Fins

by William Knoedelseder

  Dedication

  In memory of my father, William Kenrick Knoedelseder Sr.,

  and my dear friend for more than fifty years, Terry J. Cowhey,

  the two guys who were always there to talk cars with me

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue: Dedication Day

  1:Pioneers

  2:Hollywood and Harley

  3:The Competitors

  4:The Cadillac Kid

  5:Battleground Detroit

  6:Assembly Lines to Breadlines

  7:A Man of Style and “Statue”

  8:“What Will I Tell Mr. Sloan?”

  9:Helping Make Germany Great Again

  10:“I Wouldn’t Buy That Sonofabitch”

  11:Detroit’s War

  12:The Birth of Fins

  13:Designing the Future

  14:The Great American Sports Car Race

  15:The Hot One

  16:Glory Days

  17:Insurrection

  18:Not Fade Away

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by William Knoedelseder

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue: Dedication Day

  It was “D-day” in Warren, Michigan—May 16, 1956. The invasion began at midmorning as an armada of automobiles, shuttle buses, and limousines materialized out of the mist all along Van Dyke Avenue and Mound Road several miles outside the city limits of Detroit.

  The cause of the sudden traffic surge was General Motors, which was hosting an event for five thousand VIPs and members of the press to mark the official dedication of its new office complex, called the General Motors Technical Center, located on a mile-square plot of onetime farmland in the usually tranquil township of some forty thousand people.

  The Dedication Day festivities were to include a sumptuous, chef-prepared picnic lunch, followed by a closed-circuit television appearance by President Dwight D. Eisenhower and a walking tour of the complex guided by CBS News reporter Walter Cronkite, whose network was set to transmit the event simultaneously to smaller-scale “D-day” gatherings at GM offices in sixty-one other cities.

  That may seem like an awful lot of hoopla for a new office park, but the Technical Center was unlike any corporate facility ever before imagined. Built over a period of eight years at a cost of $125 million (the equivalent of more than a billion dollars today), it had been conceived by a trio of senior GM executives as a melding of science, technology, and art that would stand as a testament to the seemingly limitless capability of both the company and the country, a lofty ambition that appeared to have been achieved with the finished product.

  Twenty-five sleek, low-slung buildings made of steel and glass, the material of automobiles, were set in a lavishly landscaped 330-acre campus surrounding a 22-acre artificial lake accented by four islands of weeping willow trees, a 138-foot stainless-steel water tower, and two dramatic fountains, one spraying a shimmering curtain of water 50 feet high and 115 feet wide and the other, designed by famed sculptor Alexander Calder, shooting twenty-one streams into the air, pulsing, leaping, and falling in a graceful liquid ballet.

  A GM press release boasted that the two fountains displaced more water than all the fountains at France’s famed Palace of Versailles, prompting Life magazine to proclaim the Tech Center “the Versailles of Industry.”

  Clustered around the lake, offices for the company’s four major staff operations—manufacturing, engineering, research, and styling—were demarcated by decorative exterior walls of brilliantly colored glazed bricks—crimson, scarlet, tangerine, royal blue, lemon yellow, chartreuse—reminiscent of those found in the palaces of ancient Abyssinian kings (again, according to a GM press release). Because no contemporary commercial brick maker possessed the technical know-how to meet the architect’s specifications, the bricks had been glazed and baked in a giant kiln that GM financed specifically for the task.

  The focal point of the Tech Center was the Styling Auditorium, with its gleaming aluminum-covered dome mirroring the sky. Aside from being visually stunning, the 65-foot high dome was a technological marvel, the first of its size to be held aloft by pressure-vessel construction, which basically inflated it from within. The 188-foot span consisted of welded sheets of steel a mere three-eighths of an inch thick—in relation to its total area, as thin as one-thirtieth of an eggshell.

  Given an advance look at the facility, Architectural Digest pronounced it “an architectural feat that may be unique in our time.”

