Auto Biography

by Earl Swift

  Like its competition, Chevy constantly updated its offerings to the buying public. Every three years its cars were reinvented from the tires up, reengineered inside and out—new chassis, new suspensions, new bodies. The year following these major changeovers, the company’s “A” body core, the box it shared with small Pontiacs, would be unchanged; its front and rear ends would be tweaked, their sheet metal reshaped, taillights swapped out, grille reconsidered. In the third year, the core would be left alone, the stem and stern again edited. The year after that, the cycle would start anew.

  The aim was to excite automotive America’s yen for the right now, and to instill disaffection in the country’s drivers for whatever cars they owned, no matter how recent their purchases: Get them to buy this year’s model, then immediately brand that model yesterday’s news, and get them champing for the next. “Our big job is to hasten obsolescence,” GM design chief Harley Earl observed in the mid-fifties. “In 1934, the average car ownership was a span of five years. Now it’s two years. When it is one year, we will have a perfect score.”

  It fell on Earl, more than anyone else at GM, to effect this “dynamic obsolescence,” as he termed it. The ’57 Chevy’s new engine notwithstanding, the mechanical innards of the company’s cars usually didn’t change much from year to year—GM’s engineering was conservative, its bosses content to let others take the risks associated with new technology. So it was styling that usually sold Chevrolets and the rest of the GM line. “If you go by a school yard and the kids don’t whistle,” Earl was known to say, “back to the drawing board.”

  “Mistearl,” as his workers called him, brought a style to GM that went beyond sheet metal. Athletic, always deeply tanned, the six-foot-four designer favored bespoke pastel suits, bright shirts and ties, two-tone shoes, and the company of celebrities. He knew a lot of them—he’d crafted custom car bodies for Mary Pickford, Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, and dozens of other Hollywood luminaries before moving to Detroit.

  His people knew to stay true to a handful of principles Earl espoused with evangelical intensity. Every finished GM car should be recognizable as the product of a specific year, and of General Motors, and of its division: A Pontiac should look like a Pontiac, a Buick like a Buick, and both like children of the same corporate parent. Every GM car should hint that it shared blood with the previous year’s model, but clearly improve the breed. Finally, it should be handsome, damn handsome—enough that drivers of previous model years would want it on sight.

  He ascribed to a few more precepts on how his stylists might achieve this. A car’s front end—its headlights, grille, bumper—was especially important to its looks: “The face,” he told his people, “it’s all in the face.” He encouraged them to take risks, to shove aside tradition. “Go all the way,” he advised, “then back off.”

  And there was Earl’s most cherished tenet, summarized in three words: longer, lower, wider. “My primary purpose for twenty-eight years has been to lengthen and lower the American automobile, at times in reality and always in appearance,” he explained in 1954. “Why? Because my sense of proportion tells me that oblongs are more attractive than squares, just as a ranch house is more attractive than a square, three-story, flat-roofed house or a greyhound is more graceful than an English bulldog.”

  His first GM offering, the LaSalle of 1927, had been celebrated not only for its clean lines, two-tone paint, and sensuously curved fenders, but because it stood inches lower than the competition, and Earl had never stopped whacking at the height of GM’s cars. The company’s sedans stood an average six feet tall in 1930. The ’57 Chevy was a full foot shorter.

  By the mid-fifties, Earl rode herd on a staff of 650, split among separate studios for each of the five divisions. He was a tough boss, prone to temper tantrums and profane outbursts and sky-high expectations. Junior designers often put in eighty hours a week at the studio, knowing that Earl was nonetheless likely to fire them for the slightest error—or, for that matter, no reason at all: He fired designers he didn’t like. He fired those he didn’t consider manly. He fired one, reputedly, because he didn’t like the way the man walked. He fired some at least once a year, sometimes for just minutes; Earl was known to dispatch assistants after a just-canned man to beg him back.

