Automotive News GM 100 Supplement

General Motors Story 33 /100 Designer Mitchell wasted no time in building his legacy ’38 Sixty Special debuted in just 22 months — and set the styling pace for the industry Richard Truett t took General Motors designer Bill Mitchell just 22 months to start building his legend. Harley Earl, chief of GM’s Art and Colour Section, forerunner of today’s Global Design, North American Studios, hired Mitchell on Dec. 6, 1935. Mitchell’s first car, the 1938 Cadillac Sixty Special, made its debut at the New York auto show less than two years later, on Oct. 27, 1937. And it blew away the crowd. The Sixty Special was smaller, sportier and radically different in appearance from previous Cadillacs, LaSalles and virtually all other mass-produced cars of the day. It set the styling trend for the rest of the prewar era and influenced the look of the first postwar cars of 1946-47. Before the 1938 Sixty Special, most cars of the 1930s had running boards, doors with thick, body-colored window frames and roofs that blended smoothly and cleanly into the lower body. Aerodynamics and streamlining, two dominant design trends in the early- to mid-1930s, made many of the cars of that era look similar. But Mitchell’s 1938 Sixty Special had a crisp, clean appearance. Sporting chrome-trimmed window frames, a large glass area, a roof that looked like a separate piece of architecture I from the lower body and no running boards, Mitchell’s new Cadillac was called “the surprise of the show” by The New York Times. Automotive News commented on its “modish new hood lines.” It was different Like a Cord or a Duesenberg, the Sixty Spe- cial conveyed the idea of a car in motion. It was the start of Mitchell’s styling trademark. “The car was influential in a couple of ways,” says retired GM designer Robert Cumberford, 72. “It had the rear deck of a coupe on the end of a sedan. That was new and influential. It had no squared-up lines that people were used to seeing on sedans. The chrome on the windows was new. No external running boards was new.” The Sixty Special was copied by Nash and Studebaker, Cumberford added. The 1938 Cadillac Sixty Special had a 127inch wheelbase. It was 65 inches tall, 3 inches lower than the standard 1938 Cadillac Sixty. ill Mitchell had strong opinions about the importance of his profession. He once told Automotive News: “The designer is the most undervalued man in the industry. He may not be the key man, but before you build up your sales organization, before you get all that hullabaloo going — brother, if you don’t have the right product, whether it’s a can of soup or a Cadillac, you’re not going to make it fly.” Strother MacMinn, who taught automotive design for decades at the Art Center College in Pasadena, Calif., said of Mitchell: “He’s probably the most charismatic, overwhelmingly entertaining, bullheadedly perverse, dynamic, courageous, perceptively strategic son-of-a-bitch design director who ever hit the automobile business.” Mitchell joined General Motors in 1935 at age 23. He soon was put in charge of the Cadillac studio, where he designed the ac- B claimed 1938 Sixty Special. In 1959, Mitchell succeeded Harley Earl as GM vice president of design and held that position until his retirement in 1977. In addition to leading GM styling for nearly two decades, Mitchell was responsible for many landmark vehicles. His Sixty Special had an integrated coupe-style trunk and shunned then-traditional running boards. He drew the 1941 Cadillac Series 62, which popularized the horizontal grille; the rear-engine Chevrolet Corvair; the dramatic 1963 Buick Riviera (designed originally as a new LaSalle within the Cadillac brand); and the even more daring 1963 Chevrolet Corvette — the famed Sting Ray. Mitchell was responsible for the 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado, which launched frontwheel drive in Detroit; the midengine 1973 Aero Vette concept and many other historic designs, including the stunning Pontiac Phantom, his last — but unproduced — car at GM. The 1963 split-window Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray Coupe — a coup for designer Bill Mitchell — is at left. Next to it is a 1959 Chevrolet Corvette Sting Ray show car. A very Merry Christmas Mitchell milestones 1912: Born in Cleveland 1935: Joined GM, assigned to Cadillac studio 1938: Designed Cadillac Sixty Special 1941: Designed Cadillac Series 62 with horizontal grille 1959: Named GM styling vice president 1963: Designed Corvette Sting Ray and Buick Riviera 1966: Designed Oldsmobile Toronado 1977: Retired from GM 1988: Died at age of 76 94 September 15, 2008 Last of a breed In The Art of American Car Design, art historian and college professor C. Edson Armi wrote that Mitchell reigned over “the last great unrestrained epoch of American car design.” Armi said Mitchell “supported originality from his designers while encouraging a blend of his own classicizing style and the latest hardedged Italian taste.” Mitchell was born in Cleveland in 1912. His family moved to Pennsylvania, where his father became a Buick dealer. Mitchell split his teenage years between his father’s home in Pennsylvania, where he studied at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and his mother’s home in New York, where she L ooking back on his career, Bill Mitchell said his best day at GM was Christmas Eve 1961, when he persuaded Buick to take the Riviera from a design into production and got Chevrolet to agree that after years of only Corvette roadsters, it would build Mitchell’s split- window 1963 Sting Ray coupe. Strother MacMinn, who taught automotive design at the Art Center College in Pasadena, Calif., called Mitchell’s accomplishment “a doublebarreled blockbuster of innovative design entrepreneurship.” worked for an advertising agency that gave Mitchell work as an automotive illustrator. Mitchell’s friends included the Collier brothers, the sons of the agency’s owner, who started a local motorsports group that became the Sports Car Club of America. The 1963 Corvette Sting Ray was based on Mitchell’s design for his own race car. An insurance executive whose clients included GM met Mitchell through racing and offered to show his sketches to Harley Earl, who hired the young illustrator and put him to work on an experimental rear-engine car project. Earl, Mitchell’s mentor, took him to CaliforAUTOMOTIVE NEWS © GM Corp. Mitchell: Designer is the unsung hero in an industry that’s all about product

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