The Phone Rings, And The Surprise Of A Lifetime...

Tuesday evening, December 29th, 2009, is a date I won't soon forget. While spending an idle evening reading my favorite blogs, and posting my usual silly comments in The Car Lounge ( http://forums.thecarlounge.net/zeroforum?id=1 ), at around 9:30pm, my telephone rang. Thinking it to be the usual bill collectors, or some other undesirable, I ignored it, but my wife called from another room; "Larry, you'd better look at your phone right now!" So, I picked it up, and on the display were the words; "JAY LENO".

.....JAY LENO?!?!?!

As you may imagine, at this point I answered the call. "Is this Larry?" asked the unmistakable voice on the other end. From my mouth came the incredibly witty response; "Yes, it is...is this REALLY Jay Leno?" Well, to cut to the chase, the fellow on MY phone was the real Jay Leno, and at this point my heart was pounding at approximately the same pace as a Rick Mears pole-run at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Here was my hero, and virtual kindred spirit, blue-denim workshirt and everything, calling me to tell me that he likes my writing, especially about steam-powered automobiles. Mr. Leno was in his car at the time, coming home from taping his show, and so he asked me if he could call me back in about an hour or so to talk some more.

.....Jay Leno asked me if he could call me back and talk about cars. One guess as to my answer.

I spent the next hour on pins and needles, wondering if this were really happening, and if Leno would really call me back. At 11pm, the phone rang, and darned if it wasn't him! We spent the next 40 minutes or so talking about all kinds of things...Doble and White steam automobiles, stationary steam engines (he has several huge examples of these), his beautiful Cord 812 sedan and what it is like to drive it, as well as he and I getting acquainted on a personal basis. Eventually, "Jay" (I now feel comfortable using his first name) said that his wife was reminding him that they had an engagement to attend, and we closed our conversation, but not before he invited me to come out to California some time to visit his collection, and also so that he could "show me how they operate", referring to his steam-powered machines. He even gave me his phone number. As I write this, it is 2 weeks after that evening, yet it still seems kind of unreal that this man, who I admire and almost idolize so much, actually read my scribbles, liked it, and then looked me up and called me to chat. I'm not a "star struck" kind of person, but this affected me on a deeply personal basis. It was an honor I didn't deserve, but will never, ever forget.

The best part of all was seeing the look on my son's face, as he walked into where I was sitting while talking with Jay, when I pointed at the phone, and mouthed the words; "JAY LENO!" to him. I thought his eyes were going to pop right out of his head. There is an effort going on in my "home" website, the aforementioned "The Car Lounge" by many of its members, who are also my good friends, to help me accumulate the funding to be able to travel to California at a future date, and accept Jay's wonderful invitation to visit. To my friends and colleagues at TCL, I don't really know what to say except, thank you, and God bless you all. If and when I do make it to California, I will bring back a thorough "VWLarry Report" on Jay Leno's collection, and the experience of being taken through it in-person. Since you all know that I am the "Master of Making a Short Story Long", it won't lack for details, either.

Finally, to Jay Leno, if you should happen to read this...THANK YOU. I had been a little bit blue about the way it seemed as if nobody read my little blogpage, but somehow, knowing that you paid a visit, that makes all the difference. You're a very nice, and a very classy fellow, just the way I would expect you to be, and it's an honor to have made your acquaintance. The best to you, always.

Reflections of a (Jaundiced and Olde) German Car Fanatic, Sparked By A Citroen....a CITROEN?!?

This afternoon, while enjoying a drive through Salisbury, Maryland (the Paris of the Eastern Shore) with my wife, I spotted, to my great surprise and delight (and to my wife's shock, since I think I scared her when I shouted...HOLY CRAP!! LOOKITHAT!!!!) a very beautiful and very rare Citroen SM parked at the local Best Buy. If you haven't seen a Citroen(Maserati) SM, it is an exceedingly sleek and futuristic (even 38 years later) luxury/GT coupe from a collaboration between Citroen and Italy's Maserati, which supplied the powertrain. I was so smitten by this "blast from the past" that I turned into the parking lot so I could stop and examine this lovely and oh-so-interesting car. It was a glowing bronze color with a tan interior, and was in really nice condition. We waited around awhile, hoping for the owner to come out and strike up a conversation (Here in the "DelMarVa" region of the East Coast, the owner of a Citroen SM would probably keel over dead from cardiac arrest if he met anyone else who even knew what kind of car it was, much less be interested in it! ). The owner never showed up, unfortunately. He was probably out foraging for parts. Needless to say, it was really fun and refreshing to see, for a change, a car that is not only really cool and intriguing, but is a genuine "sparker" for an old(ish) car freak like mydamnself. I used to sit in my high school classes doodling Citroen SMs endlessly back "in the day"; they were so captivating for me (my grades reflected this, by the way). It was the car of the future, but it was already here (so to speak, if you were an American). I coveted the SM then, and today is no different. It still looks like it's from 20 years from now. Absolutely stunning in every way.

The Citroen SM. It came from France, but please don't hold that against it! For one, glorious moment, the French got it RIGHT:



So, what does an encounter with a funny-looking French car have to do with the title of this screed? Nothing really, except for this: It got me to thinking, long and hard, about how much my thinking about automobiles has changed in recent years, yet in so many ways, remains pretty much the same at the same time. Pretty schizoid, eh?