  Still, Earl’s presence made for a dynamic, always interesting workplace. GM wasn’t much accustomed to executives who burst into its suites wearing jodhpurs and riding boots, or spouting a blend of high fashion and the gutter. The best of the designs he oversaw reflected his flamboyance. The first “concept car,” the convertible Buick “Y Job” of 1938, featured hideaway headlights, push-button door latches, and the industry’s first electric windows, and barely reached Earl’s hip. Its smooth-bodied styling would be a template for the GM cars of just after World War II. Another concept car, the Corvette—the company’s answer to the British two-seat roadsters winning allegiance among American drivers, particularly veterans—blew away auto show audiences in January 1953. So did the Corvette’s station wagon spinoff, a two-door, low-slung beauty with a fluted roof, which in modified form became the Chevy Nomad of 1955.

  Behind each new design lurked a keen understanding of human behavior. Earl strove to create machines that inspired wonder and projected an image, one that a motorist assumed—or that onlookers ascribed to him—when he took the wheel. A Pontiac was youthful and sporty; so, too, was the driver who owned one. A Cadillac had to inflame the desires of the buyer who could afford it, while creating a hunger in everyone else for the station in life that would permit such a purchase. And all the company’s cars had to constantly produce new takes on the images it sought to convey, year after year. Motorists could never be left to enjoy their wheels for long. They had to have something new thrust under their noses, to feel the ache of dissatisfaction, to mull an upgrade—and ultimately, to keep the machinery of dynamic obsolescence churning.

  The strategy dovetailed with the life expectancy of cars built in the fifties, for they didn’t age well. Bodies rusted through in a handful of years. Tires wore out at fifteen thousand miles. Though his owner’s manual opened with the boast that Thornhill’s wagon was “the newest and finest Chevrolet ever built—designed to serve you faithfully and economically for many thousands of miles,” flipping through its pages revealed that the machine’s running gear was really quite delicate.

  It had to be broken in. “It is recommended that your speed for the first 500 miles be confined to a maximum of 60 MPH,” the manual read, “but do not drive for extended periods at any one constant speed, either slow or fast”—a precaution that would “assure proper ‘mating’ of all moving parts in the engine, transmission and rear axle.” It had to be warmed up before one stomped on the gas; what’s more, its optional push-button radio had to be warmed up before stations could be preset. And it required a wearying amount of maintenance: The manual recommended that Thornhill check the battery every two weeks, flush the radiator in spring and fall, change the oil and air filter every two thousand miles, take it to the dealer for a full tune-up every five thousand, and once a month (or every thousand miles) lube the chassis, turn the distributor lubricant cap, fill the distributor hinge cap oiler, and top off the fluids in the transmission, rear axle, radiator, brake master cylinder, and steering gearbox.

  This was a distant ancestor of the modern car, from another age altogether. In 1957, much of the country relied on telephone party lines. The polio vaccine was just two years old, the transistor radio three. The first commercial computers, slow and stupid next to the weakest modern PCs, cost millions of today’s dollars and occupied entire rooms. And the only way to Europe for most travelers was aboard a ship. The fastest, the SS United States, flagship of the U.S. merchant fleet, took four days to travel from New York to Southampton, England.

  How primitive was the Chevy? Here’s how: It had as much in common with the first spindly, tiller-steered horseless carriages as it has with the computer-controlled autos of today. If you were to draw an aut
omotive timeline beginning with the first wheezy buggies and ending with the 2014 model year, you’d find the ’57 Chevy near the midpoint not only in time, but in technology.

  For all of his efforts, Thornhill’s warranty from Chevrolet covered him for a measly ninety days or four thousand miles, whichever came first. So, looking to protect his investment, Thornhill built a garage in his backyard and parked the wagon inside. From the little house he and son Jack shared west of town, the shipyard was a twenty-minute commute, a trip he made in the Chevy every day; in his off hours he took meticulous care of the car, keeping it clean, staying true to the laborious maintenance schedule.

