: He had?

A: Oh, yes. He was buying motorcycles, and he a little shop down the street here, and he didn’t like the shape of current motorcycles. So he had a designer, and they redesigned the bike and created their own forms. He’d paint them in very glamorous colors and [have] leathers tailored in the same color to fit the motorcycle. I don’t mean to suggest that Bill forgot automobiles, but he developed this love of motorbikes, and he stayed with that even after his retirement.

Q: He did?

A: Yes. As a matter of fact, when he created his own design organization, he had a contract with either Yamaha or Suzuki, and he designed rare motorcycles.

Q: That’s interesting. It’s a wonder he didn’t suggest that G.M. take over Yamaha so he could be in the corporation.

A: He may have, for all I know.

Q: This is mid-’seventies. Your downsizing program—everybody is enthusiastic about it, and it’s on schedule for the next ten years. What motivated the pace of the downsizing without criticizing anything? It seems to me that downsizing has had an evolutionary approach to it over the years at G.M. You guys, and this may be your philosophy, have preferred a gradual approach both to downsizing and to a rounding or smoothing and a lowering that you’re gradually coming to in the next five years. Was that a reflection of your personal design philosophy?

A: No. I wouldn’t say that. I think the corporate approach to down sizing vehicles was a matter of cost and resources. We could not have taken all of G.M.’s products in say a three or four or five year span and downsized them. Even General Motors couldn’t do that. There’s a lot of money involved in doing a new car program today. It had to spread out over time, selecting the vehicles to downsize that move us toward those CAFE figures. We’re aiming at those numbers. I think they started somewhere around 18 miles to the gallon, corporate average fuel economy, and went to 20 and then 22, and 24, and it’s 27 next year. So the products were selected that would keep us on top or ahead of those average fuel numbers. Even if that wasn’t the target, the corporation could not have done all the vehicles in five years. We didn’t have the resources here to do it, and I don’t imagine General Motors had the financial resources to do it in that time frame. So we had to take a program at a time and be sure that we had done it right.

Q: So it was financial constraints?

A: That played a large part in this.

Q: If I’m reading recent history correctly, your approach has been one of a gradual movement toward the future rather than jumping five years ahead?

A: Are you talking about the vehicles that have been accomplished while I’ve been in this office?

Q: Yes. The last ten years.

A: How do I answer that? I don’t know that you could say it’s a gradual, measured approach. We try to reach out as far as we can with each program we do, but one of the chief factors in any design program here at General Motors design staff is to maintain the personality of that divisional car. We will not, as an example, do what our friends at Ford did. They had some very stiff, harsh automobiles, and, in a year’s time, they turned right around and did soft, rounded cars, and the former T-Bird doesn’t look like the present T-Bird. That can have a hell of an impact on the resale value of the old car, and we’re trying to protect our customers who are out there with a vehicle that’s a year or two old that resale values remain strong. If I’m the customer, and I’m driving in those ’72 or ’73 Cadillacs, and we downsized it in ’77, it was smaller, but it was still a Cadillac. It had all the cues up front and in the rear, and we’re not going to move away from that. The per sonality of a vehicle is there, and we’re going to move that personality forward as far as we can.

Q: An admirable approach, especially with General Motors’ large number of car lines. The shock would have been too much for the average G.M. buyer to jump five years ahead, so you preferred to retain the identity, protect the previous buyers, and hope to court new buyers.

A: Yes. If you look at what we did with the third generation Firebird and Camaro. They’re strongly related to the second-generation car, but they’re new and they’re fresh and they’re faster looking and smoother, and I think you could say that about a Corvette, also. You don’t put labels on the new Corvette. You know it’s a Corvette. On the other hand, if we get an entirely new program, and there wasn’t anything before this car we’re now doing, such as the Fiero, then we try to create the personality that we can carry down the road for many years to come.

We worked on that car for something like two years–maybe a year and a half–downstairs in our advanced rooms and another six to seven months in the Pontiac studio refining it. But everything I read indica tes that people who like two-place, sports machines, this is one, fine looking car. Everywhere you look you see young ladies driving them. They love them, too, so I have to believe that this team did a good job with something new. Now we’ve got a personality to work with, and you won’t see the next generation of Fieros turn around and head 180 0 in the other direction. That’s just not going to happen here.

Fiero

Q: But, as you point out, the Fiero was a jump ahead. That was a special design project?

A: That’s right.

Q: It was off to one side from your bread and butter [studios]?

A: It was completely off to one side, buried in our advanced room, with Pontiac having the strong interest in it and very concerned about when they could sell the two-place car to the corporation because you have to ask yourself how many two-place cars does General Motors need? On the other hand, the market in North America today is very diversified. The standard sedan coupe and wagon is no longer going to entertain that entire group of consumers out there, so you’ve got to have a wide variety of products. If you look back in the late ’sixties and early ’seventies, with a car like the Impala and Caprice, you could sell a million and a half of those in one year. I don’t think we look for volume such as that any more. If you can do six or seven hundred thousand of one body type, you’ve done a hell of a job today. You’re to see more two-place automobiles from General Motors. Buick is going to introduce a two-place car, Cadillac will very shortly, and what’s up the road remains to be seen, but the customer is dictating where we must go. We’re not doing it.

Pininfarina Cadillac

Q: I’m fascinated by the reports about a Farina Cadillac. Are you going to go ahead with that?

A: Yes. They designed the car, and they’re building the body, and the body will be air shipped to our new plant in Detroit/Hamtramck, and the running gear will be put into that car in that plant. That was the process decided on by the corporate management. I must say, in all honesty, it didn’t please us here at design staff.

Q: Why was that?

A: Pininfarina got the design assembly, and….

Q: How did that come about?

A: I can’t remember exactly how that happened, but I know that Cadillac wanted to do a two-place car, and we were preparing to do, and I got word from my boss, Howard Kehrl—who is a vice-chairman at General Motors—that they were going to ask Pininfarina to design the car. That didn’t make me happy, it didn’t make any of the management team happy here, and the Cadillac studio was all upset. The chief designer, Wayne Kady, was walking around with a frown, and, I thought, win, lose, or draw, I’ve got to give these fellows a shot at the program even though the decision might have been made that Pininfarina is going to do it.

We got started, but we didn’t have enough time. Pininfarina had been working on it for some months, and, when I made the decision, he was five or six months into the program, and he was to bring a car here in about 60 to 90 days. So we hurried a two-place car, and I informed management that I was doing it. They weren’t too sure it was the right thing to do, but I explained the problems I was having with the team, and I thought they ought to have a shot at it. I’m walking out to the [design center]—the Pininfarina car is sitting there, and our car clay model is sitting there—with certain members of the executive team down town when they said, “Irv, regardless of how much better your car may look than the one that Sergio is doing, we’re going to select his because we believe if it’s his design, he’ll do a better job of engi­neering and fabrication and build a quality into it that’s necessary.” And that’s how the decision was made.

Two-place Buick

Q: It, obviously, still rankles?

A: It did for awhile, but we’re over that. We’ve over that because we’ve a lot of programs coming through this building, and once a decision is made, I set them behind me and we go on and do the other work. Lloyd Reuss was running Buick at the time, and it was really Buick that started the idea of a two-place car. They came to us first.

Q: When was that?

