Automotive News GM 100 Supplement

Mitchell’s Sixty Special Crisp, clean look No running boards Chrome window frames Lots of glass A coupe deck on a sedan Above and right: Bill Mitchell explains the fine points of the 1938 Cadillac’s design while touring a vintage car show in 1964. © GM Corp. photos “The 1938 Sixty Special was a landmark car, the first true expression of a young Bill Mitchell.” — Ron Hill, retired GM stylist the instrument panel. The Sixty Special also had Cadillac’s Synchromatic column-mounted gearshift lever. It was the first Cadillac to have a column shifter. It used standard Cadillac running gear. The engine was a 346-cubic-inch, 135-hp V-8. The only transmission available was a three-speed manual. The suspension system almost sounds modern. It had unequal-length independent Aarms, coil springs and Delco double-acting shocks up front, and a solid rear axle with longitudinal leaf springs and a cross-link stabilizer. Options were limited to a radio, heater, whitewall tires and a six-wheel package that moved the spares to the fender wells. The Sixty Special weighed 4,170 pounds and sold for $2,090. It was designed to appeal to a changing market in that recession year as well as to point the way to the 1940s for Cadillac. Chauffeurs were out. Owners who drove their own luxury cars were in. Cadillac saw the future luxury cars as smaller, sportier and less expensive. Production of the Sixty Special began in January 1938 at Cadillac’s Clark Avenue assembly plant in Detroit. Promoting the new model Don Aherns, Cadillac general sales manager, developed a test-drive promotion for the Sixty and the Sixty Special. He had Cadillac dealers around the country put together a list of prospects that consisted of current Cadillac owners and owners of Cords, Auburns and other luxury cars. Then dealers sent potential customers telegrams imprinted with a red Sixty Special and this message: “Just received our first sen- But the Sixty Special had more headroom than many of its competitors. The floors were lower in relation to the body; instead of stepping up, you just stepped into the Sixty Special. The interior was typical Cadillac: plush. The large square speedometer was flanked by two pairs of rectangular instruments, and a square clock was planted in the center of Bill didn’t take over Harley Earl’s Although untilMitchelltransition in retirement in 1959, the leadership of GM design actually began in the summer of 1956 while Earl was traveling overseas. On his lunch break, GM designer Chuck Jordan drove past the Chrysler plant just six miles south of the GM Tech Center and saw 1957 Plymouths parked behind a chain link fence. Jordan was shocked when he saw the cars, weeks before they were to be publicly unveiled. They had dramatically clean lines highlighted by wellproportioned tail fins. The cars made GM’s designs look outdated. Jordan alerted Mitchell. By the end of the day, Mitchell had a succession of GM designers view the new Plymouths. Although GM’s 1958 models were too far into the design process to be changed, Mitchell immediately put the design staff to work on what would become GM’s 1959 lineup. — Larry Edsall The 1966 Buick Riviera coupe: One of the masterpieces of the Mitchell era Earl and Mitchell: Brilliant — and very different or half a century, Harley Earl and Bill Mitchell reigned over the design of General Motors vehicles, yet “they were very, very different personalities — about as different as you could imagine and both (still) be designers,” Bill Porter says. Porter, 77, joined GM as an intern under Earl and was a chief designer under Mitchell and a studio head under Mitchell’s successors. Porter remembers that Earl had rules, while Mitchell was intuitive. Earl loved tubular shapes, while Mitchell wanted creases. Earl was dictatorial, while Mitchell could be your friend. Earl didn’t draw, working instead with full-scale drawings done with taped lines. Mitchell was a brilliant artist but would take a knife and create a new line on a clay model. Earl was influenced by jet aircraft; Mitchell by racing cars. Says Porter: “Mitchell thought in terms of flair and gesture as opposed to (Earl’s) solidity and substance.” Earl had hired Mitchell, mentored him, even put him in charge of Earl’s own nonGM industrial design business after the war. F nia in 1941 to show him the car culture and customization shops in which Earl grew up. Put chrome on a diet During World War II, Mitchell left GM to do illustrations for the U.S. Navy. Immediately after the war, Earl put him to work runAUTOMOTIVE NEWS But if Earl’s was an era of aircraft-inspired wings and fins, albeit laden with oversized chrome grilles, Mitchell was inspired by racing cars and sleek Italian styling. Porter remembers Mitchell was traveling in Europe and saw a Ferrari and a RollsRoyce next to each other in front of a hotel, then worked with GM designers to merge sports and luxury in a single package: the 1966 Buick Riviera, which Porter calls “one of the masterpieces done under Mitchell.” Though Mitchell didn’t have firm rules like Earl’s, Porter says he guided his designers with his often cutting wit. “I was working on the first ideas for the 1968 Pontiac GTO,” says Porter, who was focused on making it look as though the wheels were bulging right through the fenders. Porter was so focused on achieving those forms that he had slapped what he admits was a “dumb” front end on the car. Mitchell saw the front end and said it looked more like a pigeon coop than something that belonged on one of his cars. “And,” Porter adds, “ he was right.” — Larry Edsall September 15, 2008 95 © GM Corp. Lax Chrysler security hastened GM’s entry into ’50s fin wars ning the industrial design company Earl had set up. After four years there, Mitchell returned to GM as styling director and heir apparent to Earl. Though a brilliant artist who loved to draw cars in motion — “I’ve never made a drawing of a car standing still,” Mitchell proudly told MacMinn — Mitchell reminded Armi that many vehicles, including “a lot of my show cars,” couldn’t accurately be drawn but had to take their shape in clay. “Mitchell could directly attack a clay model in a way that he could not do with a technical orthographic drawing,” Armi wrote. Mitchell led GM design away from chrome excess by putting styling on what he called a “diet” and by looking well beyond the typical annual model changes to designs that would have longer viability and vitality. He succeeded a legend, which can be overwhelming. But Mitchell not only met that challenge; he made GM’s designs even better. “Mitchell had a very strong belief in beauty and elegance and cleanliness” in design, said Chuck Jordan, 80, who worked as a GM designer for 40 years and succeeded Mitchell as a GM vice president. “That was the golden era of design. After that, the government got involved and there were clinics and (the designer’s) life changed.” MacMinn, the Art Center professor, was credited with teaching perhaps half of the world’s automotive designers. Yet he wrote that Mitchell held a similar place when it came to automotive design. “To get a perspective on his position in the profession,” MacMinn once wrote of Mitchell, “you must realize that for nearly two decades he was responsible for as many as half of the cars rolling onto the American road.” Mitchell died in 1988 at age 76. — Larry Edsall

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