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Chapter 27

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Chapter 26: Finding the Key 

Right after my meeting with Easton, Strick called me into his office to give me my Performance Review. He gave me an E. I didn’t like it and I told him so. He told me that it was better than what Leighton would have given me and he didn’t understand what I was complaining about. Hell, he had rescued me from Leighton and the last performance review I signed was from Jim McBain who gave me an E. Leighton hadn’t given me my formal review when he told me that I would not get a merit increase. Strick asked rhetorically if I didn’t agree with McBain’s Performance Review, why did I sign it? He knew as well as I did that your signature was suppose to mean only that your read it. I vowed to myself that I would never again sign a PR that was below EP.

Somehow Strick got the impression that I went to Easton complaining about him. He gave me the impression that he might have rated me higher if Easton hadn’t talked to him. On the other had, Strick had to balance the number of O’s, EP’s and E’s he gave out to conform to what the company required him to do. Like McBain and Leighton, he already had too many O’s and EP’s for the good of his own Performance Review. Until I met with Easton I hadn’t known that there were three overlapping degrees of each PR rating.  Strick’s “high” E allowed him to give me as much money as an EP without him having to give me an EP. 

Gradually our somewhat confrontational session settled down to plain talk about where I stood and what I had to do to go higher. I asked Strick to name his top five modelers, including his Masters. He did. I caught him off guard with my next question, although it sounded to me like a question I asked him before I shipped over to Taurus four years earlier. I asked, “What can they do that I can’t?” 

Strick hesitated. “You’re a good modeler,” he said without answering my question. “I have no complaints with your work.” 

“Okay. Let me put it another way… What do I have to do to be as good as your best modelers?” 

He hesitated again. “I’m happy with what you’re doing. The difference is those guys have been doing it for me all along, year after year. I have to take care of them first.” 

There was that praise again, I have to take care of them.  

Strick continued, “If you keep doing what you’re doing I’ll have to take care of you, too. Don’t worry about. You’re doing fine.”

Where and when had I heard those words before? Oh yeah, I herd them from Strick four years ago in this office. Did that mean I would have gotten an O instead of an E on this Performance Review and the one before it if Personnel hadn’t transferred me to Taurus? The next two years would tell – if I could manage to stay in Strick’s studio that long.  

Harry Strickler was in charge of modeling in two studios.  

In the main studio we worked on Escorts and other small and mid-sized cars. Ken Spencer was the Studio Exec. I worked there for about a year doing mostly wheel covers and minor facelifts.  

I was secure in my duties, which included every difficult and oddball project that came along. The bigger the challenge the more I liked it because it usually meant taking an unconventional approach that no one could question. As always, my first iterations looked awful but that wasn’t a problem with me in Strick’s studio because Strick and his Masters knew how it would turn out. They didn’t care how I did it. 

Jim Biondo was especially tolerant of my “odd” ways of dong things although he was fundamentally a conventional modeler like Dennis Painter and Dave Hackett. The difference was he actively sought out new ways of doing things and didn’t try to teach me the “right way” when he saw me doing something other than what he would have done. He never treated me as though my modeling skills were inferior to his, just different in some respects. That’s saying a lot because he was one of the best modelers I’ve ever known and acknowledged by the company as one of its best.  

Tact was not one Jim Biondo’s strong points. It rankled many modelers who worked for him. It might have gotten under my skin, too, if I hadn’t seen the value of his blunt and often harsh appraisals or if I hadn’t been the beneficiary of them more often than not. He was quick to yank a modeler off a job with the announcement, “I need a top guy on this.” Whenever he said that, he looked past Strick’s top guys and called me. I don’t think he ever noticed that he did that. I sure did. Stick and his top guys must have noticed it, too.  

When I showed Biondo my wheel cover attachment system he was more excited about it than I had ever been. He wanted to do it. Unfortunately, it looked too much to Strick like the faulty hub attachments Leighton’s Masters had sold him on. He had a bin full of them that were good only for taking up space.  

Things were slow in the studio so Strick let me go ahead with a new wheel-cover centering device I invented to speed up the process of locating the center of wheel covers for every size of wheel we used. He showed no enthusiasm for the attachment system itself. He didn’t even look at my drawing or the parts that Phil Walker had given to me and I had modified to work together the way I intended. Now I knew what the inside dimension of the nylon rotating ring had to be and I could make up a drawing that indicated it. The only remaining barrier to doing it was Strick’s disenchantment with the system he had tried before.  

