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Chapter 20

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Chapter 19: Small Car 

A funny thing happened to me on my way to my next studio assignment in Small Car/Luxury. My ten months in Schiloff’s school and my six-plus years of combined experience with Ford, Chrysler and American Motors got left behind. I had a new Manager in Jim Doyle and a new Supervisor in Harry Strickler. As far as I know Jim Doyle never visited the Small Car studio when I was there. As far as Harry Strickler knew at the time, I was one of the many rookies that Ford hired a year earlier in ’77. That’s the way “Strick” treated all of us, as a group of rookies.  

One thing that did come with me from Truck was its reputation as a repository for dysfunctional modelers.  

While I was in Truck, Strick had a falling out with Frank Mendolia, my old classmate from Schiloff’s school, and arranged to have him transferred to Truck as punishment. Frank entered the studio a bitter man. He was so caustic and humorless around me that I started to avoid him. It would be years before I learned why he had changed so much.  

Ford Personnel shifted modelers from studio to studio for so many hidden reasons that you had to be in the loop of individuals making the decisions to know what those reasons were. Sometimes Personnel would choose individuals based on a formula for matching the available skill level to the need. Sometimes the least desirable modelers would go to studios requesting x-number of “bodies” because the Supervisors of the studios that had to supply them didn’t want to lose their favorite people. Sometimes one Supervisor or Manager with more clout than another would get the modelers of his choice from another studio just because he wanted them.  

Working in Truck didn’t mean that you were assigned to Truck. You may have been sent there on loan to fill a particular need, to spy on somebody or as a favor to you or your boss to enhance or retard your chances of advancement. Several of the people I thought were assigned to truck had only been there on loan from Small Car. I could imagine the stories they brought back with them, not that Strick needed to hear them to form his opinion on the kind of people who worked there.  

The buzz-word for transfers in your first two years with the company was “exposure.”  New hires were supposed to change studios every six months to expose them to different working environment and to give different supervisors and Master Modelers a chance to evaluate them. The theory made good sense. In practice it didn’t work. In practice it couldn’t work because too many real-world variables were involved in the process.

Putting aside the machinations of management personnel to help their friends and punish their enemies, there were only so many studios a new modeler could go to in any given six-month period. New hires were like apples in and orchard. They didn’t ripened at the same time.  In the long run, for which hiring decisions were made, that was fine. However, the day-to-day decisions that a Studio Exec or a Modeling Supervisor had to make required employees who could respond to immediate needs. 

Some new hires did change studios every six months. I don’t know why I stayed in Truck for a year or why I was reassigned to Small Car. I do know that being assigned there in the first place and staying there as long as I did crippled me badly just because John Cecil did not believe in giving “O’s” and Jim McBain let his “E” stand. 

Another crippling blow to my career came in the way performance reviews were tied to merit increases and promotions. The way Metric the Personnel man explained it, being hired in as a B-modeler made me eligible for promotion in six months. In practice I couldn’t get it without a performance review and I didn’t get a performance review for nearly a year. By then a large merit increases would not have made sense if I were still a B-modeler. I got a promotion, instead, with a 9% raise in pay.  

On paper, a promotion to A-modeler along with a 9% raise in less than a year looks fabulous – when you compare it to what a rookie could expect to get. That was the rub. I was no rookie. The bottom line is I lost a merit increase and got a promotion that made it look as though Ford was doing be a big favor. That’s how my new Supervisor Harry Strickler saw it. 

You have to remember that Strick didn’t now about my work at American Motors and I didn’t know that he didn’t know. As far as he knew I was a slug from Truck who worked fourteen months at Ford over ten years earlier with the lowest possible performance review and my last modeling job was at Chrysler in 1969.  He new that Ford had responded to legal pressure to hire women and minorities and he resented the “sensitivity” classes Ford required him to attend to prepare for “us.” He thought that Ford had given me preferential treatment because I was black and he was determined not to buckle under to that sort of nonsense. 

I thought that Harry Strickler was just another bigot.  

In 1976 Small Car/Luxury was the busiest studio in the Design Center with two studio executives and modelers falling over each other to make a go of a new compact car called the Escort.  

