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Chapter 28

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Chapter 27: The Last Straw 

Over the next three weeks the Hudding fiberglass model became a fading memory as the critical zone I established in clay under the front of the beltline grew longer and wider. It kept growing until it extended from the front to of the car the rear and from the belt line to the spear above the rocker panel. The “wicked bone” was gone. In its place was a core-line that worked well in all views except for one small area under the A-pillar. The highlight flowed gracefully along the core in all views until it came to that spot. Then, in some views, it made a sudden spike.  

Howard Thompson was now working on the passenger side of the model. He had the same problem I had. Walt George was now our Master Modeler. He didn’t have a solution, either. We struggled with it for weeks, often getting close but never close enough. 

Our mistake was in thinking that the spike would go away with all of the reworks we did to the core, especially since the highlight only jumped up about five millimeters at its worst. The core had gone up and down a dozen times by as much as fifteen millimeters. Sometimes it looked as though we had it whipped only to see that at some angle the blip was still there. Something unrelated to any particular core line had to be responsible for it in every one of them. It was time to stop adding and removing clay and to start doing more thinking.  

I’d like to say that I figured out what was wrong in one brilliant flash but I didn’t. A combination of things just came together at the same time.  

I was walking slowly from the side of the car toward the front admiring what I thought was a perfect core line when the blip jumped up again. It pissed me off so much that I couldn’t do anything but stand there and stare at it. While I was doing that, I also noticed how drastically the side view of the fender and the plan few changed at the A-pillar. That’s where the blip was.  

Knowledge that the problem was built into the overall design gave me the knowledge to solve it. I had to start with the spot where the blip occurred, get it going the way it had to in every view and work the surfaces all the way to the front and all the way to the rear from there. There were two keys to this surface. The first key unlocked the possibility of doing it and the second one unlocked the secret of doing it right. If I had started my critical zone under the A-pillar, I would have needed only one key. But now I knew not only that some car surfaces had a critical zone that could only be established the way I did it with the Taurus, I knew exactly where it was.

The “blip” problem hadn’t shown up before because no one had ever done a car like ’93 Probe. That doesn’t mean it was ever easy to make the surfaces below the A-pillar work well. It was always difficult but there had always been a solution when it got too tough. The designers would introduce an element called a “scag line” that broke up the surfaces above and below it. You’ve seen them on lots of cars. Now you know why.  

Not everyone bought in on the new direction the Probe had taken. Toshi hated it. You could see the disapproval in his face as well as the frustration. Sid liked what we were doing. Scott liked it. Mimi liked it. Fritz liked it and Jack Telnack liked it. Max Jerosic didn’t say that he liked it but he couldn’t object because the new design element followed his instructions. Besides, his boss, Red Polling gave it his stamp of approval. Toshi would have changed it if he could have figured out how to do it. Toshi’s objection wasn’t as much the model, which had been taken out of the designer’s hands by the nature of the beast. It was with me, the modeler. 

Toshi had a pronounced aversion to me. He spoke amiably with his other modelers. Only one time did he ever say anything to me, and I wouldn’t call it a conversation.  He went out of his way not to stand close to me.  

It wasn’t personal. 

Toshi had an aversion to black people in general. One time he entered the rear door of the studio while most of his designers and engineers plus a few people I didn’t know where gathered in a circle in front having a meeting. The group was too large to fit in Mimi’s office and the rest of the place was crowded with rolling billboards and modeling properties. The only clear path from the door to the circle went straight to a large gap that appeared to have been left for his convenience. Dennis Moses, the only black person in the group, was standing on one side of the gap with his back to the door where Toshi entered. Toshi, with his head bent in deep thought, walked in about halfway, looked up, stopped, and worked his way around the obstacles to join the group at another point.  

The men Toshi approached from behind hadn’t seen him come in so they didn’t make room for him. Dick Trapp raised his hand to get Toshi’s attention and pointed to the gap. As if noticing it for the first time, Toshi gave a little nod of appreciation and moved into the open space next to Dennis Moses. He stood so close to the white guy on his left that they touched. I didn’t take my eyes off of him for the duration of the meeting. Toshi never got within a foot of Dennis Moses.  