Frank Horenkamp came into the studio to talk to me about an article for the Highlight but when he saw my wheel-centering jig he couldn’t stop talking about that. It was simple, compact and it worked with a turn of a lever. I used rubber bands to test the three-pronged retracing and grabbing mechanism but anyone could see how easily they could be replaced with springs now that we knew how much tension was needed.  

Frank was an engineer. During WW II he had worked in the Warren Tank Plant where it was his job to design jigs and fixtures of all kinds. Since then, he had toured G.M. and Ford manufacturing plants and he had never seen anything as simple and efficient as I had done. He wanted to take it out of the studio and into the plants for a wide variety of applications but his new duties as a grade-8 general facilitator for the Design Center wouldn’t allow him to do it. He got nowhere with the engineers who could have taken it farther. Eventually my working model fell into disuse when a rubber band broke and Strick decided to toss it in the bin with his useless wheel covers. It was all the same to Strick. 

Meanwhile, Jim Biondo was having a devil of a time trying to sell my wheel-attachment system to a Design Center committee that was set up to encourage innovations in modeling equipment. The other members of the committee were Modeling Supervisors that included Harry Strickler, Rod Leighton and Gerry Folgman. He showed them the working parts, which they could not object to, but Strickler didn’t think the system would work for another reason. I hadn’t designed it to attach to wheels mounted on stands where they were often displayed. Folgman was just plain negative.  

I asked Biondo what Leighton had to say. I expected him to tell me that Leighton trashed the idea. As a close friend of Phil Walker, whose studio I had abandoned for his because of the parts he was looking at, he had to know where they originated. To my surprise Biondo told me that Leighton wasn’t the bad guy in the group. It was Jerry Folgman. Biondo could see some merit to Strick’s objection and Leighton didn’t commit himself but seemed in favor of giving the idea a try. Folgman declared that it was a bad I idea. He said that before he even looked at the finished parts. When Biondo pressed him on why he said that, he just repeated without explanation, “It won’t work.”

Jim’s report on the “innovation” meeting told me that my wheel cover attachment system was a dead duck and it was pointless to try to resurrect it. He disagreed. He figured that Strick had the only rational objection and if we could answer it the committee would have to give the system a trial. He didn’t get it. For him and for me the objective was to try it out and see what happed. If it worked, terrific. If it didn’t we were no worse off than we were before. Indeed, we would be better off because we would know why it didn’t work, which was certain to help us somewhere down the line. To the committee it was something else, something that had more to do with politics than it did with innovation.  

I didn’t care what the unstated objections were or how many committee members shared the same ones. I lost all interest in the project.  

To me, even Strick’s objection was silly. Mounting plastic wheel covers to steel wheels with rubber tires on stands was never a problem. We had always used a thick, black, sticky gum or a gray, calk-like adhesive to do that. The wheel covers stayed on because the stands leaned back slightly minimizing the negative effect of gravity, they bore no weight and they didn’t move. Without a new attachment system for the wheel covers on model cars that sometimes rested their rims against the tires there would have been no change with the stands. Why, then, was it necessary to have failsafe wheel cover attachments for the wheels on the stands if we went to a failsafe attachment system for the wheels on the cars?   

The more Jim Biondo pressed me for a solution to the problem that I didn’t see as a problem, the harder it was for me to think about it. I came up with a couple of lame ideas off the top of my head that Jim quickly and wisely rejected.  

The speed with which Biondo processed complex information was part of his difficulty in communicating at times without causing offence. Like most exceptionally intelligent people he would see a problem and a solution before anyone else saw a problem. It came so naturally to him that he expected everyone to be on the same page with him when they were two or three pages behind. I was way ahead of him on the real problem with the attachment – the fact that it was political rather than mechanical – but I was way behind him on a mechanical solution to Strick’s objection.  

The answer came to him as we spoke. He drew a sketch of a part that could do double duty. I saw why he thought it would work but I saw something else that could kill it. My reservation was not with his concept but with the material he had in mind to try it out and the politics driving the committee. If the material failed, they would surely declare the concept a failure. It was Jim’s baby now and I didn’t want him to drop it.