Six versions of the vehicle were in progress, three clay models with two different body sides on each model. The front ends were pretty much set on all of the models. One model had a higher roof in keeping with the “package” we were supposed to stay within. One had a lower hood than it was supposed to have and the rear ends on all of them were undefined blocks of clay.  

The toughest problem with the design had to do with the wheel lips. The stylists had gone as far as they could go with them and it was up to the top modelers on every crew to bring them home. The result was three models with two sides each and sixteen different wheel lips modeled by sixteen different modelers.  

Wheel lips were always difficult because of the engineering restrictions imposed on the front tires and the necessity of making the front and rear wheel lips look like they belonged on the same car. Depending on the contours of the body side that the wheel lips had to blend into with the highlights assuming the optimum shape it sometimes took months to get all of them just right.  

The standard practice in this situation for each modeling crew was to pick the best looking wheel lip and use a bunch of points and templates to transfer the front lip to the rear, or vice versa. The modeler receiving the new information would make the necessary changes to fit the contour of his portion of the body side. There was no telling what the transferred wheel lip would look like when it was finished. Usually it meant redoing the front and rear wheel lips repeatedly until the unacceptable differences were reduced to zero. The problem with the Escort was that the job looked easier than it was, which led to errors in setting it up that couldn’t be fixed in the final analysis. 

Walt George had an answer for this perennial problem. He assigned a modeler to each wheel lip. When the stylist saw one he liked he called his Manager over and got the go-ahead to duplicate it. Walt recognized that to duplicate the appearance involved countless adjustments that the person who did the first one was best qualified to make. He then assigned the same modeler to do all four wheel lips and took templates and points from the best front and rear.  

For some reason, Walt assigned me to do one of the front wheel lips, a job that a Master Modeler usually assigns to anther Master Modeler or his best sculptor if he doesn’t do it himself. Maybe the work I did for him in Truck with the unbelievably bad scan had something to do with it. Maybe I was just the only person available at that particular moment. Anyhow, I did the wheel lip. The Manager picked it and I modeled the rest of the wheel lips on Walt’s model. Before we Di-Noced the clay for the next show, a Studio Exec named Fritz Mayhew bought the wheel lips and they were duplicated on all of the other models.

Those were the wheel lips that went on the production model.    

It would be an understatement to say that I was disappointed in not getting recognized by my Supervisor for that accomplishment. My feelings were tempered by the fact that Walt George didn’t get the recognition he deserved for coming up with the process. What I did could have been luck. What Walt did had to be genius. It saved the company more money in unproductive work than both of us made in a year and gave us time to do productive work that may have made the company millions.  

Yes, Walt George was only doing his job. Yes, he got paid for it. The sad thing is that it taught the company nothing about the process of shortening lead-time and making better products. I got no credit for staying within the feasibility parameters, although the wheel lips would have changed in the Feasibility studio if I hadn’t. Walt got no credit for his masterful strategy, which would have set the entire program back for months if he hadn’t devised it. Fritz Mayhew got credit for everything.

Some modelers called Fritz “Poindexter” because he looked so much like the little boy character by that name in the Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoon show. My pet name for Fritz was John Henry, the man of legend who was born with a hammer in his hand…. 

Modelers set wooden pegs in the clay at key points in the hood and the roof to make sure that we didn’t accidentally put in a surface below the necessary clearance for engine components and driver headroom. Whenever we hit one of those pegs that got in the way of what Fritz wanted to do, he reached for the nearest hammer and pounded it down.  

If you worked for Fritz you could always be sure of three things; his models would look terrific, he would sell them to upper management and they would never be built the way he designed them.  

Fritz did not believe in working within the boundaries of feasibly.  As far as he was concerned, that’s what the Feasibility studio was for. He saw his job primarily as a salesman who was not above lying and cheating to sell a design proposal to upper management. Lower roofs, lower hoods, and more plan view curvature in stubby rear ends always made his cars look better in clay than they would on the road. When they came back from Feasibility he would shake his head and say, “They lost it in Feas.” 

When Fritz and I worked apart from each other we made a great team. He would tell Strick or one of the Masters what he wanted and if I got the job he loved it – as long as he didn’t see me doing it. The Escort wheel lip was only the first job of mine that he picked over competing jobs modeled by Small Car’s stars. Again and again he would see what I had done and say, “That’s what I want.” Otherwise we were like oil water. The first time we worked together he booted me off the job.  