With only one exception that’s about as close as Toshi ever got to any black person I ever saw him with. A few days later Toshi was standing about thee feet away from me frowning at my body side when I took a side step in his direction to see if I could tell what he was looking at. He took a couple of side step farther away. Then I saw him rock back as if someone had splashed cold water in his face.  

He said, “Now I see why the surface has to do that.”  

He wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the air.  

As soon as I got the highlights flowing the way they were supposed to, I flipped the information to Howard on the passenger side. From there to the finish line it was a constant battle for Howard, Walt and me to keep up with the “minor” refinements that took the core line up and down in whole or in part more times than any of us could count. The slightest change anywhere on the core meant a complete change everywhere. We were essentially redoing the upper part of the body side several times a day. At this stage of development neither the designers nor the modelers could dictate what the surface had to do because the boundaries were set and we had to work within them. Now, at least, I had someone else with me to share the pain. 

When I stopped working overtime every night Walt George took over the driver side in my absence. It didn’t bother me because any good modeler trying to duplicate what I was doing had no choice but to do it the same way. If Walt didn’t know before why I check highlights with strips of DiNoc or foil in the rough clay, he knew now. This surface couldn’t be faked. You had to know where it stood every hour of every workday. Walt and Howard complained more than I did about the “little” changes that required so much work.  

We didn’t mind working hard to meet tough challenges. That was part of what made modeling exciting. Repeated changes that required more work than necessary and added nothing to the final appearance of the car was another matter. It was drudgery with a hundred ways to look bad before we could see what we had to do to look good.  

The lower the core line dropped, the flatter the surface had to be to stay within the feasibility requirements. The flatter the surface got, the harder it was to control the highlight in the critical zone and in the coke. When we foiled it to see where we had to add or remove clay, Sid, Scott or Mimi always took the opportunity to point out the inevitable bad spots as though they could see them better than the modelers could. They never waited for us to tell them that we were ready for them to look at what we’d done and sometimes when we got close to the mark they would hold informal little shows to critique our progress. Once even Red Poling got in on the act, showing off the little knowledge he had of design by pointing out an obvious flaw that Walt George wisely put in just for him.

Getting upper management to buy a design was always easier when you gave them something they could take credit for. The wiser and more knowledgeable you could make them feel in the process, the better.  Usually you would set them up with something inconsequential or something that you knew you were going to attend to anyway.  

It was funny to hear top-level executives trained in finance and business administration slinging around styling and engineering terms as if they had an in-depth understanding of what they meant. It would not have been so funny to me if I had known where this sort of game would lead. 

We farted around with the Probe design for moths trying to reconcile all of the competing interests. As soon as we thought we had it nailed down somebody would introduce anther key element that threatened to toss us back into the scrap heap.  

I was working late in the studio alone trying to take an ugly dip out of line that went from the base of the windshield to the beltline because our Mazda engineers forced us to raise the hood near the greenhouse. I had it whipped when Toshi came in and told me to put in four points near the front of the hood. This was the only time the man had ever spoken to me. I’m not sure it counts because there was no one else he could have spoken to. He was reading the points from a scrap of paper that had just been faxed to him from Japan.  

The points represented an engine component just behind the headlights that we had to clear. I used thin wooden dowels to mark the points. When I had all four of them in, they looked like uneven posts of a miniature boxing ring with the shortest post sticking up a half inch above the surface of the hood. The tallest post towered over an inch above the surface. A quarter inch was enough to ruin the design so I double-checked. Then Toshi used the bridge and pointer to check them himself. He left the paper with the points on them on the hood and walked away shaking his head.  

The next morning Sid, Scott and Mimi looked aghast at the dowels and asked me what they were. I told them what had happened the night before. They fussed and fretted. Mimi finally decided to leave the hood and the dowels where they were until she could make sure that Mazda wasn’t throwing us a curve to sabotage us or simply made a mistake. That’s when Fritz came in and advised Mimi to do what she wanted to do and to tell the engineers that their stuff didn’t fit.  

We were too far into the project for Mimi to accept Fritz’s “advice” or to go with Mazda’s new points without a challenge. Meanwhile, Toshi came into the studio, looked at the dowels and said, “What is that?”

Toshi wasn’t joking. He was genuinely alarmed and befuddled. He didn’t’ recall visiting the studio the night before or telling me to do anything. I got funny looks from Scott and Mimi but when I pointed to Toshi’s point sheet their funny looks turned to him. All of us were confused. Toshi left that way.  