One committee member had objected to the cost. Biondo thought that he could get around that objection by making all of the parts except the aluminum sleeve out of the same hard, cheep plastic we used for making radio buttons. My concern was partly selfish. If he went down, I would go down, too. He hadn’t given enough thought to why I specified the materials I did in my proposal. One part required the strength of a big steel nut. Another part required the toughness and slickness of nylon. The part that he wanted to double as a holder on the back of the wheel cover and the unmounted wheel on the stand required a material with the stretching and gripping characteristics of hard rubber.  

I think I know where he was coming from. He was thinking in terms of a practical test rather that a political win or lose contest. He wanted to demonstrate that the principle was as sound as we both knew it was.  

If the plastic nut cracked, everyone would know that we had to use bronze or steel. If the plastic holders were too slick to grip the aluminum sleeve as tightly as they should we could use hard rubber. By then everyone would realize that the cost of making those parts out of the appropriate material was negligible and worth thousands of time more in saved time and ease of function. We had taken all of the complexity out of the attachment process. Once the nuts with the rotating ring were attached to the spindles on the hub we were in business for however long the wheel stayed on the car. Anyone could slip the wheel covers on and off in seconds. When they were on, they would stay on for as long as the designers wanted them to be there.  

We made up one set of hard plastic parts. We put the holder on one wheel cover. We put the plastic nut with the plastic ring on one wheel of one car. We put the aluminum sleeve on the rotating ring and the wheel cover on the sleeve. Then we got assigned to other projects. The test wheel cover got lost in the shuffle and that was the end of it…. 

True to his word, Strick gave me an EP on my next Performance Review. Whether it was a low, middle or high EP I couldn’t tell. Judging by my assignments and the extent to which designers and Master Modelers other than Jim Biondo and Walt George asked Strick for me to work on their models I guessed that it had to be at least in the middle.  

The idea that I was progressing the way Strick told me I would if I kept working as I always had was buttressed by my next big assignment. 

In 1988, Mimi Vandermolen was promoted to grade-12 Studio Executive to head the studio charged exclusively with developing a new version of the Probe. Harry Strickler supplied the clay modelers. Ford had a 10% interest in Mazda, which was supposed to supply the engineering. Mimi’s boss Toshi Sato held duel Japanese and American citizenship. His first language was Japanese. He spent most of his time in Japan with Joe Seibold, Larry Paluschak and our studio engineer Dick Trapp. Dave Hackett and Dave Connelly also spent some time modeling in Japan.  

If Ford’s top priority was to make the best Probe possible in the least amount of time, Sam Mayers would have had Toshi’s job. Sam spearheaded the design of the original Probe in the Advanced Concepts studio next door to Taurus.  

The Advanced studio wasn’t expected to make practical cars. But Sam designed the way I modeled. He thought about what would be required for function as well as form and designed accordingly. He eliminated months of unnecessary reworks by driving as straight and sure as he could to the finished product. His Probe broke all existing records for low wind resistance and looked so good that the company decided to put one into production that looked very similar to his.  

The highest Sam Mayers ever rose in Ford was grade-10 Manager.  

I got in on the ground floor of the new Probe design. It was going to be so different that Toshi took the unusual step of making the first models in scaled down versions, each of which could be sculpted quickly by a single person. The scale models were less that half as big as the full sized model. They were 60% lower, 60% shorter and 60% narrower. We could therefore mount them on tables and make changes with 60% less clay and much less time. Think of what it means to lug around an orange rater than a cantaloupe and you can readily see the advantage. The disadvantage was that scale models always lost something in the transition to full size. No matter how detailed you made the scale model the most it could give you in full size was a general idea. 

Getting the most general idea of which way to go with a design proposal was the job of a vice president senior to Jack Telnack. The man above Jack Telnack was Max Jerosic, the head of product development for all Ford car and truck lines. Fritz Mayhew made the styling generalities more specific. A project director acted as a watchdog on styling, engineering, ergonomics and costs. Toshi Sato answered to Fritz. Mimi answered to Toshi. Mimi’s Manager was Scott Yu. He supervised the day-to-day performance of the Probe designers, who included his brother Albert and a black protégé of Same Mayers named Dennis Moses.  