“Jeez,” he said in exasperation after fifteen-minute tough-o-war, “getting you to do the simplest thing is like pulling teeth!” 

The “simplest thing” he wanted me to do was to add two inches to the rear end of an Escort. That might not seem like much to someone outside of the industry but both of us knew damn well that it was never going to fly. Package engineers spent months working out the overall length of our vehicles to accomplish several things. On of those things had to do with shipping the vehicles to all points in the United States and Canada by road and rail with so many vehicles per conveyance. Arbitrarily adding even an inch to a particular vehicle could add more money to shipping costs than hot sales could ever make up for.  

Moreover, a car that far out of package would never get that far. The Feasibility studio would catch it, correct it and send it back with a design change that nobody would like. Result: More overtime for Small Car, more cost to customers, less time to do the hardest job right and more scorn heaped upon Feasibility for messing up Fritz Mayhew’s design. 

The job did go out to Feasibility the way Fritz wanted it. It did come back looking like hell. We did put in a ton of overtime getting back to square one.  

We farted around with that rear end for months. It got to the point where the stylists gave up on it at let the modelers see what they could do. I said before that Len Elledge was not a good modeler. Nevertheless Len came up with a workable solution. Had it been Bill (Ka-wall) Kowalski, Al Stonefish or one of the other great Sculptors or Master Modelers it would, no doubt, have made it into production. From Fritz’s point of view it didn’t help that Len’s brother Bob worked in Feasibility.  

For a day or so Len was a hero to his fellow modelers who shook his hand and patted him on the back for his outstanding accomplishment. Draftsmen, engineers and even some of the stylists got in on the act. Fritz Mayhew wasn’t one of them. 

Fritz carefully looked over Len’s work and scoffed at it. Then Fritz took a roll of 3/8” black tape and superimposed his own solution. It wasn’t a rip-off of what Len did and it wasn’t as good by anybody’s estimate, but it was Fritz Mayhew’s and it did work. I’ve often wondered if Fritz would have found a solution within the boundaries of feasibility if Lin hadn’t shown everyone that it was possible….

I had selfish reasons for being upset that Walt George and Len Elleged didn’t get the credit they deserved for the logjams they broke up in the development of the Escort. What they did was what I was striving to do, to make such a difference in the Studio that my contributions to the programs I worked on could only be called “outstanding.” When the outstanding work of a Master Modeler and a Sculptor with thirty years of in grade between them wasn’t recognized, where did that leave me?  

I was starting my race for recognition from a deep hole. My work in progress never looked as good as Garry’s, Joe’s or any of the other star modelers. It wasn’t because I couldn’t do it. It was because I couldn’t be sure of the end result if I did. At some point I could only hope that Strick would see that I always got there faster than they did. Over time he had to see by that consistency that I knew what I was doing just as John Cecil and Jim McBain did, whether or not he understood how I did it.  

Ford’s top modelers, like Chrysler’s and AM’s did things pretty much the same way, allowing for the demands of the clay and the influence of a labor union. To be as good as they were, I had to do what they did. To be better, I had to do some things that were radically different.  

I knew that Emerson was right, “To be great you must be a nonconformist.” I also knew that nonconformity carried a price in misunderstanding, resentment and ridicule. As a black modeler I had nothing to lose. My entire clay modeling history taught me that I was going to have to pay that price anyway because being a black modeler, all by itself, made me a nonconformist. Misunderstanding, resentment and ridicule came with the preconceptions about my skin color and affirmative action.  

The way to turn those preconceptions to my advantage came to me when I was in Truck. When I worked with someone who couldn’t model well, I got the blame for his poor performance. When I worked with someone who could model well, he got the credit for my good performance. When I worked alone I would get an A-modeler or Sculptor to “help me out” before I could finish. I was the only black guy in the place, and the men whose judgment of me would determine my performance review didn’t see me. They saw a stereotype. Their judgments followed the stereotype.  

The solution: give them a modeler that they had to look at.  