This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. It was the third in a series of designer blackouts that had occurred in as many days. Mimi was the first to tell me to do something, to stand there while I did it and to come back a couple of hours later and ask me what I was doing. Scott Yu did the same thing the next day. Then a couple of days after Toshi did his blackout thing, Mimi called me into her office for a confidential discussion about one of her designers. She was worried about his unexplained absences from the studio. She had forgotten that she had given him a bunch of assignments outside of the studio.  

My meeting with Mimi solved the mystery of the blackouts. Toshi, Mimi and Scott were sleep-deprived and subject to the temporarily insanity that came with it. They were so overworked that it was a wonder they could function at all. They got phone calls at home on weekends and at all hours of the night from their superiors demanding one thing or another that had to be done immediately. Some of it was contradictory. Some of it was trivial. Some of it was idiotic. They were pulled in opposite directions at once. They had so many orders to follow, so many questions to answer and so many meaningless tasks to perform that they couldn’t follow through on all of them without some mental functions shutting down now and then.  

The model went ahead on automatic. The modelers did what we had to do and the most the designers could do at this stage was get in our way. They applied tapeline after tapeline of where they thought the core highlight should go. But no matter what they did the surfaces always came back to where we left them because they couldn’t go anywhere else without screwing up the body side.  

The last change I made before I left one evening was as right as it was ever going to be. I knew it. Howard knew it. Walt knew it. I think Sid, Scott and Mimi knew it, too. Toshi thought it could be better. As soon as I left he had the riggers come in to take the model to the showroom and tape on a core line there. Walt George was tired of arguing that we had gone down this road several times before so he taped the core and took points on it and removed the tape before the riggers took it away. When I came in the next morning he was taking points on the “improved” core line that Toshi had taped on in the showroom. They were identical to the points he took on his tapeline that followed the core I had put in. That was the core line that ended up on the production car.

The fact that we had maxed-out the design and Walt George had proven it didn’t keep Fritz and Toshi from screwing around with it for another six or seven months. That was partly because the clay model’s surface contours were not recorded before it went to the Plastic Shop to have a fiberglass model made. Only Walt, Howard and I understood the surface well enough to duplicate it and none of us were asked to supervise the fabrication of the fiberglass model. Nobody in the Plastic Shop was told how critical the surfaces were so they sanded the surfaces unevenly and the highlights didn’t come out the way they were supposed to.  

Some photographs had been taken of the clay model before it was cast and they were sent to Japan but the modelers there couldn’t duplicate the surfaces, either. Toshi was shuttling back and fourth between the United States and Japan – where Ford announced to the press that Probe was being designed. He eventually sent one of his Master Modelers back to the Design Center to get a first-hand look at the clay. The casting process damaged the clay badly and the modelers who where trying to repair it didn’t have it quite right. Still, it was better than the fiberglass. 

I knew that Phil Walker had been demoted from Supervisor back to Master but I didn’t know he had been working in Japan until I saw him in the studio studying the model. We had a brief conversation about the model’s defects and about his experiences in Japan. That was the last I saw of him. 

As soon as the clay model went to cast I got reassigned to the interior project that was heating up. A young, amiable guy named Richard Chung was my designer. Although he was new to the studio in addition to being new to automotive design, it took less than a month to see that he was on a fast track. How he could have jumped ahead of Sid Chang, Dennis Moses or Scott Yu’s younger brother Albert was a mystery. The fact that he was being groomed for success was not in question. Albert never got an assignment like Richards to showcase his considerable talents and Dennis never got the modelers that Toshi regarded highly or the time to give to interior design that Richard got. Sid was also kept hopping with jobs that kept him out of the spotlight.  

For long stretches of time Sid and Dennis were learning how to draw on an electronic easel in a special room that was set up for that purpose. Albert mostly languished at his desk. Before the end of 1988 he quit.  

Richard’s interior was supposed to make him a star. Other designers asked Mimi for me to work on their designs and complained that they couldn’t get me. That, of course, was a personal complement but I couldn’t savor it because I could see how I was being used to help Richard at the expense of the other designers, especially Dennis Moses.

