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Chapter 30

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Chapter 29: Sudden Turns 

Before I left the Small Car studio to work for my old friend Greg Arceri in Interiors two incidents gave me fresh insight on why I was such a thorn in Ford Motor Company’s side.  

We were attempting to create a smaller minivan than anything on the road – a mini-minivan if, you will. I was assigned to help a young new designer named Melvin Betencourt with his design. Melvin had medium brown skin and straight black hair. His mother was Puerto Rican. His father was German. He referred to himself as a German-American. His German half was also rich. I don’t recall whether his father died and left him with a ton of money or a trust fund had been set up for him when he reached a certain age. In any event, he was independently wealthy. He became an auto designer because that’s what he wanted to do. 

Melvin showed no discomfort with blacks or whites, although the people he hung out with after work were white. His friends and his fiancée didn’t appear to be racial choices. Unlike some young “non-whites” who landed prestigious positions at Ford, Melvin did not shy away from blacks. He was friendly, talkative and easy to get along with. He went out of his way to become friendly with me and made no bones about why he did it. He was competing with other designers on the mini-mini and while watching me work he thought that he had the best chance of winning with me. I liked working with young designers who didn’t come in thinking they knew everything. Melvin was no exception.  

Melvin started at G.M. but somewhere in his training he had missed essentials like how to make a tape drawing that lined up in all views. He was horrified at first when I made some necessary changes in the clay to bring his front-end and body side together. But when I showed him why I did it, the light went on and he took it from there. He was a quick study and a good designer – too good.  

Melvin’s mini-mini quickly outshone the others but there was something wrong with all of them. You can make any vehicle look better by giving it 16 or 17-inch wheels with a minimum of clearance between the tires and the wheel opening on the sheet metal. That’s how the renderings looked. The models could never look that way because the program called for 12-inch wheels and the suspension dictated a huge clearance between the tires and the sheet metal. With the height of the roof the wheels look even smaller than they were. The height of the cowl, the part of the hood closest to the base of the windshield, was anther problem. The overall proportions were awful. This was a big fat bird with little bitty wings. It was never going to fly.

While Mimi fought with the product planners for bigger wheels Melvin decided to see what he could do with what he had. Normally, designers do everything they can to lower the cowl line because the lower the cowl line the sportier the vehicle appears to be. This wasn’t supposed to be a sporty vehicle so the attempts to lower the cowl line were done more out of habit than anything else. Melvin hadn’t been an automotive designer long enough to form this habit. Like the rest of us he was tired of people passing by and snickering or shaking their heads. It wasn’t enough for him to have the best-looking turd in the toilet. I was still a turd and the program was still in the toilet.  

In a flash of creative genius, Melvin wondered out loud if he could improve the proportions by raising the cowl. I didn’t see how it could hurt and I told him so. The problem for me was adjusting the other elements of the design to be compatible with the change. Melvin gave me a free hand and the model came together in one day. First shot. There it was. It looked terrific.  

A model rarely gels as quickly as this one did. The surfaces weren’t the least bit tricky, so once I put in the beltline to match the cowl, the rest was easy. I could even highlight the whole thing flawlessly in one go because I put in each element of the design with highlighting in mind.  

This wasn’t my design. It was Melvin Betencourt’s. He established the styling parameters and once they were set only one optimum design could go into them. Any competent designer or modeler who started in the same places that Melvin and I did would have eventually arrived at the same destination.  Melvin started with a good basic design that became a great design when he raised the beltline. I started with an honest representation of where every thing had to be and a clear idea of where Melvin wanted to go with the styling options that remained.  

All we needed were bigger wheels. With the dazzling complements we got from everyone in the studio as well as the people that passed by, we were confident that we would get the bigger wheels. We also thought that we might get a suspension system that would allow us to narrow the gap between the tires and the sheet metal around the wheel openings.  

Neither Melvin nor I took into account the political fallout of a rookie designer scouring an unprecedented victory on his first assignment in such a short time with the aid a “below average” Sculptor-modeler.  It normally took years to get where we had gotten in six weeks. You just don’t walk into a studio where you’ve seen an ugly ducking the previous day and see a beautiful swan in its place. The lesson, as every second grader can tell you, is that the ugly ducking had been a swan all along and we could see what it was when we stopped trying to make a duck

Nobody was going to study what we did and how we did it. Fritz Mayhew had another lesson to teach us.  