Clay modelers no longer wore the green smocks that once distinguished us from the men in the shops. Usually, a smock wasn’t necessary anyway to protect our clothes and they were of no value in keeping or pants clean.  When we did need a smock to paint or wallow in the mud we now used one of any color. The only modelers who still wore green smocks every day were two or three guys who had been around for a long time and never broke the habit. I started wearing a green smock every day. 

Then I started to boast about how great I was, knowing full well that Roger Dowey, the Master Modeler I was working for, would put me on a job he didn’t think I could do to show me up. It never crossed his mind that I was setting him up because there were no jobs that I couldn’t do. I didn’t even have to do them exceptionally well because his expectations were so low. All I had to do was exceed his expectations.  

Now I had a job to do from start to finish.  

Roger assigned Leonard Gross to help me with my one-man job. The nature of the task was so far beyond what a person with no modeling experience could do that it made me the job leader by default. Leonard could make good templates, apply hot clay, rough in surfaces and even do some finish work that Roger didn’t think either of us could do. He did everything better than his level of experience would lead one to expect. I’d worked with him enough to know that he could do it.  If you didn’t give a modeler credit for what he or she could do, you couldn’t get the most out of your assets. By recognizing Leonard’s skills as Art Field and Walt George later recognized mine, I was able to use them as assets. 

We had to sculpt a clay bumper from sketches, verbal direction and engineering data and foil it to simulate chrome. Great foilers were few and far between. You could stretch aluminum foil only so much before it broke. If you didn’t select the right thickness for your application and pull it just right as you pressed and stoked it in place you would either damage the clay or wrinkle the foil. Where you couldn’t bend the foil smoothly around a crowned surface, you had to apply another swatch of foil and cut it so that the cut didn’t show. If the clay surface was flawed in any way, it would show up like a dead rat in a bowl of chicken soup. The final major surfacing and the foiling were therefore left up to me. 

The modelers who had been looking at my work all along weren’t surprised that the finished product looked like a chrome-plated bumper. That’s what it was supposed to look like. They were surprised at what Leonard did to give me real help. The whole thing astounded Roger. He searched long and hard for something to criticize. He couldn’t find it and didn’t try to hide his chagrin.  

“Great job,” he said and walked away.  

A few days after that is when my Vietnam brigade yearbook came up missing. I’m sure that Roger didn’t steal it. I don’t think that it was Mike Aloe, either. I do think that both of them felt badly later on about knowing who did it. Both of them began to make friendly gestures toward me even though they continued to yell “River” every time Dave Davison entered the studio. Roger went so far as to show me the timesaving trick for plotting highlights that I used, with a slight modification, to put in the winning Escort wheel lips…. 

This was the experience I brought with me to Small Car to boost my image with Harry Strickler. Small Car had too many modelers for the green smock trick to work and too many Master Modelers and top-of-the-line sculptors to win points with Strick through them. I screwed that up the first time I worked with Joe Seibold, the best clay modeler in the studio, a good leader and a fair-minded man.  

I shined with the other Master Modelers whether they recognized it or not. I did especially well with Walt George and Jim Biondo, the man who said he wanted to hire me at the job shop where I meet the modelers for my past. But for some inexplicable reason I couldn’t shine around Joe. It was one of those deals where I would do nine things right when he wasn’t paying attention to me, and one thing wrong just before he turned around to look. Everybody had days when their work wasn’t up to par. Those were the days I worked with Joe. 

To get around the “Joe” problem during a slow period when most of the modelers had nothing to do, I decided to take my Truck act straight to the Supervisor. I picked the nastiest job I could find, the front end of a Mercury Tracer, that was part clay, part fiberglass, with wood splinters, missing chunks of clay and patches of old paint that wouldn’t come off. I timed my approach to Strick so that I was standing between him and the wreck when I told him what a fabulous modeler I was and how much I wanted to do something challenging. Naturally, he pointed to the wreck.  

“See what you can do with that,” he said. “I was going to scrap it ‘cause it’s too far gone to do it right. It’s impossible to make it look good. Just try to make it halfway presentable for the show.”  

Normally a show involved a mad flurry of activity around hot properties under development. The “wreck” had already seen its last show and probably stayed around as long as it did for a reason that made sense at one time but nobody could remember what it was. The only thing it could have to do with a show was to make the real show properties look better by comparison. In other words, it was busywork. 