While we were in the roughest stage of modeling the clay interiors, Toshi arranged for an in-house survey of the properties. Richard’s instrument panel and doors looked the best because we were the first to get started and I had more time to work out some of the little things that gave his design a better appearance. Dennis Moses didn’t have a clay model to show because an outside vender was doing his.  

The people invited to participate in the survey from all over the Design Center weren’t supposed to be looking at the clay models. They were supposed to be evaluating the renderings that the designers had on the walls. But instead of covering the clay models we were ordered not to cover them. This was a sure indication that Richard’s design was being positioned to come out on top. Richard had the best looking rendering by far and more of them. The other designers resented it, not because they envied Richard’s talent, but because, the survey was engineered to showcase his talent at their expense.  

Dennis Moses was steaming mad. He had the best design but the worst renderings. They were little more than sketches with a few swatches of color. He didn’t have time to do anything else. Scott Yu’s rendering were a little better but not by much. And so it went until it came to Richard’s wonderful display.  

Then a strange thing happened. 

As each group of people came in, they admired Richard’s drawings and my model…but they voted for Dennis Moses’ design. The secretaries voted for it. The engineers voted for it. The maintenance people voted fore it and other designers voted for it. Fritz Mayhew voted for it.  

Maybe the result wasn’t so strange. Most of the people in the survey had been around the Design Center for a long time. A good rendering or a good model could sell a bad design to just about anybody but not when they could compare it side-by-side to a distinctly superior design. Besides, everyone in this survey knew how car designs evolved. Denis’ drawings showed them the best design. Richard’s rendering gave them a preview of how good it would look when it was finished. It filled in the missing hues and textures. 

The next day Scott relayed the message to Richard from higher up for him to incorporate elements of Denis’ design into his. The other models dropped out of the competition. We didn’t have Denis’ model to look at because it hadn’t returned from the vendor. We all started getting antsy about it as the show date for both models approached. The show was scheduled for Saturday morning. We got the model back from the vender the Friday afternoon. It was the worst modeling job I had ever seen.

To begin with, it looked as though the clay had been scraped off of the floor. Chunks of gravel, streaks of dirt, cigarette butts and chewing gum wrappers were embedded in the surface. New clay and old clay were mixed together. All of the design lines were crooked and none of the lines on the instrument panel that were supposed to flow into the doors lined up. It was so bad that nobody believed it could have been done that way unintentionally. It reminded me of a cold, burnt hamburger I got from a grinning young guy behind the counter of a McDonald’s restaurant in Dearborn a couple of decades back.  

Charlie Leak did the original rough model. It got started later than the others. Giving the job to an outside vendor to finish after it was scanned and milled was supposed to be a faster, cheaper and better way of doing business. This was the way Ford planned to make all of its clay models in the future, with a minimum of hand modeling in-house and a maximum reliance on electronic digitizing, milling and finishing by outside vendors.  

The fatal flaws in this approach were never corrected because they were never recognized. If anyone had recorded what it took to make Denis Moses’ interior clay model presentable it would have saved the company tens of billions of dollars in lost efficiency over the next fourteen years. As of this date, Sep 5, 2003, Ford is still losing huge sums of many every year because of the lesions it didn’t learn from the ’93 Probe interior fiasco. It went down in the books as a great success mostly because Charlie Leak’s splendid modeling and leadership turned it into a success. 

Charlie would have had to grow two more heads and four more arms to finish the job himself. Leonard Gross saw what was happening and threw himself into the fray. Leaks’ model was right next to mine so I could also see what was happening. I so no chance for the model’s salvation until I saw Charlie and Leonard working furiously and efficiently to reach that impossible goal. Then a ray of hope began to shine though the dark clouds, provided that Leak could get another pair of trained hands working with him just as furiously and efficiently.  

I finished my IP and doors as quickly as I could and joined my two friends in battle. Charlie was the general. Leonard and I were his army. Charlie took full advantages of the things that Leonard and I could do best. He gave us our assignments and he let us do them. In this battle, the general had to fight, too. All of us had our hands full.  