Melvin’s mini-mini had come together so quickly that we didn’t have time to go through the usual routine of several in-house shows, a full dress show for the Director, product planners, etc. Word about Melvin’s vehicle spread and people from all over the Design Center dropped by the studio to look at it. The verdict was unanimous. This was a winner. Not even the great reviews for the Taurus or the Probe were unanimous.  

Toshi hadn’t seen the model yet when Fritz walked in alone to critique it. To my knowledge, nobody called him. He just showed up. Mimi and her managers Scott Yu and Mark Kelly were clearly surprised to see him. He came straight to the model, shook his head sadly and began lecturing Melvin about the a,b,c’s of automotive design. He started with the cowl. 

“The cowl,” he said, pointing a derisive finger at the part, “is way too high. In design, you don’t want to raise the cowl. You want to lower it. You want to get it as low as you can.” 

Fritz looked around for something and spied it in my toolbox, a “hogging“ tool for cutting out large amounts of clay in one swipe. Fritz was shorter than average so he couldn’t reach across to the centerline to begin digging out the clay. Instead, he reached over as far as he could to do it without apparent concern that he might get clay on his expensive suit. He dug a hole past the lower surface that we started with and stood back to admire his work.  

“That,” he said, “is what you want to do if you want to become a good designer. And the beltline….” 

Fritz had said and done more than enough to kill the design and to put Melvin Betencourt in his place. The words “If you want to become a good designer” reverberated in my ears like the tribal warning gong in King Kong. I’m sure that it sounded that way to Melvin, too.  

This little exhibition wasn’t about design. It was about power. It was a threat dressed up in transparent clothes for Melvin not to exceed his authority in dictating fundamental designs if he wanted a design career at Ford. He might have gotten away with it if he had run it past Toshi and Fritz before he did it and if I hadn’t brought the model so near to completion. Fritz knew me well enough to know that what I did in clay would work in the real world and he was a good enough designer to know that he couldn’t add a thing to Melvin’s design to improve it.  

Fritz Mayhew’s message was simple. I, Fritz Mayhew am the boss.

Ford’s mini-mini van died as sudden, painful death but we kept the corpse on hand for another few months. Why? I don’t know.  

This was around the time Folgmann replaced Strickler as my Supervisor. I might have impressed him with my work on the mini-mini regardless of his prejudices and predilections if he had been there to see it, just because it was another of those tasks that was supposed to be impossible. All he got to see me do in Mimi’s studio was put makeup on a stiff.  

Although it was too late to do any good, we did get bigger wheels for the mini-mini.  

A wise man from the Metal Shop named Larry Kay came into the studio to adjust the axels, put the wheels on and set the centerline of the tire tread to the right depth. While he was working, I told him about Fritz’s “ME BOSS!” act with Betencourt, which led to a general discussion about management decisions that took us around in unnecessary circles.  

Larry said, “They don’t mind us going around in circles. Circles are predictable. They know what’s coming and they can control it. It’s the sudden right turns they don’t like.” 

There it was. Sudden turns. That’s why old-formula modelers like Dennis Painter and Dave Hackett were prized so highly. With them on the job, you, as a manager, knew what you were going to get and you knew in advance when you were going to get it because you could see it coming and you could control it every step of the way. They weren’t merely very good at what they did; they were predictable. 

Betencourt’s high cowl was a sudden turn. Many of the things I did at Ford, professionally and politically, were sudden turns. Nobody in power could predict what I was gong to do next. They were afraid that I was working against the company to get something I didn’t deserve. They thought I was being insubordinate when I thought I was being creative. They didn’t know what to make of my role on the Highlight or my level of participation in blood drives and the United Fund. It never occurred to them to look at what I did for what it was or the results of what I did for the company. It never occurred to them to look at what I tried to do until I was forced to take drastic action against the company to protect myself.

I didn’t always aim at the same targets everyone else did. Few people saw that I was selecting better targets for the company and hitting them because they were focused on the targets they knew and the process they knew of hitting them. My modeling innovations were not predictable unless you knew me well enough to know that I would achieve management’s stated objectives every time and often surpass them.