The color of the designers should have meant nothing. It meant a great deal to Toshi Saito. My color also meant a great deal to Toshi. If you think that the top-heavy management structure of the company made things complicated enough without throwing in a little racism, you’re right. Just counting the layers of management tells you how hard it was to get anything done. When big breakthroughs came in the Probe design, Toshi was the last to see them because three black men and a Jew made those breakthroughs. Dennis Moses did it with his interior design. Charlie Leak and Leonard Gross did it with everything stacked against them in modeling Denis Moses’ interior. I did it with the exterior.  

My designer was Sid Chang, one of the young designers that the company expected to be a star. For once I agreed with the company. He was another Sam Mayers protégé. He started slowly with no fear of trying things that might look horrible in the beginning because of his confidence in his ability to produce something beautiful and exciting in the end. We made a good match. His styling approach and my modeling approach were in sync. We respected each other’s special talents.  

Sid concerned himself with formulating the major styling elements without interfering with how I brought them together. He handed me a sketch or told me what he wanted and walked away. When he came back he gave it a thumbs-up, a thumbs-down or he watched to see whether he liked where I was going and then made his decision.  

Because I believed in checking highlights during the roughing in phase we could both see where we were very early in the process and make intelligent styling and modeling decisions about what to do next.   He made the styling decisions. I made the modeling decisions. Allowing me to make the surfacing decisions was crucial because Sid’s vision required minute surface adjustments that made a huge difference in appearance.  

In the beginning we lagged behind the other three models including the one Dennis Moses was trying to design with a modeler who wasn’t there most of the time and didn’t help him when he was there. Our systematic progress allowed us to catch up and pass the other designs that swung wildly from one theme to another. The modelers blamed the designers. The designers blamed the modelers. I blamed the process of rapid rough modeling to create illusions of instant success in the naked clay that couldn’t be followed though to the next stage of development. Had Sid and I done things that way – the Ford way – we would have struggled, too. Indeed, the other teams would not have appeared to be struggling if Sid and I weren’t so far and so obviously ahead of them.  

Our progress was measured unofficially every day with people inside and outside the studio who commented on what they saw as they passed by. We got complements from secretaries, product planners and sweepers – a good cross-section of people that gave us the kind of input we got with the Taurus. It was like a spontaneous daily survey. Sid and I were the clear winners every day.

Joe Warren, who had shown his respect for modelers during our meeting with Red Poling, was lavish in his praise of my surface development. He knew how difficult it was because of the complex mathematics required to create those surfaces on paper. He knew how unlikely it was for a designer to pull it off. This was the very thing he told Poling about. When I tried something that wasn’t so nice he said, “That’s ugly. Put that other thing you had back on there.” He wasn’t involved in the project. He was simply giving me his opinion as an interested observer and paying me the compliment of recognizing that the “other thing” was all mine.  

Now and then some clown who should have known better would say something that boggled my mind and pissed me off. I knew that others who didn’t say it were thinking it. No way could either Sid or I have done what we did without the other. Yet, Sid got all of the credit for work that could only have been mine unless Sid was an outstanding clay modeler as well as an outstanding designer and I was a mindless robot.

The only white modelers I ever saw getting this sort of evaluation were women who didn’t stay in modeling long when they saw the writing on the wall.  I saw it repeatedly with all of the black modelers who had been in the business for ten or twenty years. If the model looked bad, we screwed it up. If it looked great it was because the designer was great or we must have had help from a great white modeler. In the Probe studio it wasn’t the barrier for me that it had been in Taurus or the insurmountable obstacle that it had been in Luxury. It was just an irritation and a constant reminder that I was dancing on a slippery slope. 

As long as the people above me in my chain of command didn’t look on me as an inferior modeler I was in good shape. Here, I didn’t have to worry about a Master Modeler who wanted to shoot me down because I was doing something that worried him or because he wanted to “teach” me how to do things the “right” way. I was the modeler in charge and the soundness of my decisions as well as the quality of my work spoke for themselves. In the final competition between the four scale models I was so far ahead that I could cruse to the finish line. It was no accident. It was the way I planned it. It was the way I always planned my jobs. The difference was I got to start it, work it, and finish it my way.  

Mimi, Toshi and Fritz picked Sid’s design to model in full size. We had three modeling bridges, which meant that we could do six proposals – one proposal for each side of every model. The real work started with the full-size models. Strick sent over his top modelers to do them. The designers needed the best modelers they could get because no variation on Sid’s theme could be contoured in an acceptable way without them.