Well, to any young whippersnappers out there, just you wait until you get to be MY age, dagnabbit! Back when I was a kid (which would be, say, south of approximately 30 years old), the whole automotive universe was in perfect order, and everything made perfect sense to me. I had it all figured out, you see. It was simple, really. I can state VWLarry's Theorem of Automotive Relativity in one simple declarative sentence: German cars are all that is good and right and perfect, and all other cars are scheisse (German for "poopee"). See! Isn't that easy, and isn't the logic absolutely airtight? The world of cars, seen through the prism of my youthful enthusiasm, was easy to understand, and of course I KNEW that I was right. After all, my buddies all felt the same way that I did, and we endlessly validated each other's opinions about the wonderfulness of German wagens (German for "car". We felt then that we had to use German words as often as possible when talking about cars, in order to elevate ourselves, and the cars, out of the mundane). German cars were engineered...no, over-engineered. They were elegant, stern, and defiantly UN-stylish. They were beautifully crafted and assembled, and they were the cars of the AUTOBAHN. 'Nuf said. Needless to say, that last statement was about the ONLY thing that my buddies and myself weren't completely full of scheisse about.

This illustration is only slightly less idealized than my youthful image of the Deutschen Autobahnen:





We ran around in Beetles, Karmann Ghias, Porsches (356s and 912s), Volkswagen Type 3s, a Mercedes Benz 190SL or two (just about the most beautifully crafted postwar car I've ever laid eyes on); even a fabulously weird and wonderful '52 Mercedes Benz 220S sedan that my best friend bought for a song from a local import-car guru, and other goofy and totally unpatriotic (we lived in steelmill country on the Southside of Chicago, and "foreign car" types like us hippie/commies weren't too popular with the locals) automobiles. Most of them were rustier than the Titanic (another delightful characteristic of German cars of yore), but we didn't care...we drove GERMAN cars! I was the "scholar" of our group, and read everything that I could lay my hands on that dealt with the automobiles of Germany (along with anything else that remotely dealt with automobiles, period...I'm obsessive, folks). German cars were IT; Germany was the Nirvana of motorized creation, construction, and transportation, and Germans had the Secret of Automotive Perfection installed in their very genes. I mean, who could argue such truth?

German cars, even rusted, clapped-out Beetles, were all direct descendants of these Teutonic totems, in our view:





As for the cars from other nations, well, we had our opinions. British cars were amusing, even fun, and they always inspired the best jokes about them (Why do the English drink warm beer? Because they have LUCAS refrigerators! HAH! ), and so on. But who in their right mind would ever want to DRIVE AROUND in a car that would most likely NEVER assist you in reaching your destination? I mean really! And those goofy SU carburetors...who in the hell could ever figgerout how THEY worked? British cars also always seemed to smell wet inside, too, kind of like a metallic English Sheepdog just in from the rain. I couldn't ever own an English car anyway, since my dad HATED oil stains on his driveway. The one English car I ever owned myself was a 1964 English Ford Cortina GT. Somehow it did not leak any oil. I think it was the only one.

My Cortina GT looked like this one. It not only didn't leak any oil, but it was a BLAST to drive. Nobody ever said the Brits don't build FUN cars.




Italian cars were interesting. "Interesting". That's a way of damning them with faint praise. You could hear them rusting if you listened hard enough, and the steering wheel was always too far away, with the pedals too close. You felt like they were designed for gorillas to drive, fer cripesakes! But, they sure were pretty, for the most part. This was a real virtue for Italian cars, because keeping them running involved endless searching and waiting for spare parts, so you basically were left with nothing but a nice thing to look at most of the time. True story. I had a friend who dated a girl back in the early 1970s, and she drove a Fiat 850 Spyder. It was a very cute and very "cool" car in many ways, but it very seldom actually ran for much more than a half-hour or so consecutively, even though it was well-maintained and in good running condition. One night, very late, after downing many many beers with another buddy, my friend and the other fellow went out into the garage where the little Spyder sat, and took turns whacking it for the next few hours with a sledgehammer. By daylight, they had reduced the Fiat to about 16 inches in height, and that morning, 6 or 7 big strong guys carried it out and put it into my friend's dad's pickup truck for disposal. "Fix It Again, Tony", done Sopranos style.

So pretty, yet so troublesome. Most of them sleep with the fishes today:




American cars were for dolts, period. They were cars for mouthbreathers and bottomfeeders and tirescreechers at the local drive-in. We sniffed and sneered in their general direction, and left it at that. Some of us, though, had these lingering feelings of affection toward them, yet dared not reveal our terrible, dark secret. To express even grudging approval of a 1970s American car back then would be to invite ridicule, and possibly complete ostracism from the "brotherhood". I liked Ford Pintos, but you damned well didn't hear it from ME!

My first new car came the year I graduated from high school. It was a shiny new 1971 Pinto. I LOVED that car. After I finished modifying it, it looked something like this one. My heresy lasted two years.




Japanese cars basically didn't exist in the early seventies, especially in our neck 'o the woods, the industrial Midwest. They simply weren't yet on the radar screen. My brother and I went to the local Ford dealership, in January of '71, my senior year in highschool, and test drove a funny little new car from Japan they were selling...the Honda 600 Coupe. It was a two-cylinder microcar that we almost couldn't fit into, and I remember we found it strangely fun, yet entirely meaningless. The heater was a door on the dashboard where the radio was on other cars, and when you opened it, you could actually see the engine, and along with heat, came NOISE. Honda? CARS?? It's a good thing they're so good with motorcycles. Anybody could tell that Honda cars weren't going anywhere.