I kept getting into trouble because management’s stated objectives weren’t always the real ones and something bigger was always at stake.

The entire business about when and why Ford hired me and rehired me had noting to do with me joining the company as an individual clay modeler to help in its product development. It was all about hiring enough black modelers to keep the federal government off its back and settling a class action race discrimination suit out of court. I was tossed into Truck to keep me from advancing but that didn’t work out so well for the company because of what John Cecil and Art Field allowed me to do. Ditto with Small Car and Walt George. The same thing happened in the Large Car studio with Jim McBain.  

Ford Personnel executives knew how smart I was. When Ford was in deep trouble with the competitive threat from Japan, I was doing too many things too well and too consistently for them not to pick my brain for answers in meetings with two Executive Vice Presidents.  

Ford’s Chairman Donald Peterson picked Frank Horenkamp’s brain, too. He invited Frank to his office, supposedly to talk about the great job he thought Frank was doing as editor of the Highlight. Somehow my name came up as one of the writers. As Frank told me about the meeting he had that look on his face that he always had when he knew something was wrong but couldn’t put his finger on it.  

He said, “I told Peterson that he was missing a good bet in not including me in his planning.” 

I blinked hard and shook my head in disbelief. “You said what?” 

“I know. I was nervous. I was talking one-on-one with the Chairman of the Board. He’s asking me what I thought and I told him.” 

Frank told everybody, “If you didn’t want to know what I think, don’t ask.” My article in the Highlight might have brought my name to his mind, but whatever it was that made him say what he did to Peterson, he meant it. I was geeked. Can you picture a grade-7 clay modeler in a strategy meeting with a group of grade-18s and up? It was flattering but so bizarre I had to question Frank’s judgment. He waved me off as if to say there was more to it than that and to get to what was bothering him.  

He said. “I told him that you might be the smartest guy in the company.” 

That was too much. I tried to say so but Frank waved me off again. 

“You know what he said? He said, ‘We know.’”

What do you do with a bombshell like that? 

The meeting between Frank Horenkamp and Donald Peterson was supposed to be confidential. Frank was loathed to break a confidence. He didn’t tell me about the other things they discussed, just the things he said that concerned me, and Peterson’s two-word response, “We know.”

Frank and I stood silently in his office trying to grapple with the meaning of Peterson’s words. I left on that silent note.  

Maybe Peterson did read my letter to him as well as others and spotted something I figured out that I wasn’t supposed to. I couldn’t imagine what it could have been because I didn’t write anything that could get his attention that wasn’t obvious to anyone who studied my case. It could have been something else, though, something that generated all the paper that made my personnel file so thick. Maybe a lot of things about me made the company’s movers and shakers nervous. Maybe it was the way I was moving and shaking them in ways they couldn’t anticipate. 

They knew I was smart enough to see that I could get on a fast track for Master Modeler by distancing myself from other black modelers and denouncing the union. But I made no secret of my allegiance to the black modelers as friends and allies in a common cause to elevate all of us and I was an organizer in the recent union drive to elevate all modelers who weren’t getting their due.  

Greg Arceri told me that he thought I would do well in the new pay-for-performance system. Perhaps I would have if I hadn’t sided with the union. The company won that fight but only by waging a campaign of misinformation and subtly appealing to racial prejudice in its attacks on the three clay modeler organizers, George Green, Cal Morrison and me. We played it straight. We lost by 14 votes. 

Personnel couldn’t anticipate what I was going to do in those situations because it had no real concept of personal integrity. At Ford, qualities like loyalty, courage and integrity didn’t mean the same thing as they do to you and me. Loyalty meant personal loyalty to a particular high-ranking executive or a particular group of high-ranking executives. Courage and integrity meant nothing.   

The company wanted to show the world how open in was to minorities in the prestigious field of automotive design. But instead of getting my black face in every picture that came along to project that image as well as to promote myself, I consistently bowed out. By implication, the pictures gave me credit for things I didn’t do or marginal credit where I did much more. They were not what they were purported to be and the company’s reasons for taking them were not what they were purported to be. I had no problem with fulfilling the company’s stated objectives as long as I could see that the real ones weren’t contrary to them.  