I didn’t know what Charlie and Leonard were thinking but from my experience at Ford and Chrysler I knew that an all-nighter wasn’t going to do it. Toward midnight our judgment wasn’t to be trusted. We were as likely as not to go backward from there, thinking that we were doing wonderful things until the new day gave us better eyes see with. Before I joined the other modelers I noticed that they spent a lot of time digging debris out of the clay and trying to save “finished” parts of the model that had been milled with combinations of old and new clay. While my mind was still in good working order I decided to scrape away the old clay and redo the surfaces with new clay.  

Charlie and Leonard quickly picked up on why I took such a drastic measure and followed suit. By the same token, I saw them doing things I hadn’t thought of as being more efficient and appropriated what they did into my act. Most of our communication was wordless. Everybody trusted that the other guy knew what he was doing and that all of us were working toward a common goal. Charlie knew how to lead teams in challenging situations because of his experience as a noncommissioned officer in the Air Force. We were neck-deep in a challenging situation. We were a great team. We had a great leader, Charlie Leak. 

Mimi was also a big help. As usual she was working late in her office. For the most part she stayed there. When she did come out to see what we were doing she turned right around and went back. Before she went home around 9:00 that night, the only thing she told us was how grateful she was for our efforts. Sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing.  

Leonard bailed out an hour or so after Mimi left. It was a good decision. He was starting to make the kinds of dumb mistakes that come from mental fatigue. Charlie and I understood. If he had suck around for the glory of “being there” he would have dragged us both down.  

A couple of hours later, I started going backward, too so I bailed out. By the time Leonard left, the model was in far better shape than anyone could have reasonably expected but we sill had some foiling, painting and fitting of small component parts to do. This was where I noticed that I was beginning to slip. Charlie wasn’t in much better mental condition than I was. He was starting to screw up the way I was only not as often. We had identified and attacked the most troublesome areas early so the things we had to spend more time on at this point because we had lost our edge didn’t hurt us as much. As far as I was concerned, the model was ready to go to the paint shop and the little things we hadn’t finished wouldn’t be noticed.  

The next morning I went directly to the paint shop. I arrived early, which was unusual for me. Then again, a Saturday show was unusual, as was the condition of the property we had to show. Some moldings could be applied and foiled only after the model was painted. Not knowing how late Charlie had stayed or how it might have affected his judgment about things like that, I wanted to get a jump on the remaining tasks. 

Charlie was there ahead of me.  

I could see by the little he’d done that he had either left shortly after I did or stayed much later and taken one step back for every step he took forward. He told me that he had left shortly after I did. When I say that he had done little when I got there that morning I don’t mean that what he did was insignificant. I mean that it took little time for an outstanding modeler with a clear head to do. Charlie Leak was an outstanding modeler and he was certainly working with a clear head. Together we were able to do everything required for a first-class model.  

After the show Mimi approached me to tell me what a wonderful thing I did in pitching in to make Denis Moses’ instrument panel and doors a success. I don’t think I responded as graciously as I should have. Leonard Gross was the first to volunteer when he saw the need. If I hadn’t seen what he was able to accomplish I might not have followed his lead. Charlie Leak led the job and did more work than Leonard or I did. I thought that Mimi should have noticed those things. It pissed me off that I had to point them out. I fear that my vexation showed.  

The issue was bigger than praise for me that should have been shared between three of us. It was Mimi’s blindness to Leonard’s skill and initiative, Charlie’s skill and leadership, and the honest application of teamwork that got the job done. It was the same blindness that kept me well below the midpoint of my pay grade and out of the running for Master Modeler. If Mimi looked at Leonard and Charlie this way, how did Toshi look at me? Did he see my skill, my initiative, my leadership?  If I got transferred to another studio would I be back in the same boat I was in with Rod Leighton and his Master Modelers?  

As of 1988 few Jews, women or African-Americans had ever worked in the Design Center. Only two Jews, two women and three blacks had risen above pay grade 7. The only Jews, women and blacks who started as modelers had to find other careers paths to reach a higher plateau. There were no black secretaries in the Design Center itself and no black secretaries in the entire Design and Engineering complex who made it to past pay grad 2. My sister Sara remained a grade 2 for over twenty years. In the whole Design Center, where roughly eight hundred design professionals and support personnel worked, there were less than twenty black employees including Ballerie Foskey. 

Ballerie, the only black female to be accepted into Ford’s ’86 clay modeling school was sent to the plastic shop where the leaders were pay grade 6. Ray Campau told her that it would get her into the Design Center and from there she could move into modeling if she improved her skills enough. Two years later she was still there.