A: I can’t remember [when] that happened. I was in this office for about two years when that happened. Lloyd came to me, and he, said he’d like to do a two-place Buick, and we got started on a few proposals and then, for a variety of reasons, none of which I can remember at this time, Buick backed away a little. Cadillac got wind of the idea that Buick was working on this, so they jumped in quickly. So, the corporation did this thing with Pininfarina. When the decision was made to have Pininfarina do the car—design and build the body—the Buick group—it was still Lloyd Reuss—came back and said, “I want to get started on this. I don’t know how much of chance I’ve got to sell it, but I want to do this. Get me a hot car.”

So having lost the Cadillac project, our team was all fired up, and we spent about a year putting this Buick together. I recall it being shown to the corporation prior to a product policy group where the program was going to be presented. I took our chairman and our presi dent out there, and we had the car in the hallway on the second floor. I showed them the Buick, and Roger Smith walked around it and said, “My God, that’s one hell of a good-looking car.” I don’t know how they’re reacting about the appearance of the Buick relative to the Cadillac, but I know they like the look of the Buick, and that satisfies us.

Q: Can you give me your personal opinion as to the relative qualities of the two?

A: Appearance-wise?

Q: Yes.

A: [Pause] Dave, that is….

Q: Is that a leading question?

A: That’s not a leading question. It’s just that having been so deeply involved in the two-place Buick, it’s very difficult to be objective about this.

Q: We don’t want you to be objective. We want you to be subjective.

A: Yes. I believe we’ve got a hell of a finer looking car than the Cadillac. If I didn’t feel that way, I shouldn’t be here.

Q: Right, okay, good. These will be out in ’87, ’88?

A: Yes. If I remember the dates correctly.

Earl’s Approach

Q: About the differences in style and approach that between you and Mr. Mitchell and Mr. Earl—especially Mr. Earl whose large size and intimidating—would intimidate people along with his rather forceful personality in terms of getting executives to accept design changes and so forth, you indicated that you have a different approach.

A: I have a different approach, Dave, of course, and I think I’m operating in a time frame that’s entirely different than the time frame Earl operated in. If you go back to the ’twenties, ’thirties and the ’forties and ’fifties, a boss was a boss whether his name was Harley Earl or Mr. X, or Mr. Y or Mr. Z. He was the boss, but our society has changed fantastically in the last thirty/forty years, and that approach couldn’t be used today. It would be impossible. You’ve got to focus on people, you’ve got to help them grow. You do not intimidate. I’m not sure—and I’ve heard this over the years—that Harley Earl went out of his way to intimidate people on his staff. I did gain the impression—and I had worked for Mr. Earl about eleven or twelve years—that he went after those that he considered weak, spineless. I had a lot to do with Earl when I ran the Oldsmobile studio, and I dealt with him on a daily basis, and he was always very nice to me and always very kind. And if I had something he didn’t like, he would plan it out. But if he didn’t think it was any good, he never really got angry with me. If he had, it wouldn’t have frightened me, because I fear no man regardless of title.

Camaro/Firebird

Q: One of the things that we should look into, momentarily, was the sports car syndrome that General Motors fostered, starting with the Corvette, and you were the leader there, and coming up to the magnificent Z-28?

A: Camaro/Firebird and the Z-28. But the Camaro and Firebird were the result of a Mustang. Mustang announced their car in April at the New York World’s Fair. But what the consumer doesn’t know, and probably the people at Ford, Mr. Knudsen—Bunkie Knudsen was running Chevrolet at the time, and Chevrolet had added quite a few cars over the years, because the market was demanding it, and Buick had the Riviera. Bill Mitchell sold that on his own to the Buick division. He was very strong for getting a personalized coupe, and Buick bought it. We looked at the volumes that Buick was turning out the first years. I was running Chevrolet studio at the time, and I sat down with the team, and we had a little discussion about it. Buick can sell X number of cars in one year at that price, what if we did a little personalized car? How many would Chevrolet sell if the price were right?

We wouldn’t go the Buick route because that’s a more formal, sophisticated, four-place automobile. We’d do something to appeal to the youth of America. Something sporty and dynamic. We talked ourselves into it. I came to Bill, and I chatted with him about it, and he said, “Well, all right, if you want to do it, go ahead and do it. You got room.” We didn’t have room in the studio, so we had a warehouse across 12 Mile Road , and we went over there and worked on this car. I had a fellow working on it who is now in charge of Advanced-One, whose name is Phil Garcia, and we put together some ideas, found one we liked and modeled the automobile. In having the operation away from the this building, Bill didn’t get involved, so we had a pretty free hand. We created the car in clay, di-noced it, and I invited Bill over. He took one walk around it, and he said, “Jeez, that’s a damned good-looking car. We’d better get Bunkie over here.” So we got Knudsen over about a week later, and Bunkie walked around the car, and he said, “Damned exciting.” But he said, “I want to tell you something, fellows. The last thing Chevrolet needs is a another car.” And that ended that four-place—what would have been the Camaro program, and that was about a year before Ford announced the Mustang. The following year, in April, it was there for everyone to see that there was a need in that spot at the low end of the market. When Ford brought the Mustang out, General Motors didn’t react to it until the first year numbers came in, and I think they sold something over 400,000. Then we started moving fast. The question of whether Chevrolet needed another car or not was a moot point at that time, and we went right after the Camaro.

Q: Had you kept the project?

A: No. It wasn’t kept alive. The armature was used for another program. We photographed the car, and when we got the word we’d better get started on a four-placed, sporty vehicle—it wasn’t called Camaro at the time, it had an XP number—we thought we’d go back to that. But the decision was made that it would have to come off the Chevy-tooled under body and cowl and use the suspension and engines and windshield. We didn’t have the flexibility. We couldn’t reach the car we were doing at the warehouse. So the original Camaro, while it did well in, the market, was not satisfying for anyone here in this building—not Jack, not myself, not the chief designers involved. Henry Haga was the chief designer of that studio at the time. He’s now out on the West Coast running our advanced concepts [center]. We did what we were asked to do. But when that program was finished, I got with our vehicle packaging group, and we started planning the second-generation car, and there was no inteference. We did a new under body and placed the seats where we wanted them, and go the cross section.

A year or so later, we started modeling it, and when we started, Bill Porter was in charge of Pontiac. He was going to do the Firebird. That’s why we did cars like the Berlinetta. Pontiac had one in the middle, too. I don’t remember now what they called it, but they’ve given up on that one.

Q: It was a good idea, but, apparently, the ladies wanted the hot car.

A: The ladies seem to buy what men like. They like the same cars. The industry for years has been talking about, “Let’s tailor this type of car for women,” and it has always failed. Women like the same auto­mobiles men do.

Q: They’re competing with them now in the marketplace.

A: They are just like men when it comes to wheels. There are girls that like to go fast. I have a daughter that wouldn’t buy anything but a performance automobile.

Q: How old is she?

A: She’s 29.

Q: That’s interesting.

A: She’s living in Boston, and you couldn’t sell her a four banger under any circumstances. She’s got to have a quick automobile, and then there are ladies just like there are men who want fuel efficiency and a lot of room. They’re no different.

Q: It’s a different market. It’s fluid now.

A: We did some colors on both the Firebird and Camaro about half through the second-generation car. It was supposed to be tailored for the female. They were bright and cute. The colors didn’t do a thing out there. Women didn’t buy them at all.

Q: What are your plans for the sports car? Have you got some innovations in the next five to ten years as far as sports cars, or are you Trans Am, and Haga was going to do the Camaro Z-28?

