Designer Times by Bob Gurr
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67. Before Walt - Young Car Stylist

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My first career lasted just two weeks. After dreams of designing cars from age 15 onwards, then attending a four year college to obtain a Bachelor of Arts in Automobile Styling, I found my new job to be a dead end right away.

In 1952 I wasn't yet twenty years old, I'd already authored a book "How to Draw Cars of Tomorrow", and I faced the realization that I'd made a huge mistake in my choice of entering into the Automobile Industry.

Born and Raised in Southern California, the prospect of adapting to life in the Automotive Capital of Detroit did not look encouraging. And the actual job conditions inside a car company did not seem to be something I was prepared to endure. This sudden situation was surely a big disappointment and should have left me demoralized. But I clearly remember it was more of a mental shift...I would now be open to any new opportunity. This would come along a few months later when I was invited to join the prestigious firm, George W. Walker - Industrial Design. But one year and one day after my arrival in Detroit, I was on my way west to face an unknown future...five years of effort wasted.

Whoa! What happened here? My earliest memories were filled with mechanical things, even as early as 18 months old. Cars and airplanes totally fascinated me by age 5, The latest new car designs were so exciting. I'd drag my mother to where I'd just seen a new car, hoping it was still parked where I first saw it. Every airplane that flew overhead had my attention.

I'd draw cartoons of aircraft action with crayons on my closet wall. My mother soon learned to keep me well supplied with pencil and paper.

All thru grade school I got in trouble for decorating my test papers with cars and airplanes. I thought I'd like aircraft engineering, but my math skills were never going let my qualify for such a job. During the junior high days I had a paper route. One day I came across some all-new postwar Studebakers set up for publicity photographs. Wowwee...future cars! That's what I want to do...design new cars. By the last year of high school, my architecture teacher gave up trying to teach me to draw houses and suggested I try for Art Center School upon graduation.

Art Center (later moved to Pasadena as the Art Center College of Design) was located in Hollywood and had real car designers as teachers. My grandmother staked me to the $212 semester tuition as well as $15 per week to live on, $10 for the boarding house, $5 for transportation and entertainment. Before long I was the recipient of a General Motors scholarship. Several months before graduation, I was sent to Detroit to join General Motors as a newly trained Car Stylist. But I wound up at the Ford Motor Company instead!

Seems the Art Center job placement representative had been drinking with his industry buddies in a bar awaiting my arrival. He'd made a deal with a former GM designer who'd defected to Ford. They concocted a plan to raid me right out from under GM even before I interviewed there and ushered me right into Ford Styling without even looking at my portfolio. Thus my arrival in Motorcity burned a major bridge. A Ford guy would never be hired back into General Motors. The situation of GM paying tuition for a Ford employee set off some fireworks that lasted for years afterwards.

Anyway, my first assignment at Ford Styling was in Advanced Styling, where all the new hires were placed for try outs. Later they would be transferred to a production studio where actual new cars would be styled. Styling was the buzzword then, design is the current popular term. At that time, stylists would be given an assignment, say, sketch up hood ornaments until told to stop and do something else. Or maybe draw ideas for chrome strips.

But no individual stylist ever actually designed much more than bits and pieces of a car.