So much for the "vision thing":




French cars. Yes, French cars. French cars were from another planet. They had incomprehensible liquid suspension, mooshy-cooshy seats, completely indecipherable instruments, and sometimes they even had different wheelbases on either side of the SAME car (re: Renault 16). Everyone knew that you couldn't get parts for a French car unless you chartered a plane to Paris yourself, and even when you got the part you needed, the car STILL wouldn't run anyway. So what was the point? Did Frenchmen ever actually DRIVE those things? Were French cars the source of that infamous French grumpiness we had always heard about from our WWII veteran dads? We seriously doubted it, since it seemed like every French art movie we watched in downtown Chicago snooty art movie theatres always featured lots of trains and bicycles and horsecarts. The cars were usually just parked on the side of the road. Mais oui.

Renault, at one time, was the #2 importer of cars in the United States, right behind Volkswagen. There were lots of little Dauphines coming off of cargo ships and being distributed around the country. But, honestly, did anyone ever see one of them moving under its own power?






So, we flash forward to the current century. VWLarry still loves cars (some would say to a degree approaching psychosis), but he doesn't see quite the same thing he did thirty-some years ago. Scanning down the scoresheet, German cars are the biggest losers of all. I've rarely been so disappointed in anything as I have in the carmakers of Germany in the last decade. They have truly lost their way, and have nearly totally flushed their collective heritage down the drain. Volkswagen is riding off in all directions at the same time, trying desperately to be something that they are NOT. Mercedes Benz is in a design-funk that has no end in sight, and they continue to whore themselves to the altar of mega-horsepower idiocy, while letting their reputation for peerless quality evaporate around them. BMW is so damned full of itself it isn't even funny, and if anyone can show me any remaining genetic link between cars like the 2002 and the current lineup of BMW bling-mobiles, apart from the increasingly mutated "Hoffmeister Kink" C-pillar styling signature, please show me. Porsche is the greatest letdown of all. Their cars are mere caricaturish silhouettes of their mostly glorious past. They are fat, and overpowered (I'm gonna get crucified for that one, but sob e it), and obscenely expensive even for Porsches). That's their cars. I won't even comment on Porsche's trucks. Worst of all, Porsche...PORSCHE has absolutely NO presence of any consequence in bigtime motorsports. Shameful and impossible to digest for this old Porschephile. Only Audi seems to be progressing, albeit at the usual stratospheric, nosebleed-levels of pricing of German "greatness" we all suffer from today. It's a shame really. As a working stiff blue-collar type, I'm doomed to only press my greasy nose to the showroom window and sigh.... But now, you wanna talk about German cars of the pre-mid-nineties era? Pull up a chair and have a beer with me, meine freunde.

British cars are still fun and interesting, but they are now also relatively reliable, and those damnable SU carbs are finally on museum shelves and committed enthusiast's workbenches, where they belong. Italian cars are still Italian cars...nice to date, but you wouldn't really want to MARRY one, would you? Japanese cars are, well, they're pretty much the whole show, now, aren't they? Who woulda thunkit all those years ago, when everybody knew Honda as a really nice motorcycle maker, and Toyota had a car called the Corona that some wonky professor at Purdue had purchased, and whatinthehell was a NISSAN(Datsun)?

SU Carburetors. It's a carburetor, but you are supposed to fill it up with OIL? You're kidding, right?





French cars. Ah yes, French cars. Well, some things do remain the same, don't they? Puh-leeze, spare me the sermons about today's Renault and Peugeot cars; you're not fooling me for a minute.

What about American cars? If irony could materialize, it would be in the form of a contemporary American automobile. Today, the cars from GM, Ford, and even Chrysler, at times, are among the best and the brightest coming from anywhere on the planet, at least in my opinion. But, as Ford struggles to stay afloat and solvent, Chrysler is already being methodically taken-apart by Italy's Fiat (too weirdly ironic here for words), and the once mighty General Motors Corporation is about to, in about 24 hours from the time I'm writing these words, to be transmogrified into a ward of the state that may not even carry the name "GM" any longer. Chevrolets have never really been better cars than they are today, likewise Cadillacs, and even Buicks are showing spark and vitality that couldn't have been predicted 10 years ago. But at this point, does any of this even matter anymore? Oldsmobile flared bright and strong just before the axe fell on them, and Pontiac, perhaps the marque, other than perhaps Chevy, that is most emblematic of American Automotive Joy in the post-WWII era, is on the slab, being embalmed for its upcoming funeral as we speak. There is little joy to be found these days in the automobile bidness, no matter the country of origin, though. It seems like everyone is waiting for the other shoe to drop, and no one is quite sure of what the world of cars, and car enthusiasm, will look like 5 or ten years from now. Change is now the only constant.

"Aye-aye, sir. The deck chairs are all re-arranged, and the leaks should be plugged any time now."




I still love those damned Citroen SMs, though, and I still have those old sketches. Maybe that guy in Salisbury will put his up for sale someday.