A: We had a little contest going between the two groups—Pontiac and Chevrolet. We selected the upper that Bill Porter’s team did—windshield, upper profile line, side glass, graphics and put that on the Camaro and got pre cisely what we wanted. The divisions weren’t involved. They were busy selling cars. They had to sell cars. They had to engineer. So we took some time with that program, and Bill was delighted with every step as we went.

Q: I can imagine.

A: Yes. When we invited the general managers in, and I don’t remember who they were, there was no question about the vehicles. No question at all.

Q: Instant acceptance?

A: Yes. The Pontiac group liked what they had, and the Chevrolet [people said], “Don’t touch it. Leave it alone. Release it,” and that’s the way we go. The car made its mark. It was out in the market for ten or eleven years with just facial changes and graphics in the rear.

Q: It’s been a success story.

A: It lived a long time. It was a very profitable program for General Motors.

Q: Was the Berlinetta part of this program?

A: No. When we did the second-generation Camaro/Firebird, we did a base car and a performance car. It came through to us that there were a lot of young ladies driving the car, and maybe we should tailor an auto mobile somewhere in between base and performance that women would like.

Q: …going to bring it along gradually?

A: No, we’re not going to gradually bring it along. We are doing, and almost have completed, the next generation of Camaro/Firebird. We’ve got a fiberglass model out there that’s set to move for this car. As a matter of fact, Dave, much like the second-generation car, this fourth-generation car will be introduced in the Fall of ’89. It was done about the time we had just released the car that’s out on the street. The assistant chief designer in Chevrolet Three, off on his own, just created a full-size rendering, and I walked in the room one day, and I thought, “Damn. That’s a dynamic-looking thing.” So I went to the chief designer—Jerry Palmer—and I said, “Jerry, have you got any resources to model that?” He said, “I’ll find them.” So, within four to six months, we had the vehicle outdoors several times, and we refined it. I liked what I saw in clay, so I elected to use some finan cial resources to build a fiberglass model. I wanted that around to live with it to see how well it works. And we had it around this building for probably two years before the bell rang to start the ’89/’90 program, and it had lived well. Everyone who came in here, and corporate management said, “Jeez, that’s a dynamic car.” And that sets the mood for what we’re doing in ’89, and we’re taking a step with this car that goes beyond anything we’ve done with past Camaros and Firebirds. However, you will know it is a Camaro.

Q: It still maintains the identity?

A: Yes. It has many innovative features, its performance will be equal to or better than. It’s rumored in the newspapers it may be front-wheel drive. I’m not at liberty to say what wheels will drive the car, but it will be an interesting package, and I think our Camaro/ Firebird customers and followers out there are going to enjoy this one.

1985 Corvette

Q: The other end of it, the Corvette. The new ’85 Corvette is a success story plus the design is quite striking. [The public] is quite taken with the new generation Corvette. Some of the purists—and I know you’ve had to contend with these Corvette purists all these years….

A: They’re out there.

Q: …will say that you’ve bastardized it–that you’ve succumbed to the recent design mania for a Euro look. Can you tell me what kind of a considered decision that was in your area? How that came about?

A: Sure. The purists, and a lot of other people who are not necessarily purists, have told me that you messed up the Corvette. But the Corvette before this one, in our view, was right in that time frame but overstated for the ’80′s simply because a Corvette like any other car has to have sound, aerodynamic numbers, and you could not have jumped the fenders up off the body as high as the Corvette preceding this one. And, as we did aero studies, we tried as hard as we knew how, within the aerodynamic framework, to keep that subtle balance in the silhouette of a car. We got as much as we could without upsetting the aerodynamic numbers. Now the Corvette, aero-wise, its coefficient of drag isn’t quite as good as I expect because it’s at .35, and there are a lot of cars out there a .35, but what pushed the number up that high is the footprint. We’ve got some very wide tires on that car for ride and handling, and if you take and put a standard set of rubber under that vehicle, the coefficient of drag drops under .3 into the .2 area. So, it’s just a wide footprint that pushes us up to .35. But these are tradeoffs you have to make between aero and ride, handling and performance. So aerodynamics was an important factor in designing that vehicle. I personally believe the car is correct for this time frame.

Q: I seem to recall hearing somewhere that the designer on that project was a local product out of Homer LaGassey’s show.

A: Yeah. Center for Creative Studies—Jerry Palmer. Jerry Palmer was chief designer, then he was involved in the current Camaro and Z-28, and Jerry’s team put the Corvette together. You’ll see a coupe that’ll be introduced in the Fall of ’86 that’s a part of two sedans that was done by Jerry’s group. It’s the Berretta, and Jerry’s team did that. They’re a very aggressive, far-out group. They do some damned interesting cars.

Q: It must be fun working with a group like that.

A: Oh, yes. Jerry is a very good designer and totally involved with automobiles.

Seville

Q: The other anecdote that sticks in my mind, which may not be important, but I’d love to hear your version of it. The original Seville was a personal and sales success, and then somebody decided to give it a new look. How did that come about?

A: Are you talking about the second-generation Seville ?

Q: Yes.

A: Yeah, that’s an interesting story, Dave, because when we knew we had to start the second generation car, I was working on that with Jack Humbert and Wayne Kady, who is the chief designer at Cadillac, and what we had started was taking that original and projecting it out a step or two farther, and we were into the program for about two or three months.

Bill came in one day, and he said, “Now fellows, that’s not it. You haven’t got it. Now, I’ll tell you what I have in mind.” And he made a little sketch, and it was very much like a Rolls of the ’thirties with this….

Q: His old obsession.

A: Profile in the rear, and we didn’t think too much of that—the design team—but he insisted. He said, “You’re going to do that damned car that way, and don’t give me a bad time, Irv. That’s how I want it, see?” So we got up on the boards and taped it and retaped it and rendered it, and wiggled it, and tickled it, and refined it, and then we thought we’re pretty close, let’s model. We got it in clay, and Bill was delighted with the results all the way through. There were many of us who felt that the word profile wasn’t working well with the face of the vehicle, but the face of the vehicle had to be a Cadillac. You couldn’t drop the nose down as you’re doing the Riviera(?) in that time frame. So we went with it, and I think we had a little trouble in the first year or two convincing the customer that that was the right statement, but in recent years it seems to have caught on, and the volumes are increasing.

Q: The instinct was correct even though you had had some detractors.

A: Yeah. And in spite of where the volumes have gone in recent years, I would not have moved in that direction, personally. But he was the boss, and the car we were doing, I thought, was pretty dynamic.

Q: Still got a sketch of it?

A: We have photographs of the clay model. It was a car I really liked. I really enjoyed it, but, being number two, or three, or whatever I was at the time, they didn’t give me the opportunity to push that one through.

Bill Mitchell Retires

Q: Bill has retired, then, at this point?

A: Oh, yes.

Q: And he probably retired somewhat reluctantly, don’t you think?

A: I don’t know. I suspect, but it’s hard to say. When a man has been in the business for forty odd years, he may be ready for another challenge. Bill never did open up to me, nor I don’t believe to anyone else around here, as to how he felt about walking out the door in the later part of July in ’77. He never admitted to me that it was a hard thing to do.

Q: It was against his nature?

A: Yes.

Q: He told me that Harley Earl called him in his office and said, “You’re going to succeed me.” And then he tells a hilarious story about Jack Gordon calling him in and saying, “I don’t like it one God-damned bit what Earl is doing.”

A: Yeah. I think they sat right on that couch when Jack Gordon told him, “I’m not on your team. I want you to know that.” I think those are the words Bill used on me.

