Special Interest Autos, May-June 1976

Article by Michael Lamm

23earl

An touch of humor to break the tension.

This very intriguing and well written article concerns three binders of illustrations, with three interesting theories of how they came about. Designer renderings from this era seem to be in short supply, possibly because much was thrown out during the move to the Tech Center. Many of the photos in the article were photostats that were in the scrapbooks, so they printed as negatives. After scanning the article, the images were inverted to appear as they originally were drawn, as positives, and appear in the gallery. The complete article as it appeared in Special-Interest Autos is available for PDF download so you can read Michael Lamm’s story for yourself (right click on the link to save the file to your computer). Special thanks to David Birchmeier for providing the article.

5 Comments
  1. Rogerio Machado

    Gary, compliments for this post. I have some of those sketches (copies) and never knew they were drawings from Earl personally.

    Rogerio Machado

  2. Suzanne LaGassey

    I did not realize that Chuck had passed. What a great guy and one of my dad’s favorite people! He always spoke very highly of Chuck!

  3. DICK RUZZIN

    A lot of wild and interesting themes for the day, I am sure that is why Earl kept them. I cannot help to notice how well drawn the Bill Mitchell sketch is. He once told a small group of us in Overseas Studio that he could tell how someone drove by their sketches. His cars all look they are going like crazy.

    DICK RUZZIN

  4. Very interesting, especially to see George Lawson’s work. He did the original Tucker renderings.

  5. DICK RUZZIN

    I worked for Ned Nickels for 4 1/2 years. He said that Gordon Beurig had done a scale model while working for Styling in one of Earl’s contest that looked very much like the Cord 810, hidden headlights and all. He then left and went to work for Cord and did the car. The engineer was named Copig, he became head ofFisher Body when I was there in 1960.

    At the first Eyes On Design we honored Gordon Beurig and Strother MacMinn. The day before the show when setting up I drove a van with several CCS students and Strother in it to pick up a scale model and Gordon’s other work at his house that was only about three miles away. He was still working and he showed us a scale model that looked very much like the Chevrolet Lumina van that we had just completed.
    As we drove along with Gordon, the CCS students and Strother we talked design and cars. Even though we were years apart we had a great conversation.

    DICK RUZZIN

Leave Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>

clear formSubmit