  The Chevy became central to a host of family memories: Sunday drives with the windows down to escape the summer heat. Trips out of the city on which Thornhill would point out grazing black cattle to his granddaughter, Janet, and tell her they made chocolate milk. Years passed. Thornhill retired. The city morphed around him. A new web of superhighways inched its way into town, bridging the rivers that had divided the region from its earliest days. Newtown was bulldozed. A white exodus emptied central Portsmouth. Norfolk razed its downtown slums, only to lose its downtown shoppers; at night, the city center lacked only tumbleweeds to perfect the lonesome ambiance of a spaghetti western. Vietnam, an old French problem when Thornhill bought the Chevy, became the region’s principal business.

  When Bruce Jr. left home for veterinary school in the fall of 1965, it was in the wagon. Thornhill and Bruce Sr. twice drove him down to the University of Georgia, his gear piled in the cargo hold. In the spring of 1967, Janet, about to graduate from high school, applied for a spot on the majorette squad at North Carolina’s Elon College, and Thornhill drove her and her mom to the tryouts in the wagon.

  He was slowing down by then. He’d long before lost most of his hair; now the fringe turned silver. Thornhill devoted himself to the huge garden he planted behind his house and to entertaining his grandchildren. His fried chicken gained small renown. Visitors usually headed straight for the kitchen.

  When he entered the hospital in October 1972, Nicholas Thornhill was that most unorthodox of Chevy owners: He’d held on to the wagon, a car designed for brief service, for fifteen years. By that time, a great many of the 1.56 million Chevys churned out in 1957 had vanished from the road. Most 210 Townsman wagons, of which 127,803 had been produced, were relegated to the scrap heap.

  Thornhill’s feelings for the car had passed from lust into love, and by all accounts had never left this second stage of ownership: He’d doted on his Chevy, treated it as a cowboy might his trusted steed, as a mechanical spouse, throughout his time with it. When he died, at seventy-five, the car was still in fine shape. It passed to his grandson, Bruce Thornhill Jr.

  IN NORTH CAROLINA, Edgecombe County officials were wary of letting thirteen-year-old Tommy Arney mix with other children in the juvenile center, so the boy was held in the county jail until he was summoned to court. His foster family elected not to take him back; the judge asked Tommy whether he wanted to go home. As he remembers it, he replied that he wanted nothing to do with Strickland. Even as he said it, he was sure he’d be back in the house before the day was through—that his mother would claim him, would choose her own child over a mooching lout.

  Had he read the papers associated with his case, he might not have been so confident. His mother and Strickland had complained to the county two weeks before the classroom attack that Tommy had been a troublemaker for years, that he was rough and fresh-mouthed and violent and hell-bent on getting his way, that he was seemingly immune to punishment and a bad influence on his younger brother and sister. That he was “impossible,” as a May 1969 county summary reported, and that they hoped he’d “be removed from the home permanently.”

  Tommy’s half brother, Johnny Coggins—the product of Fern’s teenage first marriage, and six years Tommy’s senior—testified that Tommy was nothing but trouble, that he was “mentally sick,” and that he’d made up the stories about Strickland beating the kids and braining Fern against the radiator. Tommy’s younger siblings, the twins Billy and Debbie, told the county that he acted as he pleased and rebelled when he failed to get what he wanted.

  About the only kind word for Tommy came from Pauline Davis, Fern’s sister, still living back in Lenoir, who urged that the county take all the children from the home—and those children by now included a new daughter, a toddler named Lisa for whom Debbie, herself only eleven, provided most of the care. Tommy’s aunt “said that her sister’s marriage to Mr. Strickland has had a very degrading effect on her and that Mrs. Strickland has become less competent as a parent since the brain hemorrhage,” a county official reported. “Mrs. Davis reported Mr. Strickland to be a drinker, loafer, and leech. His influence is such on Mrs. Strickland that she has lost concern for her children except in that they receive support money from Mr. Arney which is not used for the children.” Aunt Pauline also reported that Tommy was “the only child in the family brave enough to report the true situation.”

  That might have worked against the boy. When the judge asked whether she wanted Tommy back, Fern Arney replied that the state could keep him.