Campau taught a clay modeling class at the Center for Creative Studies. Ballerie was one of his students. Knowing Ray, I suspected that Ballerie’s difficulties had more to do with her teacher than it did with her. But when I asked two of her other former instructors in the Ford modeling school they told me the same thing. They said that she had a terrific personality a positive attitude, plenty of smarts and she worked harder than anyone else. She just “didn’t have the talent.”  

Ray, Gary and K-wall used the same words and gestures to explain Ballerie’s shortcomings, which, for someone with Ballerie’s educational background, could have been taken more than one way. I kept asking them individually to be more specific. Gary was the only one who did it. 

“She stuck out like a sore thumb,” he said. “She got the same instruction as everybody else – maybe more. She just didn’t pick it up…. I’ll give you an example… Two weeks after everybody else had finished their form projects, her job was still slipping and sliding all over the bench.” 

I immediate thought that she had no experience in working with wood shop and metal shop tools. Maybe other students had staked out the vices and the best C-clamps in the class or used their own and she thought she could use something else as a substitute. I told Gary what I thought. 

Gary shook his head. “No… It’s hard to explain… If you were standing in front of the class after three, four weeks and saw everybody else gliding their steels over the surfaces, your eye would go straight to her because she was still struggling with little choppy motions. She had no feel for the surface… She just… she just didn’t have the talent.” 

I saw another possibility. Maybe Ballerie’s clay modeling teachers knew their craft so well that they glossed over crucial details that some students were better positioned physically or historically to absorb. Maybe Ballerie’s problem wasn’t a lack of talent but a failure to see how one or two “little things” could make all the difference.  

Before I could tell whether Ballerie had the touch to be a competent modeler I had to know if she had the eye and the ear. Yes, the ear. If Ballerie’s instructors where telling her all the right things to do – which I was sure they were – and she did them all wrong, she may not have had a good “translator” is her head that was crucial to turning words into physical objects.    

Ballerie had a Fine Arts degree, and a teaching certificate in art. I asked her to show me her portfolio over lunch. Her drawings showed me that she was a true artist and her conversation showed me that she had a superior command of the English language – vastly superior to her clay modeling teachers. She had no training in automotive design but her theme selections and the way she executed them revealed a keen aesthetic sense that can’t be taught and a thorough understanding of basic design principles. However, her skill with pencils and paint brushes did not mean that she could carry it over to industrial sculpting.  

I had to get a finer breakdown on what Campau and her other teachers at the Ford school meant about her lack of talent to know how to help her even if my best advise was for her to forget clay modeling. So, the following Saturday, when only the students were there to work on their models for presentation to representatives of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors, I went to CCS to see her in action.  

Gary was right. Ballerie did stick out like a sore thumb. She had one of the better-looking designs but the surfaces on her scale model were terrible. The short choppy motions with which she steeled the clay showed me that she had no feel for what the steel was for. Her partner working the other side of the model was also struggling and the students working on the model next to hers were having a tough time, too, but she was the worst.  

As I walked around the studio looking at the other models and talking to the students it quickly became apparent that the “stars” of the class were concentrated in one area near the front. The quality of the models in general showed a steady decline as they neared the back where Ballerie was working. Not surprisingly, the confidence level of the students also declined as they got closer to the back. Nevertheless, I could see only one modeler who lacked the basic talent to become a good modeler. It wasn’t Ballerie. In fact, there were key aspects of her model that showed a superior fundamental talent. The only difference between the stars and the goats was in specific skills that would have been easy for Ray to teach if he had identified the problems instead of labeling the students.  

Ballerie’s problem was that she didn’t understand how the edge of the steel had to cut through the clay in one fluid motion to achieve the desired result. She didn’t understand the significance of selecting the right tool and allowing the tool to do the work. When I broke it down to Ballerie and had her practice until she got it right, everything else fell into place. That’s when I discovered that none of the students in her corner understood the concepts as well as they should have and how upset they were with Ray for not teaching them.  

Ray Campau had more strengths than I could count but an in-depth understanding of why others didn’t appear to have the potential of being as strong as he was, wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t pass on some of the things he knew because he never saw those things as specific techniques that fit into his overall clay modeling style but didn’t work with anyone with a different style. He was like a Rembrandt who couldn’t see the value in a Gainsborough or a Vermeer. By emphasizing the principles behind the tricks I taught, each student could fit them into his or her own style.   