We were now playing for keeps.

This stage of development normally began with a designer’s rendering and a full-size, side view tape drawing on a portable board with overlaying grid lines. As soon as a low-level designer’s rendering was selected the department’s Director or the Studio Executive would change it and a design Manager would supervise the changes. When Fritz or Jack saw it, it would change again. In short, Sid Chang no longer had control of his design. He and the designers assigned to the other models were reduced to order-takers. Scott Yu did most of the designing.  

Someone at the highest levels had decreed a plan view silhouette in the shape of a coke bottle. When auto design professionals say that a body side has “coke” in it, that’s what they mean. It also means that if you do it wrong it will look like it was in a major accident. An added challenge with the new Probe was our top designers’ instance that the core highlight below the beltline flow evenly from the front of the car to the rear in all views. No one was sure it could be done. Doing it on a full-size model with points we had to hold for the side glass, the rocker panel, the wheel openings, etc., was even more of a challenge. We got around it by contouring the body so that the highlight didn’t have to go all the way through to look terrific. The top designers bought it.  

My body side won the competition. And make no mistake about it, this was a competition between modelers. I did not compete with Jim Biondo because he worked on the front end of another model. His front end was transferred to Sid’s model.  

Bud Magualdi was leading a parallel program in California where our top-level executives said design trends were set. This thinking nearly led to the scrapping of the original Taurus in ’85 because the survey car tested badly there. Ford rented the Hudding studio in Palm Springs for Bud’s Probe and paid for the equipment and material to run it.   

To put this into perspective you have to know that that the Art Center was in Detroit, Michigan. Aspiring car designers came from as near as a few blocks away and as far as China to attend classes there taught by Sam Mayers in the ‘80s and ‘90s and by his teacher Homer Lagassi in the ’60s and ’70s. Ford therefore had an inside track on identifying and recruiting the best auto design talent in the world from a world famous institution in its own backyard. Going to southern California to study auto design was like going to western Alabama to study Shakespearian acting with acting coaches imported from London, England. 

Everybody knew that the shooters who were pushing for a California studio were doing it because they preferred the climate. That’s right. The entire multi-million dollar venture was based on the desire of a few executives to live in the sun year round.

The California ploy produced strange and wasteful distortions in Ford’s already strange and wasteful design process. The official thinking went something like this: Find the greatest concentration of creative people, turn them loose to be as creative as they could be and use as much as possible of what they come up with. In other words, the people in the California studio would do the same thing the Concept studio did in the Design Center. When they had a fiberglass model, they would ship it to Michigan and the Probe studio would bring it into the ballpark of reality. 

Sound dumb? It was dumb. 

Getting creative talent was never a problem for Ford. When I was working in Taurus Interior a freelance talent recruiter got my name from somewhere and tried to recruit me for Chrysler. The high salary Chrysler offered me was tempting. I turned it down because I didn’t want to lose my eight or nine years of seniority with Ford and I thought that I was on a fast track to getting an even higher salary at Ford when it lifted its merit increase freeze. The recruiter told me that Ford had an industry reputation for hiring the best designers, modelers and engineers available and then letting them go to waste.  

Nobody could figure how Ford was so successful in getting the best people, why they let so many of them rot on the vine or how they could get away with it for decades.  

The answer was massive fraud. Ford used the old “bate and switch” tactic of shady retailers to get a high volume of customers into the store. Like airline ticket-sellers, they intentionally overbooked and left people holding tickets for a plane that might never take off. The confidence of the ticket-holders in their worth combined with the disbelief that Ford would leave them hanging onto a false expectation kept them there until they had too much time invested to risk losing it. Some of them had relocated from different states or different countries, purchased homes and established community ties that they were loath to break.  

Each new crop of aspiring design professionals thought that things would be different for them. They thought that the old timers who complained about how they were treated couldn’t have been as good as they thought they were or that Ford had simply made a mistake in an isolated case. 

In the Probe studio I was between the new guys looking forward to better things and the old guys who complained about being screwed. Since my return to Ford in ’77 I had gotten numerous signals that I would eventually reach the top of my profession, which most modelers never did. On the other hand, if it hadn’t been for the poison pill callback offer that Ford made to me while I was at Chrysler in 1968, I would have had twenty years of continuous seniority instead of eight and a half. That would have meant three weeks of paid vacation every year instead of two and given me as much time at Ford as some of the people who became grade-8 Master Modelers while I was a grade-6 A-Modeler. That’s a lot to overlook if you are not advancing at a greatly accelerated pace.  

