Designing Dreams: General Motors, Harley Earl And America’s Golden Automotive Age

Designing Dreams: General Motors, Harley Earl

 And America’s Golden Automotive Age

DREAMS FROM MY FATHER

I’ll admit to a bias: From this admittedly myopic perspective, nothing better encapsulates postwar America than the cars that populated America’s roadways from 1946 through 1966. And no manufacturer better embodied that era’s industrial discipline than General Motors and its head of design, Harley Earl. Earl’s list of successes would overwhelm LinkedIn, but a damn good overview of his work is provided by author Dick Ruzzin’s DESIGNING DREAMS, 170+ pages of both professional and personal perspective. 

Mr. Ruzzin starts at the beginning, with the hiring of Earl by GM chairman Alfred P. Sloan. Harley Earl, then based in Los Angeles and feeding the automotive appetites of Hollywood’s elite, not only commandeered GM’s design processes; he essentially invented those design processes. And given the responsibility of overseeing the product for five GM divisions while adhering to Sloan’s concept of marketing those divisions to distinct audiences, Earl put an emphasis on designs both attractive in their moment…and durable over time. 

I’m not old enough to clearly remember all of GM’s Firebird concepts, but I do remember GM’s Motorama, a sneak peek at our automotive future that toured the U.S., beginning in the ‘50s. This was an era when new automotive product remained a big deal, in part because the OEMs regarded it as a big deal, and in part because the U.S. public wasn’t inundated by distractions. As you’d guess and hope, GM’s Motorama figures prominently in DESIGNING DREAMS, as do the various products – both conceptual and production-based – featured in it.

If Mr. Ruzzin’s overview of GM Design has a centerpiece, it’s his work in the Oldsmobile studio, beginning as a junior designer. His first assignment, notably, was the Oldsmobile 442, that division’s response to the success of Pontiac’s GTO. 

As you’d guess, an automotive design has many fathers (in the ‘60s it was very much a male-dominated profession), and Mr. Ruzzin goes into considerable detail describing both who they were and what they did. The designers, as you’d guess, get top billing, but they receive significant support (and attention) from the engineering team and, when the design goes from sketch to clay, the clay sculptors. All of it gets a tad granular, but given how infrequently a reader is given Mr. Ruzzin’s perspective, those details are appreciated. If I have one criticism, it’s the tendency of Mr. Ruzzin’s bio to be repeated; we’ve already learned Dick Ruzzin graduated from Michigan State and not Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design. And we have already been told that his time spent at Fisher Body Engineering, both as a college intern and later as an employee, bolstered his resume. While I still have my cognition(!) I don’t need to double-down on the details.

With that, the author’s emphasis on the Olds Toronado isn’t misplaced. Seeing the Toronado in the pages of Motor Trend as a pre-teen was as eye-opening in the mid-‘60s as the pages of Playboy. Its massive proportions housed the obligatory big-ass V8. And get this: The Toronado’s big V8 drove the front wheels, a first for a General Motors division, and every bit the automotive moonshot – at least among the Big Three – as GM’s rear-engined Corvair. 

Mr. Ruzzin also pays appropriate attention to the Toronado’s corporate siblings, the ’66 Buick Riviera and ’67 Cadillac Eldorado. The Riv was more conventional, retaining rear-wheel drive, while the Eldorado duplicated the Toronado’s front-wheel drive layout, wrapped in more upscale – and aggressively sculpted – sheetmetal.

If a fan of automotive design, Dick Ruzzin’s DESIGNING DREAMS is a comprehensive overview of what goes into those designs, along with biographical sketches of those designers he’s worked with – and sketches (many his own) of those vehicles with which he’s been associated. It is published by Veloce Publishing (www.veloce.uk), is available for $29.99 US, and you can pre-order it now with a release date set for late July. 

DESIGNING DREAMS won’t be there for Father’s Day, but the thought can be there – and if your dad enjoys cars, well…the book will get there.