Nils Wahlberg and Nash - Salute To A Great Engineer And Unsung Automobiles

I've been wanting to do a piece about this subject for a long time. We celebrate the great engineers of the cars we revere...Ferdinand Porsche is a good example of an automotive engineer of whom everybody is aware of, even nearly 60 years after his death. But certain other people who broke new ground in automotive engineering go nearly forgotten, along with the superb automobiles that were the result of their creative and innovative minds. Nils Eric Wahlberg was one of the best and brightest of these people, and he left a legacy that we all enjoy in our cars every single day. He deserves honor and remembrance. The company that Mr. Wahlberg spent most of his career with was Nash Motors, which later became American Motors Corporation when it merged with Hudson in 1954. Nash automobiles, under the engineering and technical guidance of Wahlberg, became probably the automobile industry's most technically sophisticated cars, in the overall sense of the word, available anywhere during the 1940s and early 1950s. Wahlberg, a Norwegian who immigrated to America as a boy early in the last century, holds a list of personally developed innovations that would do credit to a platoon of other fine engineers.

This is a list of the major, and some not-so major, yet still significant, achievements of Wahlberg's Nash company:
1. Modern fully-unitized/monocoque body construction, as still in use today (1940 Nash 600)
2. "Weather-Eye", the very first fully integrated automotive heating and ventilation system (1940 Nash)
3. Scientifically developed aerodynamic design for a mass-produced passenger sedan (1949 Nash Airflyte)
4. Scientifically designed, ergonomic driver-oriented instrument panel ("Uniscope", 1949 Nash Airflyte)
5. Fully reclining seats that converted passenger compartment into a serviceable bed (1949 Airflyte)
6. Serious refinement of powertrain and vehicle airflow characteristics toward goal of top fuel-efficiency in a large passenger car (1949 Airflyte)
7. One of first manufacturers to offer factory-installed safety belts and safety-padded instrument panel (1949 Airflyte)

Nils Eric Wahlberg during the 1930s:

The concept of unitized body construction (self-supporting bodywork constructed of welded sheetmetal, with no separate frame to lend support) was not brand-new in 1940; several, among them Lancia (the pioneers in productionizing unitized bodywork in 1922), Lincoln (1936 Zephyr), Cord 810, Chrysler's Airflow of 1934 and a few others, had developed either primitive unitary, or semi-unitized (Lincoln Zephyr , Cord and Airflow) construction, but Wahlberg took it that final step into complete frameless unitization that established the path for all automakers to eventually follow. This was a major advancement in the technological development of the automobile, both with respect to pure technology and production engineering, and also from the aspect of the automobile's ultimate utility, safety, and even comfort for its passengers. As is so often the case throughout the automobile's history, a small, independent carmaker stole the lead from the larger, more wealthy companies, and set the pace for all to follow in later years. Mr. Wahlberg's, and the Nash company's diligence and innovative spirit took a relatively primitively constructed machine, with its ancient separate frame with an attached, unstressed body, which was little different from horse-drawn wagons of ages-old, and brought the automobile into a state where they suddenly rivalled the technological prowess of modern aircraft, with their "monocoque", or unitized construction.

From brochure for 1949 Nash automobiles, a cutaway illustration featuring the unitized construction of the body/chassis, and relating it to the most modern, and likewise unitized, aircraft of the time:

This illustration demonstrates the way Nash promoted its new unitized construction in the earliest models that featured it; the Nash 600, of 1942. These cars, with their all-steel, of-a-piece construction, were a long-lead preview of the future of automobiles everywhere:

For many years during the early decades of the automobile, riding in a car was often less than comfortable, largely because nearly all cars, even the most extravagant and expensive of them, did not have even the most basic of heating and ventilation systems. Even during the 1930s, which was a great "age of refinement" of the automobile, car heaters were still something of a luxury, and always optionally available if at all. Then, the heaters themselves were crude and offered their own set of discomforts for the passenger, with stale, recirculated air because of the lack of fresh air circulation, along with "hot spot" heating due to the heater's lack of ducting. This made for a hot zone near the heater itself, and the increasing coldness as one moved farther away from it within the interior. Windshield defogging was pretty much a matter of wiping the glass with a towel, or scraping the ice away manually. With the new Nash "Weather-Eye" system, introduced in 1940, Wahlberg brought completely new and revolutionary levels of comfort, and even safety, to automobiles. Wahlberg's Weather-Eye system, when seen in a cutaway, is recognizable to anyone who is familiar with a modern automobile's HVAC system, by the way. He got the fundamentals exactly right in the first place, and it is a tribute to his years of research and development work on it. The system provided pressurized (Wahlberg was the first to recognize the necessity of creating positive inner pressure inside the car to eliminate drafts and dust penetration) fresh air to the car's occupants. The incoming air was also filtered (the Nash was the first car to make use of a disposable filter in the air-intake to clean incoming air), and heated and dehumidified (for maximum defogging effect of the windows). This was a major advancement in the development and maturation of the automobile, and its ability to transport passengers in comfort.

Typical period Nash print advertisement, featuring Weather-Eye. For years no other manufacturer could equal the all-weather comfort of Nash automobiles at any price:

Following is a page from a Nash owner's manual from the 1940s. It could almost be taken from any car's owner's manual of 2009:

Wahlberg's extensive work in the wind-tunnel resulted in the aerodynamic (to the point of looking very unusual, even in its time) Nash Airflyte models of the early fifties, which were remarkably efficient, and also very quiet-riding, with almost no wind noise, due to the careful management of airflow over the car. This also had, along with Wahlberg's and Nash's devotion to fuel-efficiency in large cars through careful engine and powertrain design, the effect of making Nash cars capable of far better fuel mileage than their competitors, and also the side-benefit of actually giving Nash cars better high-speed capability while needing less sheer horsepower to make such speeds possible. The Porsche automobile company in Germany, at this time, was building itself into legendary status through the exact same kind of carmaking philosophy, as applied to small and efficient sports/GT cars, as Nash Motors was applying to full-sized passenger sedans. Not even the darling of enthusiasts, when it comes to advanced aerodynamic thinking, namely France's Citroen, had embarked on this path in 1949, and their great product advancements, that being the now legendary DS of 1955. Once again, as so often is the case, an American carmaker can be shown to have set the path for others to follow, yet receives little or no credit for its accomplishment. I'm out to set that record straight.