  As it turned out, the fancy picnic had to be moved under a huge tent because of the weather—a stiff, cold wind and an intermittent drizzle that weather forecasters warned might turn into a full-blown thunderstorm before the day was out. Luckily, however, the rain failed to arrive as predicted, and shortly before noon the guests began filing into the open, drafty bleachers that had been set up on the west side of the lake opposite the engineering buildings. Bundled against the chill in overcoats, hats, and gloves, the assemblage represented a sizable portion of America’s post–World War II brain trust: Wall Street bankers, CEOs of manufacturing firms, presidents of universities, deans of engineering schools, scientists, inventors, architects, philanthropists, government officials (notably, Secretary of Defense Charles E. Wilson, a former president of GM), and senior officers from all branches of the military, including the vice commander of the Strategic Air Command, the chief of the navy’s bureau of ordnance, and the army’s chief of research and development. Typically for the time, almost all were men; it was nearly impossible to find a female face in the crowd.

  After Cronkite explained the wonders of the new closed-circuit-TV technology, a military band played “The Star-Spangled Banner” and four F-86 Sabre jets executed a screaming low-level flyover punctuated by the detonation of an aerial bomb. Harlow Curtice, the GM president and CEO, stepped to the podium and declared, “We have gathered here today for a momentous occasion.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. The Tech Center—with its four thousand scientists, engineers, technicians, and designers—had been operational for more than six months. So the occasion was really an elaborate bit of public relations. But the “moment” was indeed significant. As the sun began to peek through the clouds that November-like day in May, America was at its apex—the dominant military, economic, and social force on earth. General Motors reigned as the most successful company in the history of business. Detroit was the manufacturing capital of the world and home to the industry that directly or indirectly employed one in six Americans.

  “No industry has contributed more to our nation’s growth and development than the automobile industry,” Curtice said. “Its product has completely changed the face of America and the lives of all Americans.”

  Curtice’s preeminence on the program was made possible by the retirement the month before of Alfred P. Sloan Jr., who had headed GM for thirty-three years and whose organizational brilliance was universally credited with shaping the company into a global colossus. The Tech Center had been Sloan’s idea. He was sitting a few feet away from Curtice but had chosen not to speak.

  Charles F. Kettering, GM’s vice president and director of research from 1920 until his retirement in 1947, followed Curtice to the speaker’s stand. Now nearing eighty, “Boss Ket,” as he was affectionately referred to around the company, was a legend in the auto industry. A scientist, engineering genius, and inveterate inventor with more than 140 separate patents in his name, he revolutionized the car business in 1912 when his electronic starter replaced the old arm-busting crank starter, which had served as a barrier to women becoming independent drivers.

&n
bsp; Sloan and Kettering had built GM together, had grown rich and become philanthropists together, founding the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in 1945. They had also planned the Tech Center together, beginning in the years before the war. But in a rare divergence, they ended up disagreeing strongly about how it should look. Kettering thought most of what passed for modern architecture appeared frivolous, frail, and poorly constructed. He preferred a classic “ageless” look. GM didn’t need any “fancy buildings,” he told Sloan. “We want solid, functional buildings that don’t detract from what we do in them.”

  Twelve years after that conversation Boss Ket still seemed a bit miffed that Sloan, the real boss, had overruled him. “One thing worries me about this Technical Center,” he said. “I’m afraid that the people here may lean too heavily on the facilities and forget that ideas are developed in the mind. If we took all the people away it would be obvious that nothing would come out of the Technical Center.”

  That was his only downbeat note, however, and his stirring summation brought the technocrats in the crowd to their feet. “Anything you can think of today can be done,” he said. “With willing hands and open minds, the future will be greater than the most fantastic story you can write.”