Q: What did Bill say to you when he…?

A: He told me that the President of General Motors, at the time, flat out stated that he wasn’t on Bill’s team. “I would not have voted for you to run this place.” That’s getting off to a pretty hectic start, isn’t it? If the president isn’t on your team….

Q: Jack Gordon?

A: Yeah. This is what Bill told me. I wasn’t there. I didn’t hear it. It’s heresay as far as I’m concerned.

Q: What did Bill tell you when he was retiring? Did he call you in and say, “Irv, it looks like I’m leaving in six months, and we’ve got to work a succession.”

A: He didn’t, no. We never had any kind of conversation. I’m not even sure that had Bill had the final choice, that I would have been his man. I personally don’t think so. He would focused on someone else in the organization. I believe the decision to move me into this job was made downtown. But I can tell you this, I probably was in this office two days when Pete Estes walked in and he said, “Well, are you settled yet?” I said, “I’m all moved in and ready to go.” He said, “Now I want you to know, Irv, if there’s anything you need, if you need any help from me, you just call me anytime you want.” If Bill’s story is true about Gordon, then I got off to a beautiful start with Pete Estes and Tom Murphy.

Q: Will you correct or affirm a story I heard that with Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell—fifty years of an adversarial situation with top management—do you think that Estes and the rest thought that Irv will move in a different sphere? That you’d handle things differently?

A: I really don’t know, Dave. Perhaps thoughts like that crossed the table at the board room when they were trying to make this decision. I have no idea. No one downtown has ever said to me, “We have put you in this assignment for these reasons.” I suspect we’re very visible here where the corporation management is concerned. They spend a lot of time with design staff, and they know us very well, and they probably made the decision based on what they had observed here in the building, and I did operate differently than some of the other executives in the building. I never used a baseball bat on anyone who reported to Irv, and I don’t today.

Q: I suspect that story’s true. I think they found in you a person who would work well with the staff and would not, as you say, use a baseball bat.

A: I’m quite a bit different than the other two people in this way, Dave. How do I say it without sounding like I’m patting myself on the back. I don’t mean it that way, but I’m totally involved in every facet of this operation, not just the design studios. I deal directly with the comptroller on the budget problems we may have and how we spend money, because, whether I’m spending General Motors’ money or my own, I want a dollars worth of value for every buck I spend here. I’m not going to throw a penny down the sewer. I get involved in labor relations problems and personnel problems and just about every facet of this business. I wouldn’t feel comfortable in this office, if I didn’t know what was going on, totally, within design staff.

Q: That’s a new breed of design [directors].

A: I don’t think it was done in the past. We always had administrative assistants. Earl had one, and Mitchell had one, and they ran the business end of design staff and concerned themselves totally with the studios. My approach, to let the people run in the studios, buys some time to do these other things, but I couldn’t sit in this office and rely on someone else to handle the budget and decide where the dollars are spent. I’ve got to know and control those things.

Q: This may have contributed to your success in the last ten years.

A: Perhaps it has.

Q: That you’re totally involved, totally engaged, and then let the people you select run the divisional studios.

A: I’ll say this, Dave, we’ve hit the budget right on the head every year since I’ve been in this office. That takes attention to detail and control.

Q: And commitment.

A: And commitment, absolutely.

Q: You’re moving in to the electronic and space eras very rapidly at General Motors. How do you see the design role in these situations today?

A: You’re talking EDS and Hughes?

Q: Huges Aerospace, EDS, the Saturn Project–the whole mix of electronic systems. How the design center fits with that matrix?

A: Remember, we’re new at it with EDS….

Q: There have been some problems?

A: There have been minor problems—nothing serious in my view. I suspect, over the long term, we will gain a lot working with EDS and their knowledge of computer systems. In this building, I’m not a com­puter expert, but I’d always asked a lot of questions about buying a new piece of equipment. I just had a meeting yesterday with the EDS team that services the Tech Center, and they were laying out their plans about what is going to happen here at design staff, and I’m confident that within the next five years efficiency will increase tenfold in this building. These people know what they’re doing. We don’t have computer experts of that nature in this building. We have people who are designing new systems for us within the building, but not system people per se.

How we relate to Hughes, I have no idea at this time. I think everyone in the corporation is feeling their way, and the relationship will probably be stronger between advanced engineering—Bob Eaton’s staff, or research staff—Bob Fosher’s group with Hughes than with design staff. We had a luncheon here the other day when the Hughes team came out to visit General Motors and the Tech Center . The luncheon was held in our dining room, and we had the Chairman and the President of Hughes here, and I got to chatting with Mr. Puckett, the Chairman, who was sitting at my table. I was hosting this luncheon, and I reminded him that we were bargaining for a piece of land in California that overlooks the Pacific, and when I turned my back on the ocean, I’m looking right up at the Hughes Research Center . I said, “You know, it might be interesting in the future if we get the building in there to do some business together.” He said, “Yes, it might be.”

Q: Have you since finalized that?

A: No. Nothing has been done along those lines because I don’t believe the final purchase of Hughes is yet complete. We haven’t issued any stock, so I would imagine it’s not completed as yet.

Saturn

Q: Saturn appears to be in your orbit.

A: Saturn’s been with us for several years.

Q: Without revealing any trade secrets, can you give us a rundown on how Saturn began, how it evolved, and how you sold management on…?

A: We did an S Car some six or seven years ago that was supposed to replace our Chevette. It was a front-wheel drive car, it was three door, and the program was completed. It was a handsome, little vehicle. We’ve got photos of it here. When the engineering and the cost people got into it, General Motors discovered that we’re way over the mark relative to the Japanese, cost-wise. We were something like $1,800 to $2,000 more expensive than any Japanese car of the same rate, same carrying capacity, same wheelbase and power.

So the program was stopped, and that’s how this new approach evolved. I wasn’t a part of the planning process downtown, but, apparently, the decision was made to start with a clean sheet of paper, form a new corporation, and attack the processes to take the cost out. You couldn’t build this little car as we had been building cars for the last seventy some odd years. That started a team here at the Tech Center that was called the Saturn Task Force reporting to Alex Mair, who is the group exective here. And it was largely a Tech Center team put together, and they had manufacturing people and engineering, people and the skills and the cost people. When they had done enough spadework, they came to us and said, “Now, we’d like a body for this program we’re working on.” We started working closely with them to understand their goals, where the costs might be, how we might have to go about designing this car.

We put one together quickly, and they took our surfaces, and they were going to build the first prototype. We had a fiberglass model, and then Roger Smith, our chairman, decided that he was going to announce this Saturn project to the press, show the car, and we did that. This past January, he announced the Saturn Corporation. Prior to that he announced the Saturn project, and he made the decision that he was going to show that fiberglass model to the press. We weren’t all that happy with that first effort, because it went quickly. When the car was on stage, the press was there, and Roger gave a speech about the Saturn project. When he finished and the press were milling around pho tographing it, I went over to the Chairman, and I said, “You know,” because it was an opening for me, “Now that you’ve shown this to the press, we’re not going to let our competitors see what we’re going to do in the late ’eighties, so I’m going back to work. I’m going to do another car.” He said, “You are?” I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Fine. Do it.” So we started what we called the second-generation Saturn, and we finished that about a year ago. But, as time wears on, and we do other programs, Saturn can age right here in this building. So, within the last few months, these cars that we thought were very exciting, are being changed even now as I talk.