In the end, the thing that's remarkable to me, when considering Wahlberg's design parameters, and the resulting cars, is that he was on an almost parallel path with Dr. Ferry Porsche's car company over in Germany, only he was doing such things with large cars, whereas Porsche was with small sports/GT cars. Then, when you put an early Porsche 356 side-by-side with the "bathtub" Nash Airflyte, the similarities become even more striking. These Nash cars are so significant and so interesting that I predict their values will be climbing in the years to come, as more enthusiasts discover the true significance of them, and of their "father", Nils Eric Wahlberg. Economical operation through efficient and scientific design was VERY advanced and visionary thinking at the midpoint of the 20th century. This Nash advertisement unashamedly proclaims as much. Much advertising copy is hyperbolic in nature. Nash was simply stating fact, in my opinion:

This photograph nicely illustrates the smoothness and air management discipline that Wahlberg built into the Airflyte's design (the air-intake/grille was only as large as necessary to keep the engine cool). The somewhat odd fully-skirted wheel openings were an integral part of the aerodynamic approach of the Airflyte's design. Wahlberg pretty much disdained "styling", and approached a car's design as a scientist/engineer would. The ironic thing is that, to the eyes of observers 60 years later, these formerly "dumpy looking" Nashes (this is the way they came to popularly be seen) are probably more advanced and attractive looking than the majority of its 1949 contemporaries are. Look closely, and you can see sleekness and a kind of care-in-design that makes them look, instead of "dumpy", downright slippery, especially when taken in the context of their time:



The more you think about it, these Nash automobiles were Volvos before Volvo ever thought of being Volvos! "Cars for people who think" and all that. Very admirable, in my opinon.

Contrary to popular modern perceptions of those times, many people did indeed concern themselves with fuel economy in their cars. The "Mobilgas Economy Run" was one of the most prestigious competitive events that a manufacturer could win victory in for many years (see the one Nash ad). The rise of the big, be-finned and chrome-larded V8 powerwagons of the fifties is the predominant way that the decade is remembered today, but this was only one element of that marketplace, and since it was the most flashy, glamorous and visible, that's what is remembered today.

Keep in mind that the "foreign car invasion" of small, economical European cars began in the late 1950s, and the sales of these cars, while tiny in numbers at first, grew exponentially in just a few years, until Volkswagen, in particular, was viewed with real fear by the Detroit automakers, largely on the strength of VW's (along with Renault and others) image for being stingy on fuel. I personally had many relatives and neighbors, schoolteachers, etc when I was a boy in the sixties who wouldn't have even thought of owning and driving a "gas hog" (many of them drove Ramblers and Nashes, by the way). Not everyone by any means was as wasteful and profligate as that era's Americans are characterized as having been, en masse, back then. Thrift, if anything, was even more of a virtue then than it is today.

Nash advertising stressed economy of operation and of fuel-consumption:

Comfort and convenience in the operation of an automobile, as a field of research, was coming into its own during the post-WWII years, and again, Nash was a leader in this new field of "ergonomics". One of the significant products of this line of research was Nash's "UniScope" instrument panel that debuted in the 1949 models. The UniScope integrated the various instruments such as speedometer, fuel gauge, ammeter, oil-pressure gauge, and temperature gauge into one unitized module that was mounted, in direct line-of-sight of the driver, and close enough to permit easy viewing, atop the steering column. UniScope also promised easier servicability for repair technicians, and also permitted a recessed and safety padded panel to face the front seat passengers, which enhanced collision safety notably.

Nash cars of these years became famous (infamous?) for their fully-reclining front seatbacks, which enabled the creation of a workable bed inside the passenger compartment. It was a Nash exclusive for many years, and was the source of anxiety for many parents who would fret about their daughters going out for dates with boyfriends driving Nashes. But the improvement in comfort and convenience was undeniable, and this feature eventually found its way to being an industry standard in modern times. Nobody laughs at reclining seats anymore.

It helps to remember that the adult generation of the 1950s were all fairly recent survivors of not only the Great Depression years, but also of World War II and the austerity that it imposed on everyone, everywhere. It's not an excuse for the crazy cars that came to be during the "Flamboyant Fifties", but that also can help explain the way that people found their ability, through postwar prosperity and material abundance, to "cut loose" and enjoy a little bit of "wretched excess" here and there. They'd paid their dues. But along with the excesses and material abundance of the 1950s there was a tempering spirit of old-fashioned thrift still alive with the public. Nash catered to that spirit. The company thrived and prospered as a result. It's important to not forget the great and visionary leadership of one of the truly great industrial executives of all time here. George Mason was the president of Nash Motors during these years of innovation and leadership, and he worked in concert with Nils Wahlberg to bring the best products possible to the public. Mason was a hardworking, honest, and charitable man with a big heart, and his story is one deserving of a separate article. Mason's protege, George Romney, the father of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, followed in his footsteps as the president of Mason's new American Motors Corporation (the result of Nash and Hudson merging in 1954), following Mason's untimely death that year, and kept Mason's spirit of thrift, combined with innovation and quality, alive during his tenure with the company. Romney left AMC in 1962 to become the governor of Michigan.