Relative to the modelers who began their modeling careers in ’77 I did make Sculptor faster than they did but only by two years with six more years of experience. Now I was stalled on the low end of the pay scale – not the lowest end, but three quarters of the way below the top. The lower you were, the more likely you were to stay low because every time you got a new Supervisor he was likely to assume that you belonged where you were. I had an old Supervisor now and I was moving up. But I had a new Master Modeler in Probe, which threatened to take me down.  

John Arzooian had recently returned to the Design Center from an extended assignment in Australia. The rear end of the Probe had yet to be designed and “Arzoo” was the Master Modeler in charge of the clay model we were trying to work out that part of design with. I liked him personally but I hated working for him and it was frustrating for him to have me working for him. For me it was like working for Sam Borg.  

We clashed before I ever got started He went straight to work on the passenger’s side of the model roughing in his interpretation of the designer’s sketch. My sketch didn’t look as though it would work with the required bumper protection for the sheet metal so I asked the Studio Engineer Joe Warren to give me the “corner hit.”  

Joe looked surprised that I would ask for information like that so early in the program but Arzoo’s reaction was closer to anger. He stopped what he was doing and began lecturing me on the stages of clay model evolution. He told me that the design was going to change and I needed to “sketch model” the proposals until the designers had one they liked. Yes, the design was going to change but the “corner hit” was not going to change unless the test done to determine sheet metal damage in a low-impact collision with the corner of the bumper changed. That wasn’t likely. If the test changed, it wouldn’t happen three or four times a day. Whatever changes were made to the clay would be good.  

Arzoo didn’t buy my reasoning. Joe Warren did.  

As soon as Arzoo went back to his side of the car, Joe whispered to me, “You’re right. I’ll get that information for you as soon as I can.” 

I had a great working rapport with all of the engineers in the studio. We kept our communication lines open and gave each other the professional respect we deserved. I understood their concerns and they appreciated my honesty and diligence in incorporating them into everything I did.  

Somebody in the main studio asked for me to work on a hot job and I stayed there for a month or so going from one hot job to another. Then Mimi and Scott asked for Jim Biondo and me to return to Probe. Strick wouldn’t let Jim go and I couldn’t do much at first because I was again working for Arzoo. By then the design had been settled and it took very little to carry it the rest of the way.  

The hard part for me was modeling inefficiently to stay in Arzoo’s good graces. Gradually I came to see the method in John’s madness. He wanted to work as much overtime as he could get and to insure that he got it he instructed me to do things in five or six long steps that could have been done better in one or two short ones.  

The only way to get a good report card from Arzoo was to take those unnecessary steps. When the fiberglass Probe came to us from California we were going to follow that design so we were just marking time anyway. I wouldn’t have minded so much if Joe Seibold hadn’t picked one of those times to come from Japan for a visit and to catch me, as he always seemed to catch me, doing a truly inferior job. This time it wasn’t my fault but what could I say?  

When the fiberglass Probe did arrive from California it was as beautiful as I expected it to be with Bud Megauldi in charge of designing it and without the feasibility restrictions that we had to adhere to. Fiberglass always looks better than DiNoc-covered clay because a painted fiberglass surface is as shiny as painted sheet metal. In some ways it was better because the Hudding modelers violated points to achieve the desired effect that we had to keep.  

The down side for the fiberglass model was that it showed up more highlight flaws than our DiNoced clay model. The up side was that the high gloss itself looked so good that our designers were willing to overlook the surface flaws it revealed. The down side for us was that no matter what we did to the clay model the designers said that the Hudding model looked better. Of course it did. A polished apple always looks better than an orange on the vine.. That’s why you never see a car with a dull paint finish on the road.  

The designers made regular comparisons between the two models while we were working on the clay. It drove the modelers nuts. It went beyond irritation with me because I had to make the most physically demanding changes on the lower portion of the body side. I ended up there because no one else could make the spear-like styling feature above the rocker panel extend past the coke in the body side without looking as though the upper fillet had a nasty break in it. I had to work on my knees and on my back over the raised platform for the bridge with my body contorted in uncomfortable positions for hours at a time. The Hudding model didn’t have as much coke as our clay model did so it wasn’t as much of a chore to make the fillet in its spear work. 