Q: It might be of interest to future students of design if you could review what seems to have been a turning point in both General Motors design and the automotive industry design: the ’80′s being a turning point from the old days, and that the new era in design technique and philosophy is upon us and how that might fit in with your own concept of what design should be in the rest of the 20th Century.

A: Sure, Dave. Earlier, you used the word “evolutionary” rather than “revolutionary”. I believe that we did both in the ’80′s. I think our products were revolutionary in that we took a lot of size out of luxury sedans and Toronados and Rivieras , and everything we’ve done in the ’80′s. There was a cultural shock involved in the marketplace due to size differential. And because we were taking as much as two . feet, in the case of our luxury sedans, off the length of the car, we felt it necessary to maintain all the cues involved in those products which was a Cadillac Sedan DeVille or Buick Park Avenue.

You have to retain that personality when you make that drastic a change in size. I’d like to point out a basic philosophy that permeates General Motors design staff that hasn’t changed from the days of Harley Earl right up until my tenure in this office: that we maintain the divisional personalities through the years. We try to project those forward without doing a 180 degree turn on the customer. I think it’s important from a marketing point of view because the people who were driving our vehicles today that are one to five years old are still, and feel like they are, members of the General Motors family. An Olds is an Olds is an Olds. If you want to talk about a ’78 or ’80 or an ’85, you recognize an Oldsmobile on the street. Some of our competitors have done a 180 [degree turn]. They have very harsh, stiff-looking automobi les, and then suddenly in one year, they bring out what the media calls a jelly bean. I probably wouldn’t use that term, but that’s how they refer to it. Well….

Q: I suspect they were forced to do it?

A: Well, perhaps. Their share of market was slipping, and they had to make some drastic change. I think if we faced that, we would have done it in a different way. Where do we go next?

Q: You were about to talk about the evolutionary approach in General Motors design of the ’80′s. .

A: I was covering that, Dave, when I said when you make drastic changes in car size, you’ve got to maintain the cues that telegraph a Cadillac or a Pontiac or whatever brand name you wish to discuss. And as we march into the future, and I just left the patio a half hour ago looking at some vehicles we have out there for the ’90′s, and while they are radical in form, you could walk out there today and identify each and everyone of them. You’d look at it say, “My God, that’s a Buick. I know that.” They don’t have labels on them, but you’d know a Buick, and a Pontiac, and a Chevrolet because that is our basic philosophy. We will continue to do that. Take that personality and project it forward into the future. It protects the customer. It protects the used car value if you don’t make a radical turn in appearance. That’s essen tially one of the ground rules we live by, and I don’t see any change to those rules. That could happen, but I don’t see that anyone will change that approach around here.

Q: The divisional identity, then, will be preserved at least through the end of the 20th Century.

A: As far into the future as I can see.

Q: What do you see in terms of real change in automobile design, including mechanical and electronic design?

A: The cars out there that reflect my time in this office, are cars from ’80 on. Although I did influence many vehicles in the ’50′s, ’60′s and ’70′s, from ’80 on we were pursuing a course of far less chrome than anything we’ve done in the past. If we did chrome, we were using finer sections, smaller in size to mirror accents to body form and not decora tive pieces. I think the future says that you’ll see far less chrome-­more functional automobiles. Not necessarily round cars to achieve low co-efficients of drag. It isn’t necessary. You can do formal, harsh automobiles and get them at .3 or below. And there are some vehicles coming in ’87, in ’88, ’89 and ’90 that will be, for us, projecting the personality of the car divisions involved in these programs. But it will be a far more adventuresome step than we’ve taken in the past, plus the fact you’re going to see a lot more differential between our car divisions. They will not necessarily share upper structures across three or four divisions.

Q: As you’ve done in the past?

A: As we’ve done in the past. They may not necessarily share door panels which essentially telegraphs the side of the car. A quarter panel—the front fenders are merely reflections of the sections that are in the door. So, we’re going to have a great deal of differential in our products beginning with ’87 and moving on out. We will not only have a difference of appearance, but we’ll have different automobiles such as a two-place Cadillac and two-place Buick, and something we are currently referring to as a Space Machine that we will introduce somewhere in ’89, that, I think, the public will find a very interesting vehicle. It’ll do about anything they want to do with it. It’ll carry eight people, you can make a van out of it, you can do just about anything you wish with it. So the variety of products at General Motors will bring to the market in the ’80′s and early ’90′s will go beyond anything this corporation has ever attempted.

Q: It must exciting to think of it.

A: It has been an exciting time the last four and five years. And it has been a busy time. We haven’t had a chance to go fishing around here. But, hell, the business of creating new products for the consumer is an exciting profession. I’ve been in this business for 40 years, and to see something on the street that we had been working on five years before and see the numbers grow in sales is a very rewarding experience.

Q: I take it the question of consumer acceptance is paramount in design?

A: Absolutely.

Q: In other words, you’re out to sell cars.

A: Absolutely.

Q: It’s the bottom line. In this approach to the late ’80′s and the early ’90′s, do you feel that the consumer is ready for the electronic revolution?

A: I don’t doubt that for a moment. The electronics we use today are essentially used in customer-convenience items such as radio and heat and air, but the automobile of the future will become an electrical, mechanical vehicle. Steering would be electrical. Transmissions will be electrical. The engines are largely controlled by electronics today, and you may even one day have electrical power to the wheels rather than mechanical, so while everyone may think that this product is a mature product, that is by no means true. I only wish that I were a young chap starting today because the excitement I see up the road is going to be something to behold.

Q: Do you foresee in the near future a situation where the driver is now the passenger and that, while he’ll give the commands, the actual motion will be conducted by a computer?

A: I don’t know what you mean the near future, Dave.

Q: By the end of this century.

Voice Command

A: We’re talking about before this century runs out. No, I don’t see that. I think the driver will control the vehicle on the street, but I do believe that the driver will not necessarily have to reach for this switch and that button and flip this and punch that. Long before this century is out—the year 2000—I see the driver walking to the car and asking the door to open, and it’ll open, and he’ll ask for music, and he’ll get music, and he’ll ask the engine to start, and it will start, and if you’re running up the road and it starts to rain, you just ask for wipers and you get them. With a voice-command automobile in modern computer technology, it will probably be impossible for someone who has had four or five cocktails to start his automobile. With a slurred voice, the computer isn’t going to react, so there is a safety factor involved in this approach as well. I see this coming within the next ten years. As a matter of fact, I have driven a car that the Buick Motor Division has with this system, and, of course, the computer can be programmed so that if you have two or three family members driving the same automobile, it will react to your wife’s voice or your daughter’s voice or sounds. That’s entirely up to the owner of the vehicle how many people he wants to permit to run that machine.

Q: So the timbre—the tone of the voice—will indicate whether everything is normal or not?

A: That’s correct. If you’re slightly intoxicated, you’re not going to get that automobile started. You’ll have to take a cab home, which is a darned good thing for everyone.

Q: So can you say at this point, in the next two decades, General Motors is leaning toward a voice command approach?

A: We are, we are. We’re involved with people like Hughes. They are now part of General Motors, and some of their technology is going to filter into what we do here. We’re establishing closer links with that group now to understand what they have and how it may be applied here, and I see them making a strong contribution to our future products.

Q: Is this something that you could have foreseen twenty years ago?

A: I don’t think any of us thought that we’d be moving this heavily toward electronics in our vehicles twenty years ago.

Efficiency

Q: This quickly?