The portly George Mason, seen here posing with Clark Gable at the 1946 Indianapolis 500, where Nash served as the Official Pace Car:

It is a popular misconception among many enthusiast-types today that the automakers of yesteryear had relatively little to work with, since they did not have the highly evolved electronic tools that are available today to designers and engineers. Thusly, the thinking goes, they were limited in what they could do. Actually, the automakers had much to work with in those days. What they had was the power of intellect, coupled with vivid imaginations, possessed by great gentlemen like Mr. Wahlberg. Thusly, on the contrary, their possibilities were limitless. There were so many like him, too, with deep and wide educational backgrounds combined with fertile and creative and inquisitive minds, and the result was the automobiles that we revere so much today, or that we should revere, like these underappreciated Nashes. That's why I start topics like this, in the hope that more, if even only a few, enthusiasts find something that they look at and say WOW! that's worth knowing more about.

The Great Designers - Virgil Exner, by Larry L. Tebo

The great, and I'm talking about the really extraordinary automotive designers are truly artists, IMO. Battista (Pinin) Farina, Harley Earl, William Mitchell, E.T. Gregorie (Ford), Gordon Buehrig (Cord), etc are among the most artistically talented people of the twentieth century, and they just happened to focus their talent in the shaping of the cars we drive. From time to time I want to present some of the great automotive designers to the reader, and give a kind of "thumbnail" review of their careers and accomplishments, because these people deserve to be celebrated, as well as their creations, which have given so many people not only the utility of being an automobile, but also have graced our roads with beauty and originality. I've been learning more and more about the life of Virgil Exner lately, and he is definitely among the elite of the greatest designers, but he's not very well-known today. This is perhaps because his most famous accomplishment, the tail-finned "Forward Look" Chrysler Corporation cars of the 1950s, went from being industry sensations to their later, and more well-known role of being derided symbols of '50s excess, which was perhaps unfair to these cars and to their "father", Exner. The tailfins on these cars were conceived as part of a "clean break" with the past and into a new era of bold design, and moreover, Exner, in concert with Chrysler Corporation's engineering department, really did test these fins for their aerodynamic functionality, and they were touted as being beneficial to the directional stability of the cars that they appeared on. The actual amount of functional benefit, in retrospect, may be debatable, but the amount of excitement that this totally new look generated for Chrysler's cars when they debuted in 1957 is inarguable. The public LOVED the new look, and sales zoomed at Chrysler, and the competition's designers, on both sides of the Atlantic, were sent back to their drawing boards to catch-up with Exner's futuristic (at that time) look. All fashions fade though, and eventually Chrysler's, and Exner's insistence on hanging onto the tall fins led to the company's cars looking dated and out-of-step, but only because the company just wouldn't move ahead when they needed to. William Mitchell's design staff at General Motors pronounced the tailfin dead in the early sixties, but Exner didn't read the obituary, which led to his firing at Chrysler, but it doesn't detract from his brilliance as a designer in previous years.

Virgil M. Exner, proudly posing with his landmark 1957 Chrysler "New Look" lineup:

Just hitting on some of the high-points of Mr. Exner's distinguished career, one can see how influential this man was in the industry, and on the shape of cars that we drive to this day. It was Exner who was responsible for the landmark 1947 Studebakers, which established the completely new look of post-WWII, the "three box" design (hood, passenger cabin, trunk) that remains in existence today. The far more famous industrial designer, Raymond Loewy, is credited for the "Is it coming or going?" '47 Studebakers (the coming-or-going line came from the car's new and groundbreaking look of nose and trunk being of roughly equal length, which became the industry-wide norm), but Mr. Exner, who was employed by Loewy Studios at the time, was the principle designer of these cars. Raymond Loewy was a brilliant man and a great designer, but he was also a master of self-promotion, and this was not the only time that he accepted the applause for a design that wasn't actually his to claim, other than in name.

The following illustration is an advertising photograph of the 1947 Studebaker. These were among the most trendsetting cars of the post-WWII era, and were also notable in being the first brand-new designs of the postwar era, with the rest of Detroit's manufacturers still only offering warmed-over prewar automobiles. The bodystyle shown here is the "Starlight Coupe", which brought a unique new application of glazing with its multi-piece curved wraparound rear backlight. Studebaker resisted the Detroit "Big 3" carmakers' postwar policy of producing warmed-over versions of its prewar products, which happened largely because of the huge pent-up demand for new cars following World War II's end, combined with materials shortages and labor troubles that pre-occupied the carmakers to the point of delaying all-new products for several years into the future. Studebaker's bold strategy of bringing its all-new cars into the marketplace so soon, along with the similar actions at Packard, were to end-up costing them greatly less than 10 years hence, when they became out of step, both stylistically and financially, with the rest of the industry, thus forcing their somewhat desperate (and ultimately disastrous) merger:

Exner was very creative during his Loewy years, and here are just two samples of his work while on the Studebaker account. The first is of a proposal for what became the '47 production Studebaker, and shows the flair and elegance that he brought to his art. This model also reveals the beginnings of the famous Studebaker "bullet-nose" styling trademark that would appear on the 1950 models. Note also the hinting at rear-engine configuration. The postwar American automotive industry seemed to have an obsession with rear-engine placement (Tucker, Ford prototypes, Studebaker here, among others), and this would ultimately show itself in production, when Ed Cole (Chevrolet's engineering chief and later GM president) realized his dream of a rear-engined Chevrolet with the 1960 Corvair:

This rendering, of a proposed new Studebaker coupe, was rendered probably during the late 1940s, and again, it shows the foresight and European influence that showed-up so frequently in Exner's work. It also is a strong, yet odd, preview of a historic Studebaker that Exner had nothing to do with; the classic 1953 Starliner coupe. This could have been, as was the Robert Bourke-designed Starliner, a very lovely automobile in its own right:

In 1950, when Exner moved over to Chrysler as their director of design (he was fired by Raymond Loewy when he discovered that Exner was working directly for Studebaker in secret), he was instrumental in creating a series of concept/show cars that brought huge amounts of European design influence into the American mainstream. He was greatly influenced by the already in-place cooperative effort between Chrysler, and Italy's Ghia Carrozzeria, which had designed and built a proposed replacement for the current Plymouth sedans. An interesting footnote to this story is that it was Fiat's management who referred Chrysler's management to the Ghia Studios, through their postwar Marshall Plan-arranged cooperative work in production and engineering projects. This presaged the current Fiat-Chrysler merger proceedings by nearly 60 years. The automobile that initiated Chrysler's relationship with Ghia was the 1950 Plymouth XX-500 sedan prototype. The car was initially to have been a "by the book" construction project for Ghia, as Chrysler sent the complete specifications of what they desired, and Ghia was to have built the car exactly as instructed. But, Luigi Segre, the head of Ghia Studios, "took liberties" with the design, and the improvements he made were med with delight by Chrysler's management, along with Virgil Exner. It was ultimately rejected, however, by Chrysler management as being too European looking for domestic tastes of the time (Chrysler's management was largely Texas-based, and notoriously cautious, at the time). This is arguable today, of course, in hindsight, but the important thing about this concept car was that it got Ghia's "foot in the door" at Chrysler, and, with Mr. Exner's new presence there, the die was cast for a coming decade of great European-American cooperation in the design of coming Chrysler Corporation automobiles, both concept and production models.

It's interesting to contrast the Chrysler Corporation of the pre-Exner years, design-wise. Chrysler's automobiles were famed at this time for their world-leading engineering excellence, but, when it came to styling and "eye appeal", they were pretty much of the "sensible shoes" school of thought. The company's president, K.T. Keller was a well-known "fuddy duddy" in his personal life, and he issued a company directive to the effect of forcing all of Chrysler's automobiles to have roofs tall enough to allow a man to wear a fedora hat while driving. Wearing of fedoras by men was still commonplace then, but was showing the first signs of losing popularity, and this enforced stodginess in the design of Plymouths, Dodges, DeSotos, and Chryslers did no favors for their sales numbers in a postwar society that was filled with young people looking for something with some STYLE. This advertisement for the 1950 Plymouth amply illustrates the fuddy-duddy look of all of Chrysler's cars in this period, since they were all pretty much "same look, different sizes":

So we come to Virgil Exner leaving Studebaker for Chrysler in 1950. What Exner accomplished at Chrysler Corporation is the kind of thing that legends are made of. He turned the company's image upside-down in a matter of just a short few years, and brought profits and success to the company, throughout all of its divisions, btw, that shocked its competitors to the point of their scrapping entire plans for forthcoming new products and literally starting all over again, in order to answer the challenge of the futuristic Chrysler cars. Where the Ghia/Plymouth XX-500 had established the Italian studio as Chrysler's carrozzeria of choice, the addition of Exner and his talented staff brought the imagination and design-power into Highland Park's fold. The "high hat" Keller years were OVER. One of the most celebrated examples of the feeling of complete change that Exner brought to Chrysler is embodied in the 1953 Chrysler "d'Elegance". Nine examples of this car were built, and the impact that this design had on the company, and indeed on the industry, on both sides of the Atlantic, was great. Today it is regarded as one of the true milestone automobiles of the post-WWII era. After Chrysler had finished its cycle of showing the car at auto shows, the company released the design rights to Ghia, the constructor. When, in 1954, the management of Volkswagen went shopping for an outside design for its upcoming sporty coupe, based on the Beetle's mechanicals, Ghia's managers presented an adapted (smaller, rear-engine configuration) version of the d'Elegance to them for appraisal. VW's people liked the car so much that it went into production, almost unchanged, as the famed Volkswagen Karmann Ghia. Look at the d'Elegance from the B-pillar rearward, and the similarities with the VW are obvious:

Another of the many varied Exner/Chrysler/Ghia concepts was the Dodge Firearrow of 1954; an interesting and attractive concept for its time. Notice the early and pioneering use of curved side windows. The Chrysler Imperial of 1957 became the first production American car (Volkswagen Karmann Ghia of '55 being the first ever) to use this advanced glazing, which has become standard industry-wide in the years since:

This car is the 1954 Plymouth Explorer concept car (again from Ghia). It is one of my personal favorites because of its beautifully done "eyes", those being the headlamps. The best-looking automobiles always have one common characteristic for me, and that is their ability to effect the look of having "eyes", and thus, a kind of "face" in their design. Even certain cars with concealed headlamps manage to accomplish this. My favorite design of all time, the 1936 Cord 810, has concealed headlamps that give the car a look of a "sleeping beauty", that I find irresistible. But, I digress. (Mention a Cord and I ALWAYS digress...):