That is, it was supposed to be busywork.  

The show was three days away. By my calculation, that was time enough to put on a show of my own. The magic word was “impossible.” Strick said it himself and the way he said it left no doubt that he thought it was intrinsically undoable.  

Here I have to back up a little to point out that I zeroed in on the Tracer eyesore my first day in the studio. I’d never seen anything that bad outside of a scrap bin. As a mental exercise more than anything else, I played with ideas for whipping it into shape. I, too, thought that it was impossible at first. But the more I played with the idea of how to salvage it the more apparent it became that I could do it. So, by the time I decided to approach Strick with a dazzling display of my talents I already had a game plan worked out for the wreck.   

Every modeling job has “keys” that unlock the secret of how to do it. If you took enough time up front to find the keys, the rest was easy. I had taken plenty of time to find the keys.  

The things that made the Tracer front end appear to be impossible were the false assumptions that the hard parts were somehow necessary to achieve the best results and the paint had to be stripped or scraped away. I saw that if I made a few templates off of the hard parts that were in good shape and over the critical clay counters that were marred by islands of old paint, I could get around 90% of the obstacles. 

I cut away huge chucks of the model, applied fresh clay, spotted my templates and, Bingo! I had it, with plenty of time to spare for painting, foiling and applying all of the neat little finishing touches.  

Strick paid no attention to me whatever while I was working. On the day of the show he asked me where I put the wreck. I told him he was looking at it. He did a double take, squinted his eyes and scratched his balding head. He grunted. “That wasn’t as tough as I thought it was.” 

What could I say to that? No, it wasn’t as though as he thought it was. But before I did it, he didn’t say that he thought it was tough. He said unequivocally that it was impossible.   

My disappointment in Strick’s reassessment of the Tracer project’s level of difficulty rather than his reassessment of my ability didn’t last long. I couldn’t afford to let it. My domestic situation had undergone another dramatic change. Now I had custody of my two boys. To spend more time with them I had to devise ways of getting my work done with less overtime, which was easy because most of the overtime was unnecessary anyway. Besides, it barely made up for my costs in childcare.  

The 6.6% merit increase I got a little over a year and a half after my promotion balanced out to an annual award that was closer to 4%. The only way I could make more money without working massive amounts of overtime was to get another promotion. My strategy for doing so was to do the “impossible” again and again. 

It took almost two years for my strategy to pay off. By then Ford had frozen merit increases and the only way I could get an increase in pay was through a promotion. The missing ingredient in my magic acts was involving Strick’s stars in setting the stage for each performance instead of bypassing them entirely.  

To view the exterior models in natural sunlight, we took them out to the patio. When we brought them back in the temperature changes caused cracks in the models where hot clay had been incorrectly applied to cold clay. A fault line at these meeting places was the inevitable result. Once cracks developed, popular wisdom held that they would continue to appear no matter what. I knew that wasn’t true because I had found two ways of fixing them. Walt George was the only one I could get to notice.  

If I attempted to show my solutions to Strick, chances were better than even that he would assume I was speaking from ignorance and brush me off. So, when a model came back from the patio cracked so badly that it created a stir among the modelers who hadn’t wanted to take it outside in the first place, the time was right to put on my show with Strick. I told him in Walt’s presence that I could mend the crack permanently. He told me that it was “impossible.” Ah, the magic word. Perfect! 

Walt grinned at Strick. “I bet you fifty bucks he can do it.” 

Strick didn’t hesitate. “You’re on,” he said as if the money was already in his pocket. “In two days the cracks are going to be back. ” 

The test was only partially successful. Only one crack came back but we discovered that a structural flaw in the armature caused it, not the temperature change that created the dozens of cracks that I did fix. Walt and Strick called the bet a wash, although it shouldn’t have been. By discovering what caused the crack that came back all of the permanent cracking problems were solved on every Ford clay model forever.  

From then on no clay was applied to an armature unless it was perfectly rigid. Paradoxically, the cracking problem I solved continued because too many modelers wanted it to continue. Creating problems was a great way of creating overtime. Fixing properties rather than fixing problems was a way of insuring overtime. 