Still, the spear in the Hudding model had a bit of an undesirable break in the fillet where the clay model didn’t. In other words, the clay model spear was superior to the one on the fiberglass, yet, we spent weeks lengthening it, shortening it, fattening it up and slimming it down in a futile effort to emulate the elusive qualitative that our upper-level designers saw in the fiberglass. 

The last straw for me was when I went full circle for the third or forth time and Mimi told me to change it again. There was nowhere to go but backward. I took it upon myself to do something we should have done the first day, something similar to what we did in surveys with DiNoced clay models we compared to show room models of competitive vehicles.  

To get an apples-to-apples comparison with the survey cars, we DiNoced both cars. We weren’t allowed to DiNoc the Hudding model so I put aluminum foil on both spears with the argent side – the side that didn’t reflect light as much as the side we used to simulate chrome – on the outside. The foil on the clay spear made it much shinier than the surrounding clay and the foil of the Hudding model was a little less shiny than the surrounding fiberglass. The spear on the clay model looked so much better than the one on the fiberglass that Mimi bought it right away. When Fritz saw what I did he bought it, too. He had no choice. 

A big mistake that aesthetic car designers make in the early stages of design is thinking that they can make an infinite number of “improvements.” They can’t. Once the theme is chosen and parameters are set with a “package” that includes points for the overall dimensions, driver and passenger head room, engine components, etc., there can be only one optimum design. The task is no longer to create that design but to find it. You can make variations on the theme but they will not be superior to the fist model unless the designers failed to discover the optimum design the first time around. The will only be different.  

It occurred to me that we could take there years or more out of “face-lifts” to basic designs for three or four model years in a row by modeling all of them at the same time. I couldn’t get any of the shooter to go for it. 

Package Engineering, a separate group headed by Gail Brock, was a particular delight to work with. When I was working without a Master Modeler I was astonished to see how frequently their vital input was overlooked. By working closely with Gail’s engineers every day and sometimes with Gail herself, I always knew where the trouble spots were going to be and they always knew when we were flirting with disaster. They didn’t lie to give themselves room to play with and I didn’t cheat to make the designer or myself look good. We aborted problems regularly instead of spending extra time to fix them. Where they couldn’t be flexible they told me. They also told me why. Where they could be flexible they were. They were our partners not our enemy. 

Fritz Mayhew didn’t see things that way. His mindset relative to styling and every other discipline required to design a car was strictly competitive. When we ran into trouble with some high engine points that Mimi tried to design around, Fritz told her to ignore them. His exact words were, “Do what you want and tell them their stuff doesn’t fit.” He was actually telling her to do what he wanted, but that’s beside the point. 

We ran into the same mindset with Mazda engineers who gave us unreadable prints and unnecessarily huge clearances to surmount. If it hadn’t been for Dick Trapp in Japan we never would have gotten the ’93 Probe on the road. I think that was Mazda’s intent. The Probe was in direct competition with their car and they didn’t want it to look better. 

The biggest threat to our success with the ’93 Probe was our own vice president in charge of product development, Max Jerosic. At one point he scraped the Probe, which everyone could see was a winner. Fortunately, Red Poling vetoed his decision. Unfortunately, “Mad Max” nearly trashed it again with a demand that we change a key design element to match what Toyota did on its ’89 model. It looked like a total loss because the change that would have changed the entire character of the Probe, replacing soft contours with hard lines. Jerosic may have been crazy but he wasn’t stupid. He wanted to kill the Probe and his “little change” was a slick way of doing it while putting the blame of the failure on the designers and modelers.  

Arzoo declared that it was impossible to do what Jerosic demanded without redoing the entire design. The other Master Modelers agreed. So did all of the designers. Arzoo reluctantly told me to make the change. My head was spinning with the idea of being appointed the executioner for a great design that so many of us had worked so hard to develop. I couldn’t force myself to do it. There had to be another way.  

I studied the model from every angle to find a key to the surface that would give Mad Max what he said he wanted while preserving the character of what we had already done. I studied the damn thing for hours. There had to be a key. There had to be a key.  And there was!