A: Yes. Perhaps a lot of it was brought on by the oil embargo. You look at the modern automobile today, and even the cooling fan is driven by an electric motor which takes the burden off the engine and gives you better fuel efficiency. All of these things have changed the way we build automobiles.

Q: Did the oil embargo push you, perhaps, faster than you might have into downsizing, into a lower co-efficient of drag, into customer conveniences–ergonomics?

A: Yes. You’re correct when you say it pushed us in the downsizing which we may not have done at all had the price of gasoline remained somewhere under a dollar. The American consumer was demanding large automobiles with big engines, and the oil embargo and the government’s approach to fuel economy standards with the law out there forced every domestic maker to downsize and lighten their cars. As far as quality and customer convenience items, we’re running down that road as a result of the competition we feel from our import friends. They have done a lot in the way of little change pieces in the car where you can keep money and places to put coffee cups, and on the strength of these 250 items, they sell a lot of automobiles. So, naturally, you look at what the competitor is doing and look at your product and—forget the strengths of the product–find the weaknesses and correct those, and that’s what we have embarked on in the last five or six years. But now the game is to jump ahead of our competitors—not follow them or be equal to them, but lead them. That’s what we’re doing for the late ’80′s and the ’90′s.

Q: It’s remarkable that you always were leaders in many respects—everybody else were followers. And yet, you’d gotten a little stodgy and self-satisfied in the late ’60′s and early ’70′s, and now you seem to be out in front of everyone in terms of innovations, creative devices for the consumer. Your market research is no longer saying, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” which is a cheap shot, but you understand what I’m driving at.

A: Yes, I do. Yes, we were always leaders for a great number of years in our history, but I believe in the late ’70′s and the early ’80′s, our competitors started to close the gap. You probably could look at General Motors in that time frame as a sleeping giant, and when we realized that this gap was closing in innovation and appearance, we took it upon ourselves to jump ahead. We weren’t comfortable with that. There’s a margin we like to maintain relative to competition, and I think we’re moving in that direction now.

Q: In that period, were you startled by Ford’s coming out of the dark ages, in the sense of design, and deciding to make, as you said, a 180 degree turn and come up with something [more] aerodynamic?

A: No, Dave, we weren’t startled because the word travels through [the design] community. We had no idea what the cars were, but we understood that Ford was going to move in an entirely different direc­tion. I don’t know how the rest of my team might feel about this, but I, frankly, am delighted that they took another course than following General Motors two or three years later because everything in the country looked alike, and it gives the consumer wider choices. Now they can measure, “Here the Ford product doesn’t look anything like General Motors, and Chrysler doesn’t look like Ford or G.M., and isn’t this the proper way to do business?” And over the long term, this will all sort out as to who has the greatest appeal to the public—what approach are they buying. I don’t for a moment believe that we’re going to appeal to everyone out there—that’s impossible to achieve—but if we can appeal to 60% of the domestic market, we’ll be very happy with that.

Triumph of aesthetic and consumer comfort

Q: The whole tradition of General Motors’ styling from Harley Earl on down has been a triumph of aesthetic and consumer comfort over the traditional engineering approach to make a solid automobile. In other words, you’ve successfully merged the two traditions of aesthetically- pleasing and comfortable automobiles merged with a good, solid engineering tradition. Earl was able to bridge that gap, and, to some extent, Mr. Mitchell. During your tenure, you don’t just design something to look alike, you design something to bring the consumer to the showroom, but when they get there, they’ve got to get a quality product.

A: Yes. There are people in our profession, Dave, who look at that 3-dimensional, clay model as created in anybody’s studio, not just our own, as a clay model, but there are many of us who look at that clay as steel and glass and plastic and rubber. And, it’s got to work, and the glass has to drop, and the engine has to start, and it has to have the proper clearance, and you’ve got to cool that engine, and you’ve got to seat those people comfortably. It isn’t a piece of art that’s going to stay in ‘the Detroit Art Museum . It has to be functionally sound. We’ve got a lot of people who believe exactly that, and we may have a few who look at it as clay, and I can do about anything I want with it, it’s pliable. Hell, I can go out there and defy the laws of physics if I want with this particular material, but a professional designer doesn’t attack it that way. We have appealed largely to the consumer through aesthetics because the greater majority of consumers do not know a great deal about what is under the hood and how this car is propelled. As long as you put the key in the ignition and it starts, that’s fine. That’s all they want, and that’s what we should give them. We should give them a trouble-free automobile that runs for a 100,000 miles with replacing only a few things, and, if we don’t, we’re going to lose the ballgame. That’s what they’re looking for.

Now, how are we able to lead over all those years? You can go back to Harley Earl’s time and still live by this approach: it is the young talent we bring in this building that determines what that end product is going to be. When we tour the industrial design schools, our standards are so high—you can go out to Art Center or CCS here in Detroit (Center for Creative Studies), and they may have a graduating class of ten, and we’ll select one—only the one who fits our standards. That’s the fellow we’ll bring aboard even though the need in the building may be for four or five designers. We won’t commit to filling those four other spots. We’ll take this fellow that meets our stan dards. We always run light in this organization. We really never achieve the staff necessary to create all the products that General Motors has, but I’d rather have one .300 hitter than five .190 hitters. It keeps the staff strong.

Fiero and the XP cars

Q: It would be helpful to future students of design, if we could take a case history of a recent, successful General Motors automobile, and, from your standpoint, bring us from the beginning to the conclusion.

A: Something like the Fiero?

Q: That crossed my mind—the Fiero. How that started. Where it began in terms of concept. Did it begin in the engineering department or the product planning department? Did it begin in the design studio, or was it a combination of all three? Was it a team approach?

A: The Fiero was a team approach, and, I guess, you could go back as far as 25 years, and we tried to sell the two-place car for the Pontiac division.

Q: Sell it internally?

A: It was internal—we called all our products XP that weren’t in the marketplace, and we’re trying to sell something new like a four-place, personalized coupe called the Riviera . It would have an XP number before it had a name, and the Fiero had many XP numbers over the last twenty years. As we came up into the ’80′s, the opportunity seemed to be right for Pontiac to get into a two-place commuter for a variety of reasons. One, the new Corvette was going to move into a new price structure and a very sophisticated car as far as running gear and appearance–second to none. We believe it’s second to none in the world. You can use the name Ferrari, it’s a very important name, but this car will do everything a Ferrari will do. As a matter of fact, it’ll run a little hotter. So the opportunity was there to do what Pontiac Motor Division was referring to as a two-place, commuter car. It would be extremely difficult to get any group in this building to do a commuter because we believe that if the car is youthful in appearance, you’re going to do one hell of a lot better than if you do some stodgy, two-place, little commuter machine, and when we started, we started in one of our advanced rooms.

Pontiac was just putting their team together. They had a fellow named Hulkey Eldicotchi who was in charge of the engineering program. He visited with us many, many times, and we talked about the goals. He was telling us about what power he’d use. It should be mid-engined. We wanted mid-engine, they wanted mid-engine, so we started downstairs in our advanced rooms. All our advanced studios are on the first floor. All the car divisional studios are on the second floor. We had several false starts, admittedly, and then this vehicle started to evolve from a sketch. As time wore on, perhaps, a year in that studio, we refined this form—a very distinctive silhouette. And that’s what we were looking for, Dave. We wanted something running down the street that you’d never miss. It had a silhouette that, with one look at it in a crowd of cars, you’d say, “That’s a Fiero.” We had the silhouette, but we didn’t have the face of the vehicle or the tail of the vehicle—the graphics that would telegraph “Pontiac.”