By 1955, Exner's revolution at Chrysler was in full-song. The tailfins of the 1950s have undergone a kind of "rehabilitation" in recent years, with the high-flying and flamboyant styling gimmick having fallen into ridicule and parody during the intervening years; particulary the 1960s and 1970s, when they were symbols of obsolescence and excess. But Exner's tailfins began as a legitimate design departure, and an attempt to provide something really new and daring to the buying public. In fact, the first Exner fins were pretty modest, as this advertisement for the 1955 Plymouths shows, as well as the following detail shot from a 1955 Chrysler 300. If anything, they were understated and extremely attractive, IMO. Note also the way Plymouth went from "old maid" appearance (the 1950 model above) to "sexy debutante" in just 5 years. Exner was truly and agent of change:

The 1956 Chrysler 300 is a greatly admired automobile today, both for is high-performance abilities, and for its temendously successful styling. This was perhaps the apogee of Detroit's "1950s flamboyance, yet without excess". The flair and excitement were there, but were not overpowering, as coming years would bring, unfortunately:

This car, the 1955 Chrysler Falcon, is every bit as beautiful and elegant, and sporty-looking, as anything coming from the European makers of that time IMO. Imagine how successful this car might have been if Chrysler's executives had made the decision to manufacture it as a competitor to the two-seater Thunderbird (it reportedly came close to going into production), which debuted the same year.

Exner was not just good at sporty-looking automobiles, though. Chrysler made one of their several intermittent attempts to create a separate division out of the Imperial nameplate (usually Imperial being the top-echelon Chrysler model) in the middle 1950s. Exner's studios designed a handsome and sophisticated Imperial Crown Executive Sedan, which was built by Ghia in limited numbers, for 1955. Very conservative, yet dashing and elegant at the same time:

The year 1957 was the real "no turning back" point for Chrysler and its Exner designs. The company was flush with cash, and they wanted desperately to overtake Ford for the #2 spot in sales, behind evergreen GM. The cars that Chrysler Corporation fielded for 1957 were new, literally, from the "ground-up". Even the tires were new, with smaller, 14" tires becoming standardized in order to bring the cars even lower to the ground. The suspension was new, with Chrysler's torsion-bar front suspension bringing improved handling and ride to the general public. But the REAL new was the styling. This advertisement looks quaint to us today, but put yourself in 1957, when these cars hit the scene with a BANG. Razor-thin rooflines, huge glass areas, low-low waistlines and hoodlines, "space-age" sleekness oozing from every line, and those FINS! The ad-copy was not hyperbole at the time. It was FACT. These cars were Virgil Exner's personal triumph. They literally sent GM's designers back to the drawing boards. They had been caught flat-footed and behind the times for the first time in decades:


Even Chrysler's "red-headed stepchild division", DeSoto, got the youthful makeover treatment for 1957, and, in fact, just may have been one of the most exciting looking cars from any American maker of that year. Chrysler's cup, styling-wise, was running over. Sales set new records across the board at Chrysler:



The tailfins had a fatal, built-in flaw, though. They aged VERY quickly, and became passe in just a few years' time, yet Exner, who had heretofore been an industry trendsetter, now, inexplicably, fell into a kind of design stupor, and with him so did Chrysler Corporation's products. Harley Earl, GM's design chief since 1927, and the "Grand Old Man" of automotive design worldwide, retired in 1959, and his successor, William Mitchell, brought an entirely new, and just as revolutionary as Exner had been, sensibility to automotive design that was all his own, and it was the antithesis of Exner's latter-day approach. Tailfins and chrome, suddenly, were OUT. The "extruded look" of GM's early 1960s cars, such as the linear and sleek 1961 Pontiac, were IN, and almost overnight, GM's position as the "Pied Piper" of the industry, in terms of design trends, was re-established. Exner's Chrysler cars persisted, stubbornly, with ever-taller and more elaborate tailfins, as if to say to its competitors that, if the public was bored with the tall fins, then by golly, even BIGGER fins is the answer! It didn't work, and Chrysler's sales in the early 1960s went into a tailspin that the company never completely recovered from.

By 1962, Virgil M. Exner was fired from Chrysler Corporation. He became, unfairly in my view, a scapegoat for many of the problems that Chrysler experienced in those times. He had actually, in the time just before his termination, developed proposals for new, finless and very sleek/modern Chrysler models, yet a recessionary economy, combined with a management scandal at Chrysler in 1961, along with incorrect information about GM's upcoming new products (they were rumored to be "downsizing" for 1962, which never happened), caused the cancellation of Exner's programs in favor of smaller, hastily developed cars for 1962 that have now been judged to be among the most homely and undesirable automobiles in history. Those were not Exner's fault, but the damage had been done.

Mr. Exner went on, after leaving Chrysler, to design several independent projects, including a really novel and attractive Bugatti-revival prototype (Bugatti has been revived over and over again). He also was involved in an abortive project to revive both Stutz and Duesenberg automobiles. These designs are best left unseen, IMO:

This has been just a thumbnail review of a great designer's long and distinguished career, but it's worth knowing a little bit about Virgil Exner's influence on the products that we hold so dear. He was one of the real giants, and deserves far more recognition that he receives. Thank you for reading.