I don’t think these sudden turns hurt me as much as some of the other ones I made, because they weren’t as visible or as far reaching. Without realizing it, I was screwing up multi-million dollar plans that had been labored over at the highest levels of the company to achieve goals other than the ones anyone else knew about. I was interfering in disputes between the top brass and making some of them look foolish in the eyes of their peers. I took my professional challenges at face value – the tougher, the better. All I thought I was doing was meeting them head on. I didn’t know that I wasn’t supposed to overcome them. I didn’t know that nobody was supposed to overcome them.  

The baseball exercise wasn’t about team problem solving; it was about identifying candidates for promotion to upper management. I screwed that up royally. Max Jerosic wanted the Probe to go away. I screwed that up, too. I was about to screw up a plan worth billions. 

Things got better for me when Lucy Berkowski sat down with me in Greg’s office to go over a “work plan” for me in Interiors. I’d never heard of a work plan. This one looked like a roadmap to Master Modeler – odd, to say the least, for an “E” level clay modeler. Greg and I could barely keep from laughing as Berkowski earnestly went over the form prepared by Personnel to insure that I had a chance to develop my leadership potential. We were friends. Greg already knew what I could do. So did the company. I could not have done what did in the Army Reserves when I was with Ford in 1966 and ’67 or what I did as an organizer in the recent union drive if I did not have leadership ability. All I needed was a Ford-sponsored opportunity to use it for Ford. 

What the company didn’t know was how serious Greg was about giving me true responsibilities and how I or any other modeler could use it to transform the entire process of interior concepts and components design. 

Dave Reese, the former Director of Small Car or Luxury – I was never sure of which – was again my Director. Mimi’s former husband Al Ornis worked under him as my new Studio Executive. Ornis had two Design Managers, three designers, one Studio Engineer, three or four draftsmen and eight modelers, including me. Four of the modelers were Masters. The studio was divided into two sections with two separate work areas. The Interiors side of the studio took up most of the space with luxury model steering wheels, instrument, panels, consoles, doors, pillars, trunks and package trays. The Components side consisted of one Manager, both designers and two modelers. I was going to be the second modeler.

Greg left me alone for a while to look around and talk to my old friends.  

I could see at a glance that Greg had assembled a strong modeling team, although I couldn’t see the reasoning behind the way the studio was staffed and organized. Of all the management personnel, only Greg had an organizational plan I could decipher. Reese’s plan, Ornis’ plan and his Manger’s plans were inscrutable. They appeared to be taking on projects as they came.  

The Interiors Manager, Dick Petit, buzzed around from one property to another directing the next phase of property designs that originated in the studio with his designer Tony Frasseto and elsewhere. It really didn’t matter where they started, if they ever went into production they would have the stamp of Al Ornis and Dick Petit all over them.  

One thing that caught my eye like a patch of spinach on the front tooth of a smiling debutant was a portion of the instrument panel that led into a yet-to-be-designed consol. When I saw that Cal Morrison was modeling it, I assumed that it would be gorgeous. It should have been. A badly placed line kept the radio, the CD and the climate control units, represented by cardboard cutouts, from lining up properly. When I say “properly” I mean in an aesthetically acceptable way. I’m not talking about a design element that didn’t agree with my personal tastes. I’m taking about a design element that was inherently wrong. It created a twist in the surface that made the horizontal lines of the components crisscross in a critical view and left big, nasty gaps in the vertical lines.  

The fact that the radio, CD and climate control bodies were rectangular and had fixed dimensions meant that the designer had little to play with to fit them into the overall design. That’s why you like to have a modeler like Calvin on that kind of job. Tell him what you want. Show him what you need and he will bring it together the best way it can be brought together. It’s usually unbelievably difficult to do. This was an easy one for Cal. I figured that it was something he had just done and hadn’t had a chance yet to see it from my perspective.  

I said, “Cal, you got a bad line there.” 

No competent modeler takes offence at a remark like that. We all know that the modeler would have seen it and corrected it before too long. If you are the modeler with the bad line you don’t mind hearing someone point it out even if you know its there and haven’t gotten around to fixing it. If you missed it, someone showing it to you will save you time.

Calvin was not offended but his response did not compute.  

Calvin said, “That’s what they want.”

I said, “Look at it from here and you can see what I’m talking about.” 