The Pontiac group had now received approval from the corporation to go ahead with the engineering on this car. Not, necessarily, that we were going to market with the vehicle, but to go ahead with the engi­neering. You could spend X number of dollars, and we’ll take a look at it again in another six months. When they got that okay, we decided that the program ought to move into our divisional studio, rather than advanced, because those individuals are skilled in creating the Pontiac personality. We move a car upstairs, and with people like Jack Humbert and John Schinella, we went to work and started refining this vehicle—finding the graphics for the rear and the face. The interior group, we cut loose to do the instrument panel and the interior environment. And another six months had passed when Pontiac got the okay to go into production. Then we dotted all the i’s, crossed all the t’s up in Pontiac 2 Studio, and the vehicle was released.

Q: Where did this final go-ahead come from?

A: The go-ahead comes from the corporation—the executive committee. They look at our clay, and they look at the cost of doing the vehicle. Then you’ve got to project volumes to determine if there’s any profit in the program. It was called a commuter car all the way through its development, but it’s anything but a commuter car. It’s a two-place, youthful, sporty machine.

Q: How did you come by the midship arrangement?

A: Essentially, to produce a two-place vehicle that in no way would mimic the Corvette, and there were two-place vehicles out in the marketplace like the Fiat X-19. It was a mid-engine car and a pretty attractive automobile, but we were confident we could bring out something that was better than that—more distinctive than that. This vehicle, in the year and a half it’s been out there, has really appealed to young women. If you note, as you drive down the street and see Fieros, you’ll see a lot of young ladies driving them. My daughter owns one. She’s very delighted with it.

Q: Someone in product planning seemed to have decided that you hadn’t tapped young, female commuter market.

A: If that was said, I didn’t know it. But everyone was involved with developing the concept of the program—the planning people at Pontiac, the planning people in our building, the engineering design community. It was a real team effort. The Pontiac engineers were in our studios more than I’d ever seen on any program, because here was a whole, new machine and a whole new opportunity to give birth to a new personality. That’s exciting to a creative team, and it’s far easier to do a car that has never existed before than taking a personality you’ve had for fifty years and projecting it forward. That’s a far more dif­ficult assignment.

Q: The Fiero came on strongly as a dashing image, but, apparently, the engineers were a bit conservative about the powering of it.

A: I’m not sure that the engineers were conservative. I think they were being careful, because, in no way, could this car nudge the Corvette. So, to sell the program, you talk about a four-cylinder engine with this kind of performance from zero to sixty, and Corvette is that much better, so they’re really not related. They’re two different automobiles. This is in the $10,000 field. That’s in the $20,000. They’re completely apart, and on that basis, the program was filled. But, if you notice, this year we have a V-6 in it, the performance is exciting. And once you’ve got the car on the marketplace, you can put in more power and go.

Q: It’s hindsight, but I wonder why it was underpowered.

A: I don’t like the word underpowered. Let me put it this way, the appearance of the vehicle suggested it should go a hell of a lot faster than it did the first year.

Q: The expectations were there.

A: Yes. It just didn’t do what it looked like.

Q: So this approach is unique with you. You were able to come up with a completely new concept in a very short time to fill a gap that you previously didn’t know existed in the market.

A: That’s right.

Selling the Fiero Program

Q: Did you have any trouble selling the program?

A: Yes, there were some hitches in there, because at that time we were developing the Fiero in ’81 and ’82, the market went flat. The car actually would have been brought to market a lot sooner had the market remained strong. But the capital wasn’t there to invest in the new program, and when the market started moving forward and getting stronger, that’s when Pontiac got the okay. We were confident that we could probably beat all records for two-place cars in the first year with that automobile, and we did precisely that. We almost sold 100,000 of them in the first year, and no one has ever done that with a two­place automobile. And we expect to continue to do that.

Q: Do you see General Motors, stylistically, going toward the wedge?

A: Not entirely. We’ll use that form in certain segments of the market, and we’ll use other approaches in other segments of the market. That’s a very diversified market out there. You will not see all General Motors cars being rounded, as an example. The upper level will be more formal than we will be at the lower end of the market. Sports machines may be wedged, and, then again, they may not. You’ve got to be very flexible in this business. You can’t lock in on one approach and say that’s the answer. My personal view of what an automobile should look like isn’t good enough, because we’re not designing for Irv, we’re designing for the 15 million customers out there that buy automobiles every year, so our approach has to be diversified.

Irvin Rybicki’s Career at General Motors

Q: Could you sum up Irvin Rybicki’s career at General Motors, his own personal design philosophy, and what lies ahead for you, personally, in the next ten years.

A: My career at General Motors–a fascinating subject. Damn stimu lating and exciting. Often, Dave, when I go to some of the industrial design schools and talk to the young people, since my career is winding down I say to them, “If, the day I have to walk out the door, because it’s mandatory that officers retire at the age of 65….”

Q: That’s still in effect in General Motors?

A: Oh, yes…”and I could walk downstairs into the personnel depart ment and hire in as a junior designer, I would do precisely that. Because the future is going to be exciting. It is an exciting business. It’s never dull, and when you think you know everything there is to know about it, some outside force changes how you approach a design of a vehicle, and you’re off with a learning process once again. That’s what makes it an exciting profession.”

I’ve served in every studio that General Motors has—Chevrolet, Pontiac, Olds, Buick and Cadillac. I’ve worked in advanced areas. I found each step along the way stimulating. I learned each time I made a move working with different personalities, different approaches to design. I tried, in almost every case, to absorb the strengths of the individuals I was working with and forget the weaknesses hoping to build a better Irv Rybicki when it came to becoming a professional designer. I was fortunate enough to move through the ranks from designer to assistant chief designer and chief and up into the front offices—finally in this office. I can’t say that any one step or period was better than the other. I enjoyed them all. Being in this office has been exciting in that it’s taken me beyond design, because there were the problems of running the total organization from a budget point of view, from a labor management point of view, a personnel point of view. I got involved in all of them, but it was stimulating, nevertheless. Yes, if I could do it over again, I’d stay in the business. I would suggest to any young man who loves automobiles and has some creative skills that it’s a good profession to go after. What am I going to in the future?

Q: Yes.

A: I’m not going to sit around in a rocking chair and swat flies, and I do not intend to stay in the profession in spite of what I’ve just said about going into the personnel office. If I had that opportunity, I would naturally do that, but I’m going to move off into other areas and new challenges and keep myself young and alive and vital and involved.

Why did Irv get the job?

Q: One more question. Following two rather forceful personalities in this office—Harley Earl who was an incredibly formidable character to many people….

A: Yes, to say the least.

Q: And Bill Mitchell designated heir apparent [because he] was somewhat of the same cut.

A: Yes, he was.

Q: Although these people were marvelously creative, and they hired good people, they were adversarial, in the sense that they were strong personalities, and they were not respecters of authority—they thought their views should be followed, not only by their subordinates, but by the officers of the company. Then a person like yourself comes along, and I have a feeling that the corporation said, “Enough of the adversarial relationship. We want someone who will come in with a team approach—who’ll work with the whole corporation.” Do you think that you have filled that role in your tenure as vice president of design?