The thing that affected my campaign for promotion the most was a letter that Ford circulated in December of 1980 with the subject line, “Salaried Woman and Minority Employees. That’s when I heard about the class action suit brought against Ford in 1973. Apparently women were also involved in the suit and the letter was to explain the settlement. Now I knew why Ford called me in ’74 and why it delayed rehiring me in ’77. Now I knew why it set me up to fail in Truck and why so many people assumed that Ford hired me only because of my color as opposed to robbing me of ten years of seniority because of my color. It was no longer speculation. It was the obstacle I had to overcome…. 

In the early ’80 headlights were all the same so all of the auto companies devised standard ways of installing them in clay. I saw that Ford’s way was cumbersome and time consuming. A sculptor named Dave Conley showed me how to do it when we had to install them on a Tempo, a car with rounded finders to acclimate the public taste to future products without crisp finder lines. While he was working and explaining I was working and trying to explain a better way of doing it. I had to look at what he was doing but I couldn’t get him to look at what I was doing.  

“Now,” he said, “we’re ready to locate them.” 

I said. “Mine is in.” It had been in for some time and the way I set it up made it unnecessary to fiddle with a lot of points and adjustments to know that it was located correctly. Without saying a word, Conley dug my headlight out and did both sides of the vehicle his way.  

Conley did the same thing with a Ford Tempo wheel lip that I put in for Dave Turner, the lead stylist and Styling Manager. Turner and Fritz bought it and went on to something else. It wasn’t a wheel lip that modelers were used to, so when Connelly saw it he wiped it out without checking the highlights and put in one that was more conventional. Nobody caught the change until it was too late to change back. I lost big points. The stylists lost one of the best features of their design. 

That sealed it for me. If I was going get attention for doing something big as a member of a modeling crew, I had to have an audience. 

When I saw a star Sculptor named Bill Kowalski struggling with the problem we had at AM of blending clay into fiberglass, I made a point of getting into a debate with him about a better way to do it. Walt George, Jim Biondo and Gary Kubitsky reserved judgment. When everyone else agreed that it was impossible to make a seamless blend without applying paint primer, sanding it down and repeating the process three or four times, I made my move. The result spoke for itself.  

This was no small matter. Once you applied paint primer to clay, making changes became a major operation. Major operations took time. Wasted time wasted money. Of course, the biggest waist of time was scheduled overtime. I hated it for personal and professional reasons. I wasn’t alone. Jerry Pietila, the Leader at AM with two older brothers who were Master Modelers at Ford, stood at opposite poles to his brother Art when it came to overtime. According to Strick, Art didn’t work overtime at all.  

The subject came up during a meeting I had with Strick in 1981 about my performance review in ’79. I was long overdue for another PR. I wanted to know what I had to do for a promotion. The long delay between P/R’s had already robbed me of a merit increase. Now the longer I stayed an A-modeler the more it looked like I didn’t deserve to be a Sculptor. If I got moved to another studio I’d be starting over again. 

Strick gave me the old “walk on water” routine required for an O. I reminded him of the Tracer front end. He didn’t recall it. I reminded him of the Quick-stick blending trick. He had a vague impression that it was K-wall’s idea but since I brought it up, he did remember that it was mine. I reminded him of the winning Escort wheel covers, the Tempo front end and the tricky outside mirror job I did for Dave Turner. Every job I did for Turner sold even though one of them never made it into production. I knew better than to say anything negative about Connelly. Strick found my claims so hard to believe that he didn’t bother to check the record.  

When I saw that I was beating a dead horse and losing points in the bargain, I reminded Strick of my superior attendance record and all the overtime I worked although I preferred not to work it. These were things that he could check without leaving his seat. 

“I ain’t buyin’ that,” he said in the same blunt way that he said everything, “You’re just as greedy as the rest of us. You work all the overtime you can get for the money.” 

I was taken aback. “I thought overtime was mandatory,” I said. 

“No you didn’t. Nobody is forcing you. Your Master is doing you a favor when he asks you to work it. If you don’t want to, don’t.” 

“If I don’t work it I won’t get promoted.” 

“You’re doing fine, Jasper. You’ll get promoted. Art Pietila has been a Master Modeler for a hundred years and he never worked overtime.” 

End of discussion. I didn’t know what to say.  

