One of the cool models on display at the 2013 FBCG reunion.
The Detroit News published a great online photo gallery covering the January, 2013 Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild Reunion held at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, Arizona. Click on this link to review their post: “Model Makers produced their own classics.”
Thanks to Mike Parris for the heads up.
Gary,
Thanks for sharing this excellent Detroit News Photo Gallery for all to see.
It’s great to see that the model cars have been very well preserved by their builders.
John M. Mellberg
FBCG 2nd Sr. Natn’l., 1966
Gary,
Ron Mangus did a phenomenal job on the interior of my latest roadster. If you haven’t seen photos, let me know. They won’t be as good as yours, though.
Finally, I had considered competing in the Fisher Body competition as a lad, but it was another one of those “coulda, shoulda, woulda” things.
Chick Koszis
I was amazed with creativity, imagination and quality of those models.
The Fisher Body Craftsmans Guild was one of the finest things General Motors ever did.
It inspired four of us guys back in the ‘50s, Bob Cadaret, Ron Hill, Robert Cumberford and myself, all of us at Franklin High School in Los Angeles, to enter the contest and later become designers in GM Styling. Cadaret and Hill stayed on. Cumberford and I moved on to careers in automotive journalism, car and aircraft design, and cartooning. But working in GM was like attending a superb university specializing in the ways of business, crucial in helping us define what we wanted to do with our lives.
Every young man who designed, built and submitted a model car in that contest came out a winner. I have poked fun at GM in my cartoons over the decades, because they deserve it. But GM also deserves credit for having created the Fisher Body Craftsmans Guild, one of the finest things any corporation ever did.
Thank you Stan Mott for you for your insightful comments about the Fisher Body Craftsman Guild Program. The four designers you mentioned were all very talented individuals and those who remained at GM became well deserved leaders. It is a shame that this kind of program no longer exists, however I am amazed at the talent of the young people at CSS and other institutions. The future, worldwide, is in good hands with these very talented individuals.
I thank the FBCG program and my State of New York award in 1959 for my my start in building hot rods an custom cars in the 60’s. I didn’t get to go to Art Center School or Pratt Institute because of finances and logistics. So I enrolled in a local Tech School and took architectural drawing and design as second choice. I took an interest in building kit cars. At looking at the kits available at the time, I was not impressed with the kits available, that were crude copies of existing cars. I new that I could create an original design that would be easier to build. So in 1966 I designed the Talon Gt kit car based on a popular chassis at the time a shortened VW. After building several kits and a licencing agreement with a Dutch company, I went back to the drawing board and modified the design to fit full size VW chassis. The Talon GT 2+2. After that experience it led to a development of a design team that created several other limited production cars for clients.