Before Arzoo when home that night I told him that I had an idea to save the Probe without turning the soft counters into hard lines. He told me that I was wasting my time. At first, he chafed at the suggestion that I could do what everyone else said couldn’t be done. He hadn’t yet learned that my unorthodox way of modeling was the product of careful study and not an indication of my failure to absorb what the best modelers like him had tried to teach me.  I could tell that he thought I was setting myself up to show how little I knew by going ahead with my idea for a solution. When he gave me permission to give it a try he did it in a way that told me he was giving me plenty of rope to hang myself.  

Arzoo wasn’t trying to hurt me. He liked me. He saw the good things I did. He saw my “potential” for doing better if I would only stop being so stubborn about paying attention to details that didn’t matter and start learning how to “sketch model.” The sketch modeling I did to demonstrate to him that I could do it only convinced him that I wasn’t consistent. By allowing me to make an ass of myself, as he was sure I would, he was trying to let me see for myself what I needed to see to rise above the mediocre modeler he thought I was.  

Everybody knew how much I hated working overtime so it was decidedly strange for all of the modelers except me to go home after an eight-hour day. Even the modelers who were working on other projects were too bummed out by the apparent deathblow Mad Max had given to the new Probe to stick around. As usual, Mimi, Scott and Dennis Moses were still around two hours after everyone else had gone. Mark Kelly, Mimi’s other design manager was also there late as usual. By 8:00 P.M. Mark Kelly and I were the only ones still around. I had hopped to have something promising worked out by then but when Mark went home a half hour later I was still struggling to achieve what I had envisioned.  

The key was to turn the sharp line coming off of the beltline into a controlled band of light – a highlight. No one had ever seen a highlight on a coke-bottle shape like the one I was trying to make so I had no precedents to guide me. The best I could do was identify a critical zone of light reflection and try to work it into the rest of the model. By midnight it was clear to me that I had begun a journey of a thousand miles that could take months to complete but I had taken a few thousand steps in the right direction. I was sure that the hard part would be getting Arzoo, Sid, Scott and Mimi to look past the ugly ducking I created to the beautiful swan I knew it could be.  

I came to work an hour early the next morning prepared for a fight.

Larry Turk, who had been working the passenger side of the clay, was the first modeler I saw that morning. He always came in early, as did most of the other modelers. He was as surprised to see me there ahead of him as he was to see what I had done. In his twenty-plus years in the business I’m sure that he had never seen anything as ugly as the “wicked bone” I had going. That’s what he called it, “a wicked bone.” He teased me mercilessly and I braced myself for more of the same when the rest of the modelers and designers showed up.  

One by one as the Probe team members entered the studio and saw my creation their jaws dropped in sheer amazement that anyone could make something so hideous. Even as a rough start it went against every modeling convention known to man. Conventional wisdom held that everything you did at every stage was supposed to look as good as possible. It wasn’t supposed to be polished up until the later stages and only then when the modeler was confident that it wouldn’t look too bad. Mine was polished and it looked horrible.  

I thought it was going to be a tough sell.  

It wasn’t.  

Had Dave Hackett or Dennis Painter been my Master Modeler they would have stepped in immediately to “fix” it. I could never have explained to them that it didn’t need to be fixed; it needed to be expanded from the critical zone, which was all I had established, to blend into the rest of the car. The unanswered questions were how far did the zone have to extend and how could it be done.  

I don’t think that Arzoo understood what he was seeing at first but I could tell that something he saw changed his mind about my understanding of what I needed to do and how I did it. He knew that I was a better modeler than the “wicked bone” made me appear to be because he had seen so much of my finished work. Now he seemed to be more curious than anything else to find out what I would do next. He left me alone. 

Sid Chang was the first to see what I was doing. His insight shouldn’t have surprised me considering the first result of the sketch he gave me with contour lines to begin the scale model. His sketch was beautiful because he could draw in the highlights wherever he wanted them. The model was ugly because the real highlights went wherever the surfaces took them. I had to change the surfaces to matched the spirit of what Sid was trying to accomplish as well as the reality of how light reflects off of a three dimensional form. Although the result was not what either of us had anticipated, the basic idea had not changed. Now, with the full-size model we were back to where we started in clay on the scale model. 

This was not an auspicious beginning for Motor Trend Magazine’s 1993 Car of the Year. But it was the beginning.