  Two days after his court hearing, now a ward of the Edgecombe County Department of Social Services, Tommy was shipped to the state’s Juvenile Evaluation Center in Swannanoa, a mountain burg east of Asheville. A combination of penal institution and mental health facility, the center assigned social workers and doctors to evaluate the boy and plot a course for his salvation.

  At first, his behavior was angelic, at least by the standards of his past: “Upon his arrival at the Reception Unit Thomas began a very earnest effort at trying to adjust,” reported a staff “Social Diagnosis.” He “exhibited no overt manifestations of the explosive, ‘seizure’ type episodes which directly led to his commitment. He was tractable and presented only occasional disciplinary problems.”

  But he also gave his keepers reason to think that he might have some demons hiding behind that good citizenship. He reminded them of “a dormant volcano which is rumbling deep within and can explode at most any time.” They saw that he was expending “an unusual amount of energy in trying to suppress his hostile urges.” And as time passed, those urges got the better of him. His eruptions, combined with his “tumultuous history” and a battery of tests, led the center’s doctors to conclude that he might be epileptic. An electroencephalogram produced an abnormal record, “consistent with a convulsive disorder of deep level origin.”

  With that, doctors prescribed him medication for epilepsy, and one psychiatrist—who, according to Tommy’s medical records, “had problems himself”—told him flat out that he was crazy. State officials later judged that diagnosis “wrong and harsh,” but not before it had powerful “effects upon Thomas,” causing him “to be distrustful of psychologists and psychiatrists.” It’s almost needless to add that it did nothing to cool his temper.

  After several months, Tommy was moved to Cherry Hospital in Goldsboro for further study and examination. He didn’t settle down—to the contrary, he says he organized and led a mass breakout of the hospital’s juvenile charges. After eight weeks, in June 1970, he was transferred to the C. A. Dillon Youth Development Center in Butner, a half hour north of the state capital at Raleigh. The word “Butner” alone spells trouble to Carolinians, who know the town’s chief industry is wrangling criminals: The feds maintain a vast complex of prisons there, the state a penitentiary and an array of treatment centers. It’s a place that errant kids are taught to fear—keep it up, a Tar Heel parent might say, and you’re bound for Butner.

  In his first six months at C. A. Dillon, Tommy got into a lot of fights (“His peer relations have not been good,” his minders observed) and consequently spoke with a lot of counselors. In one such conversation, the handler brought up the coatroom attack back in Rocky Mount. Tommy could remember the fight in fine detail, an impossible feat for an epileptic. The medicine stopped at once. “Behavioral improvement was seen following th
is,” a Dillon official reported.

  Indeed, a November 1970 evaluation found him to be well-groomed, mannerly, respectful, engaged, open to supervision, and a hard and willing worker. “Thomas has improved very much in the last two months,” his examiner wrote. “He realizes what it takes to grow up and be a responsible young man. Thomas has learned a lot from C. A. Dillon School. He has benefit[ted] very much from the program.” He still needed to check his temper, the official wrote, but concluded: “Thomas would make someone a good son to raise.”

  State and county officials judged him ready for a foster home, and began casting about for one. Months passed. No one seemed willing to take a chance on a now-fourteen-year-old boy with a history of violence. Dillon staff began to worry that Tommy would backslide, and his own recollection is that his behavior did worsen, with a vengeance—that he got into constant fights, had regular sex with the girls with whom he was locked up, and engineered an overnight escape on which a farmer shot him in the leg. He guesses that his record was sanitized to boost his prospects for adoption, because none of this mayhem shows up in the state paperwork I’ve seen; instead, biweekly reports chronicle his continued good behavior through the spring and summer of 1971. The edgiest document from the period was a psychological evaluation, conducted that February, that judged him “brash, restless, and impatient,” and his tone “challenging.”

  “He worked quickly and carelessly, and several times he broke off to pace around the room,” the psychologist wrote of Tommy’s approach to an IQ test on which he scored 96, at the low end of average. “He could probably do better if he were able to settle down and concentrate. He accepted the challenge of some items and on these achieved at slightly higher level. On other items, which frustrated him, he scattered the test pieces angrily and gave up well before the time limits had expired.”