The next time I visited the CCS modeling class, I spent less time with Ballerie and more time with students who picked up on what I showed her and the other students in her corner. Ballerie didn’t need more attention than I gave her the first time. Her model looked great. All she needed was time to apply what she knew and to break a few bad habits.

I was surprised to find that some of the students in the middle of the studio shared the feeling of the students in Ballerie’s corner that Ray Campau wasn’t giving them the attention that he gave to his stars. They had different problem and the solutions I gave them only served to convince them that Ray was saving those techniques for his “pets.” The student’s in Ballerie’s corner thought that some of these students were his pets. They weren’t. They were simply the ones he identified as having the most talent. 

One or Ray’s stars, who I didn’t think was paying attention to me, rocked me when his wife came to the class and he introduced me to her as the “wizard.” He told her that I was a Master Modeler and I had taught him more in a few hours than Ray and taught him all semester. I was too stunned to tell him that I was only a Sculptor and a low-paid Sculptor at that. Besides, I was a master modeler in practice. I just didn’t have the title to match my know-how. There was no smooth way of making the distinction, anyway, because other students immediately joined in with a chorus of praise. Someone said that I was a much better modeler than Ray and he wished he had me as his teacher instead of Ray. Heads started nodding and other students muttered similar comments.  

It wasn’t a big love fest for me. It was more of a bitch session against Ray. His student’s had plopped down a lot of money to attend his class and they were angry that they didn’t get their money’s worth of instruction They did not take into account how much Ray had taught them or the fact that the tricks I showed them merely took them to a higher level.  

I was not a better modeler than Ray Campau was. I just had a different modeling philosophy and more success as a teacher with my experience in the Army Reserves. I knew that everybody with equal talent could not always achieve the highest quality results in the same way. I saw more talented students than Ray did and I treated them accordingly. Without confidence a modeler was nothing. I gave them confidence and a foundation of accomplishment to build on.

Some of the CCS students ignored me. All of Ray’s stars did. Some were reluctant to say anything. I didn’t know why but I feared that they didn’t want to get involved in a popularity contest between their teacher and the interloper. I didn’t want that, either. Ray Campau was now a Ford clay modeling Supervisor. No matter how a contest between us turned out, I would lose and the students who “voted” for me could also lose.  

I made the students in my new “fan club” promise not to tell Ray about me. Some of them worried that they wouldn’t be able to explain their improvement without mentioning me. Ballerie suggested that if the question arose they could attribute their improvement to a modeler from GM who came in to help one of the other students.  

The issue never arose because Ray never noticed the difference. The way he saw his students and their work before I showed up and afterwards didn’t change. However, something must have changed at Ford because Ballerie was finally able to get out of the Plastic Shop and into modeling. Ford also hired other students from her CCS class as modelers. One of them became a Master Modeler about six years after I mad it.  

A young student named Aaron Walker seemed to take little interest in the modeling techniques I taught beyond what he needed to improve the design of his model rather than the appearance. I found out later that his attitude was based on his lack of ambition to be a modeler. He wanted to be a designer and he took the modeling class only to familiarize himself with what modelers could do for him. He should have paid more attention.

At the Design Center my fortunes took a sudden turn for the worse when Harry Strickler announced his retirement and Jerry Folgman took over his job as my new Supervisor. We clashed right away when he took me out of the Probe studio and put me to work on some mindless task that I don’t even remember. The designers were still screwing around with raising and lowering the core line on the Probe. The job fell to Howard Thompson, who complained that the “little” changed he was asked to make meant redoing the entire body side. He complained that I was the only other person who understood it and he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t working on it, too. His complaints fell on def ears.    

Ford was tightening its belt again and I felt the squeeze when Folgman called me to his office of an interim PR. I didn’t see how I could to lose ground. Howard had previously gotten an O and he didn’t tell me that Folgman lowered it. He wasn’t happy, though, because Folgman told him that he wouldn’t get an increase for 14 to 16 months. Folgman dropped my EP to an E and told me to expect an increase in 18 months. Toshi Saito agreed with him. This could mean only one thing to me…War!