Art Pietila worked in another studio. I went there the same day to get the story directly from him. He confirmed it. From that day forward I worked overtime only when the job leader insisted on it or getting the job done truly demanded it.  

Walt George didn’t like overtime, either. That’s why Strick asked him to supervise an experimental studio called Trunk Interior Prove-out. The program called for no overtime. Walt would still answer to Strick and Jim Doyle. Our Studio Exec would be Ken Spencer. Walt would have one modeler. He picked me. He told me that he couldn’t read brown line prints and he saw what I did in modeling, Feasing[1] and proving-out[2] Dave Turner’s mirrors. Mirrors are always a bitch. 

Walt and I enjoyed each other’s company. He was the one who got me interested in characters and events in the Civil War that they didn’t teach in high school. I first heard about the crater debacle from him. When Strick asked him why he picked me when he could have had top guns like K-wall, Al Stonefish, Paul Davis or Gary Kubitsky he said, “Because he can model, he doesn’t like overtime and I like him.” 

Working alone with Walt was a joy. Our basement studio was the one that McKinley’s prove-out team occupied in the ’60s. Next door, of course, was where I worked for Vick Clark. We had fabulous equipment. The layout tables were superb. The lighting was ideal. The work was clean and free of stress. Walt and I could come and go as we pleased. We could do experiments without interference to test new modeling ideas and to see if old ones that models took on faith had any practical validity. We didn’t have to worry about studio politics or stylists who changed their minds about what they wanted to see every fifteen minutes.  

A friend of Cal Morrison named George Green worked prove-out in Vic’s old studio. George was a Sculptor who came to Ford in 1964. Early in 1975 he spearheaded a drive for union representation of modelers with the Society of Engineers and Office Workers to stop Ford’s dishonest lay-off and callback practices[3]. Ford manipulated the union vote by delaying the proceedings to exclude large numbers of laid off modelers on the assumption that they were more likely to vote for the union. The company argued that they had no standing to vote because they were no longer Ford employees. Ford’s head of Design Gene Bordinat spread the word that Ford would never recall them.

George Green was supposed to be only one of four modelers on the S.E.O.W. union drive committee. He did 100% of the work in informing everyone of what was going on. The others kept their identity secret. 

When Calvin showed up to testify in the NLRB hearing to decide the fate of Ford’s layoff and hiring practices, he expected to see a hundred fellow modelers standing shoulder-to-shoulder with George Green. Bordinat was there with a team of Ford’s high-priced lawyers. The S.E.O.W. lawyer and union rep were there. George Green and Cal Morrison were the only modelers. Their testimony, in contrast to Gene Bordinat’s, persuaded the NLRB to come down on the side of the laid off modelers. From then on Ford had to lay off all of its salaried employees strictly according to seniority and offer them their jobs back before they could hire new employees. That case set a precedent for the entire country. 

The “stealth” members of the union drive committee all prospered. I was never able to give my full trust to any of them again….  

While I was working with Walt George, George Green showed both of us a trick that shortened our modeling time considerably. Walt picked it up right away.  

Walt was better at reading prints than he gave himself credit for. Most of the problems he had were with drawings that didn’t make sense to him because they weren’t correct. The draftsmen faked them because they ran into problems they couldn’t solve and they knew that most modelers would fake the discrepancies rather than admit that they didn’t understand them. Neither Walt nor I knew that at the time, so when we ran into something that we didn’t understand we took it to the draftsman. If he couldn’t give an explanation that we could decipher, we took it to the engineer Claude Coleman. The best engineers admitted when they were stumped and bent their efforts to clearing up the fog.  

Claude Coleman was one of the best engineers I ever knew. By the time we were finished we had reconciled every discrepancy, which saved the company millions of dollars in retooling costs. That was our job. The entire design budget was only a fraction of the cost of tooling.  

Ford was saving millions of dollars every day with honest work and wasting millions of dollars every day with bullshit. Those huge sums in bullshit costs below the surface of Ford product development reminded me of a story Walt told me about his WW II days in the Navy… 

“Me and this other sailor were looking out over the Pacific Ocean. Water, everywhere you looked from horizon to horizon. I said, ‘Man, that’s a lot of water.’ He said, ‘Yeah, and that’s just the top of it.”