  President Eisenhower wrapped up the speechifying portion of the program, appearing “live” on a large screen to deliver a five-minute pep talk that someone in either the White House or, more likely, the GM publicity department had titled, in keeping with the theme of the day, “The Rich Reward Ahead.” It was a bland performance—rambling, repetitive, and replete with platitudes, concluding with a prediction that work at the Tech Center would bring about “broader freedom and richer dignity for human beings, more rewarding lives, for all Americans and, we hope, through all the world.”

  The audience wouldn’t have cared if the President had recited pages from the Detroit telephone directory. As far as they were concerned, he was the auto industry’s best friend. He had come into office convinced by his experience moving armies across Europe during World War II that the United States needed a massive upgrade of its transportation infrastructure. “A modern highway system is essential to meet the needs of our growing population, our expanding economy, and our national security,” he said in his first State of the Union address. So he threw the full weight of his presidency behind the passage of the Federal-Aid Highway Act, which committed the government to spend $25 billion building 41,000 miles of interstate highways, the largest public works project in the history of the country. The legislation was set to be voted on the following month, and everyone present believed it was certain to accelerate already booming auto sales and spark an attendant surge in the steel, glass, rubber, and oil industries. Billions more dollars would pour into Motor City.

  Of course, no one in the bleachers could foresee that all those new roads eventually would send hundreds of thousands of people streaming into the suburbs to live, siphoning off the inner city’s tax base and leaving it unable to provide adequate services for its remaining, less affluent residents. On Dedication Day 1956, it was impossible to imagine a future in which both Detroit and General Motors would file for bankruptcy.

  The afternoon’s program concluded with an hour-long expedition through the Tech Center grounds, office suites, laboratories, and design studios, with much of the narrative provided by GM’s vice president of styling, Harley Earl, who had not been introduced or even mentioned by any of the speakers, an odd omission given the role he played in the events leading up to the day. He was the third member of the troika (along with Sloan and Kettering) that conceived and planned the Tech Center, and was arguably the one most responsible for how it turned out. In the Versailles of Industry, Harley Earl was Louis XIV. He had chosen the architect and overseen all details of its execution, approving every color scheme and every piece of custom-designed furniture throughout the entire complex. From the Antoine Pevsner bronze sculpture Bird in Flight near the front entrance to the brushed-steel handrails leading down the back stairs to the basement of the Styling Building, the GM Technical Center looked the way it did because that was the way Harley Earl thought it should look.

  The same could be said of the roughly 50 million cars that had rolled off the GM assembly lines during his twenty-nine years with the company. Earl practically invented the profession of automobile styling. He introduced art into the rigid mechanics of mass automobile manufacturing and thereby changed the game forever. It was styling, not engineering, that had propelled GM past Ford to an indomitable fifty-plus percent share of U.S. auto sales. Earl’s sense of how an American car should look, and what it should embody, pervaded every design studio in Detroit. His decision to put tail fins on the 1948 Cadillac kicked off a competition among automakers to see who could out-fin all the rest, to the point that the rear fender protuberances became the dominant design element of American cars during the 1950s and the subject of a heated public debate, with both sides claiming them as a metaphor for the state of the nation.

  If Harley Earl is known at all to the public today, it’s probably as the “father of tail fins.” But he was a great deal more than that. Six decades after Dedication Day, automotive historians and car collectors alike will tell you that the American car industry’s rise to greatness began and ended with him.

  1

  Pioneers

  The first great fortunes in America were made in the timber business as the country’s immense northern forests were felled, first to clear land for homesteads and later to provide lumber for bridges, buildings, towns, and cities.

  Commercial logging began in New England and then moved inexorably west into New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, taking down nearly everything in its path. When the first loggers arrived in Michigan in the 1840s, they found a vast expanse of untouched white pine and a network of navigable rivers to transport the cut timber to ports on the Great Lakes. In other words, log heaven.