A: I do not know till this day, Dave, why I got the job. Whether it was because they were looking for someone who would follow a team approach—that they’d enough of the other—or what the circumstances might have been. I do know this. Over the years, as I watched the two men operate, I believe they were shortchanging themselves because the staff wasn’t permitted to really run free. And having worked in all the rooms with a great many creative people and viewed the ideas they had—some were magnificent and never got to market—I’ve said to myself for a great many years, “If I ever wind up in that front office, I’ll let them run, and if they are off the mark, I’ll get them back on.” But I wasn’t going to hold anybody’s hand and steer anybody’s pencil. I have some pretty strong ideas about what an automobile should look like, but, at the same time, if we talked about the Buick studio and the personality running that room, I want the cars to reflect what that group believes within a certain General Motors framework. I think it’s my job to keep them within that framework but to cut them loose so that what they’re doing isn’t a Chevrolet or a Pontiac or a Olds—it’s pure Buick. I believe that is what has happened in my 8 years in this office, and we’ll see a lot of that in the ’80′s has produced some very different-looking cars. For me, it’s the right approach. I have no idea what the next man will do, and he’ll run it his way, and I will wish him the best of luck when I walk out of this office; and he absolutely has a right to run it his way. I did it my way, and I’m delighted with the results.

Q: Thank you. Something you said I very much admired. You said, “I fear no man.”

A: That’s true.

Q: And that you—while you’re not dogmatic in your opinions, you’re flexible—you feel that your approach has been the right one over the years.

A: I certainly do. If I had to it over, I would do it precisely the same way.

Q: What final word would you have for young designers coming up in the next couple of decades?

A: Final word for young designers—make your presence felt.

Q: In what way?

A: If you’re in a professional design house, such as General Motors design staff, make your presence felt by what you put up there on the wall as a seed of an idea. Communicate—communications are vital in this business. You can sketch ideas, but if you’re not talking to your neighbor designer in front of you or behind you or in small meetings in the studios—out of these conversations come a great many strong ideas. I know when I ran studios, Dave—and we work a lot of overtime in this building—overtime hours, after the fellows have had dinner in our dining room, are not all that productive. Now they’re fed, and they’re a little slow, and I would create meetings in the room and talk about the car we were working on all day long and get them to express their ideas. I found that far more beneficial than getting 45 minutes of work—physical work—out of three hours. I didn’t think that was a good buy, so we chatted about the vehicle, and a lot of great things happened out of those little meetings. So that’s why I say, “Young men, make your presence felt. Make yourself heard. Don’t be afraid to speak up.”

Q: Thank you very much.

A: Thank you.

We’ve been speaking today with Mr. Irvin W. Rybicki who has been for the last 8 years Vice-President of Design for General Motors Corporation.

Click on this link to download the Detroit Institute of Automotive Styling course in PDF format (39MB).

Detroit Institute Ad from Popular Mechanics, December, 1946

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There are many photos in the book of production and styling show cars from various manufacturers, renderings by Strother MacMinn of many of these cars plus several pages of his own designs. This rare, out-of-print book was loaned to me by Richard Nesbitt. Strother died in 1998.

A Man of Wit and Genius

From Coachbuilt.com. As a young boy growing up in Pasadena, California, Strother MacMinn spent every spare moment drawing pictures of cars or pestering salesmen at car dealers to share their brochures and knowledge of the treasures in their showrooms. It was on one such occasion that a kindly gentleman at the Pierce-Arrow agency provided a turn of fate for Strother by disclosing the whereabouts of a service entrance into the Walter M. Murphy Studio, where he met and became friendly with Franklin Hershey.

Franklin Hershey, one of the best designers in that custom body shop, was so taken with young Strother’s sketches that he invited him into a whole new world by having him come to his office Saturday mornings where he showed him the basics of professional body design. This friendship and guidance continued after Hershey moved to Detroit to work at GM, and throughout Strothers’ prep school, summer classes at the Art Center School in Los Angeles and high school years. It eventually led to Strother’s first working job in 1936 in the Buick studio at General Motors Art & Colour Section with Franklin Hershey as his boss.

With corporate approval from GM’s German division, Harley Earl set up a new studio in 1937. Strother MacMinn, John Coleman and George Jergenson, with Frank Hershey in charge and Hans Mersheimer of Opel as design liaison officer, were given the assignment to style the upcoming 1938 Opel Kapitan. It was an exciting enterprise because of its new approach to international styling and included advanced ideas such as built-in headlights, stretch fenders and a clean body form. (That basic model, with face-lifts, remained in production into the early fifties.)

It was with skill and enthusiasm that MacMinn participated in the development of design proposals for GM’s inter-city bus client, Greyhound Lines, Frank Springs styling department at Hudson Motors, Ed Anderson’s Oldsmobile studio, and many others on his long list of credits.

But, according to MacMinn, the best job offer anyone ever had was his part-time teaching job in 1945 at the Art Center College in the Industrial Design department. MacMinn feels nothing can compare with the excitement and stimulation of sharing enthusiasm and knowledge with dedicated, professionally oriented young design students. Perhaps that is why he has been teaching part-time for the past 41 years.

In addition he has worked independently as a designer of: aircraft seats, household products, and fiberglass boats. And as a consultant in 1979, he helped to found the first Southern California advanced concept satellite auto design studio for the Toyota Motor corporation.

Since 1953 MacMinn has written and illustrated articles for Road & Track, Motor Trend, Automobile Quarterly, and Car Graphic magazines in addition to historical catalogue essays for the “Automobile and Culture” and “Detroit Style: Automotive form 1925-1950″ exhibits in Los Angeles and Detroit.

Strother MacMinn’s lifelong love of the automobile has led him to own a 1937 Cord 812 phaeton and a 1929 Rolls-Royce P-1 Derby phaeton. He kept and still drives the 1951 Jaguar XK-120 roadster that he bought for $2400 in 1953.

An excerpt from the Coachbuilt.com article about chrome

Chrome, too, can be a temptation. Cadillac introduced chrome plating in 1929 and it quickly spread throughout General Motors and then the industry. Nickel, with its lovely warm hue, had had a soft richness that was appealing, but when that super-hard blue-white of chromium came along, which needed little polishing and which seemed to last forever, nickel quickly became pass. Few owners chrome inappropriately on cars that predate 1929, but on later cars, there’s a tendancy to chrome everything, including parts such as water pipes and electrical conduits that weren’t chromed originally. Chrome wire wheels appear in such abundance today that one is tempted to think that all classic cars had plated wheels. Yes, chrome wire wheels were possible as the problems of embrittlement were solved, but they were rare.

The problem is compounded when owners add whitewalls to chrome-plated wheels. Such a combination again shouts “Look at Me” too readily. Strother MacMinn, who served as Chief Honorary Judge at Pebble Beach for twenty-five years, always maintained that a car could have chrome wheels or white sidewalls, but not both; he felt the eye was so drawn to the combination of whitewall and chrome wheel that the general line of a car, its balance as a whole, was distorted.

A great Concours d’Elegance automobile is a combination of beauty, accuracy of restoration, and an indefinable melange of “star” qualities. But above all, a car must reflect its own period, especially in matters of color and decoration. Strother MacMinn, a famous judge with strong artistic gifts, comments on taste: “Either choose chrome wire wheels or white sidewall tires but not both. Too gaudy.” He adds, “All classic cars were not red or cream!” (Two favorite colors of restorers which often show to advantage on a field). The best car may quietly state its own period with a delicate refinement, even with understated elegance, that, when new, would have reflected the buyer’s taste. Good judges will see this on the field.

Gallery of artwork from Sports Cars of the Future by Strother MacMinn

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