Calvin said, “That’s what they want.” 

We went around the same circle a few more times. Then Calvin said, “Watch this.” 

He cut in the line that should have been there, adjusted the surfaces and rearranged the cardboard cutouts for the “center stack” in about five minutes. This was the Cal Morrison I knew and this was the way the part should have looked. It met all of the requirements in front of us and accommodated a console that would have to blend into it down the road.

Dick Petit walked over to us, as Calvin said he would when he saw what he had done to the center stack. He shook my hand and introduced himself. He then turned to the center stack. Calvin bowed his head in my direction and rolled his eyes up to meet mine as if to say, now watch this. 

I watched Petit break open a big ball of semi-hard clay, scoop out the soft clay inside and start applying it to the edge of the part Calvin had removed. He smeared clay over Calvin’s surface and used the biggest clay rake in Calvin’s toolbox to rough in the rest of it. When he had a crude surface in place, he arranged the cardboard cutouts the way I had first seen them. He smiled with satisfaction at what he had done and told Calvin that all he had to do was clean it up.  

Calvin smiled sadly at me. He had made his point.  

I spent another twenty minutes or so going from property to property in Concepts and renewing old acquaintances with the modelers, Dennis Phinney, Mike Wyman, Tony Paladino, Emory Seveges and Ed Fulwider. Then Greg came to me and walked me around the rolling billboards used to partition Interiors from Components and introduced me to the Design Manager I would be working for, Ed Jaquet.   

On our way to the Manager’s desk at the end of a row of similar designer workstations where I saw two designers I didn’t know, I saw a modeler I didn’t know. He was bent over the edge of table strewn with drawing and materials for finely detailed work. He appeared to be in his late twenties. He wore a tan smock and a jeweler’s headset with rotating magnifier glasses. He was concentrating so hard on filing an aluminum die for extruding clay that Greg chose not to interrupt him. 

A long, wide drafting table with a fluorescent light canopy for an even distribution of light and minimum of shadows took up the largest section of the area. The draftsmen sat in darkened cubbyholes facing huge Lundy monitors to work on an electronic drafting system call PDGS. I think the letters stood for Portable Digital Graphics System. I had taken a PDGS class in ’86 and wasn’t impressed with it. The system replaced drafting by hand throughout the design center in only three or four years so the large layout table was obsolete. It looked to me as though the table with its terrific built-in lighting canopy would be ideal of the kind of work the young modeler was trying to do under a standard clamp-on lamp.  

Unlike Tony Frasseto, who I knew to be a first-class designer from working with him before, I didn’t know Ed Jaquet’s designers Bob Scott and Soo Kang. Bob had been with Ford long enough to know what he was doing. Soo was an apprentice. Ed Jaquet had been with Ford too long to be happy with the fact that he was stuck on the lowest rung of the management ladder with a project that was going nowhere.  

He showed me line drawings and rendering of two radio faces that outside venders were supposed to turn into facsimiles of the real things. Mind you, they weren’t prototypes. They didn’t have to work like real radios. They just had to look like real radios. He reached into his top desk drawer and hauled out the vender’s models. They did look like real radios. They took six months to make. They cost the company $50,000 each to make. And they looked nothing like the line drawings or the rendering. The buttons were aluminum. They were supposed to be black plastic. They weren’t spaced properly and the knobs and switches were wrong. Six months and $100,000 right down the tubes…  

Greg told Jaquet that I would be the modeling leader in Components and represent modelers in section meetings. With one modeler to lead and, from the look of it, nothing to do but make radio faces it sounded absurd. Maybe there was more to it than I knew about. 

There wasn’t… 

I got to know the other modeler by working next to him on an unbroken succession of mindless, disjointed tasks.  His name was John LaBlanc. He asked me to call him Jack. He modeled at GM for six years before coming to Ford a few month earlier. The Personnel man told him, as I was told, that he would begin as a B-modeler, despite his obvious qualifications to start as an A-modeler or Sculptor. He took a cut in salary in exchange for a promise of making more money with a combination of merit increases and faster promotions – the same speech I got my second time around The difference in the way he came to Ford and the way I came back was that the money he got as a pay grade 5 was the same as a mid-level 6. Mine was barely over the entrance level for 5.  

I wasn’t sure what to think about that.