  Detroit, which was founded as a fur-trading post in 1701, developed into a major logging hub in the latter half of the 1800s as timber companies floated islands of logs down Lake Huron to the city’s many sawmills, which cut them into lumber for shipment east through Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. Michigan timber thus provided the underpinning for Detroit’s rise as an industrial center. Detroit-based lumber barons invested millions in real estate and manufacturing, built vainglorious mansions, donated to art museums, libraries, and colleges, and formed an aristocracy that fostered an image of the city as the “Paris of the West.”

  All the while, their armies of loggers laid waste to Michigan’s pine forest, leaving behind millions of acres of stump-studded, debris-littered land that was unsuitable for farming but fertile ground for dry-season fires that periodically destroyed vast tracts of uncut timber and killed hundreds of people. Most of the cutting went on during the winter months so the logs could be hauled to the rivers over frozen ground by horse- or ox-drawn wagons and sleds. Which meant the loggers spent the entire winter in the forest, sheltered in shantylike log bunkhouses that held as many as a hundred men. The so-called shanty boys—mostly single and in their teens and twenties—worked from dawn until dusk six days a week for twenty to twenty-six dollars a month.

  Jacob William Earl was a typical shanty boy. Born in 1866 in Oneida, Michigan, a hundred miles west of Detroit, the son of a farmer, J.W. didn’t go to high school. After completing eighth grade, he served as a blacksmith’s apprentice for a few years and then went to work in the woods, where he labored first as a lumberjack, the most difficult and dangerous job in logging, and later as a sawmill worker, which paid better—thirty to sixty dollars a month—but required him to provide his own room and board. His time as a lumberman coincided with Michigan’s peak as the foremost lumber-producing state in the union, when its output amounted to a fourth of the nation’s total, nearly equaling the next three states combined. But the pace of the cutting slowed in 1887 as Michigan’s timber resources began to play out. Having consumed an estimated two-thirds of the stat
e’s pine forests, the large lumber companies started moving their operations on to Indiana, Wisconsin, and, ultimately, the Pacific Northwest.

  At age nineteen, J.W. took a break from logging and traveled with his uncle to visit relatives in Arcadia, California, a sparsely populated agricultural area a few miles north of Los Angeles. After those harsh winters in the northern woods, he apparently was seduced by the scent of the citrus blossoms and the persistent warm sunshine. He never returned to Michigan.

  He worked for a while with his uncle, who was a carpenter, then found employment in a small blacksmith and carriage repair shop in downtown Los Angeles. The shop’s location, near the corner of Fifth and Hill Streets, turned out to be a stroke of luck because it placed him just a few blocks from the home of Harley and Mary Hazard Taft, a prominent couple whose patronage would prove a turning point in his life.

  The Hazard-Taft clan was one of the city’s most storied pioneer families. The chronicle of how they’d come to settle in Southern California read like a frontier novel.

  Mary Hazard was born in Detroit in 1841, the daughter of Ariel Merrick Makepeace Hazard, a ship captain on the Great Lakes and a first cousin to Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, who won a brilliant naval victory over the British in the Battle of Lake Erie during the War of 1812, after which he supposedly uttered the famous line “We have met the enemy and they are ours.”

  When Mary was an infant, her father moved the family to Chicago, which amounted to little more than a village at the time. The Hazards lived in a small log house on the banks of Lake Michigan while “the Captain” plied his trade, piloting ships loaded with Michigan lumber. He became successful enough to own three ships, but all were lost in storms one terrible spring, leaving the family in dire financial straits.

  Desperate to restore his family’s fortune, Captain Hazard left his pregnant wife and five children behind and headed to California in 1849, seized by “the gold fever,” as Mary recalled later in a private journal. He sailed aboard a freighter around Cape Horn and after three months arrived in Hangtown, California, a chaotic, violent mining camp during the Gold Rush, so named because of its frequent hangings and later renamed Placerville. Hazard became a merchant, providing prospectors with dry goods, lumber, and groceries. After two years he had amassed enough money to return to Chicago to fetch his family and lead them to what he hoped would be a golden new life in California.