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Chapter 32

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Chapter 31: Fighting the Battles 

My Outstanding performance review and the 9 % raise that came with it looked much better on paper than it was. I was sill below the salary grade-7 midpoint and I had to battle all the way to get that far.  

I could not move Personnel to talk to the people I worked with in Small Car until I demonstrated that I wasn’t bluffing about going outside the company to have the matter looked into. I wrote a letter to Maxie Cason, the head of the Enforcement Division of the Michigan Department of Civil Rights. I sent copies of the letter to everyone who had gotten copies of my first batch of letters and I let the word “leak” out that Maxie Cason was my cousin.  I knew what to expect because I talked to him. I let that information leak out, too.  

Ford responded the way Maxie told me it would. Ford knew that the Michigan Civil Rights Department did not get involved with disputes between employers and employees unless the employee filed a formal illegal discrimination complaint. He told me that he would speak to someone at Ford to see if the company could resolve the matter internally. If Ford did not make a good faith effort to do so, the threat of getting Maxie Cason’s nose in company records and giving him direct access to witnesses was enough to insure that they could not stonewall.  

On my way to this point Bob Marth, Ford’s Personnel Relations Manager for Car Product Development called me to set up a meeting with him at World Headquarters. All the Personnel people I’d ever dealt with were polite. They called me “sir” even when they were tying a rope to hang me. Marth was surprisingly rude. I talked to him the way he talked to me.

I asked him if I could bring a tape recorder or a witness that both of us could agree on. He refused on grounds that such an arrangement was unheard of, unnecessary and chilling to a frank exchange. When I couldn’t get him to budge, I told him that we had nothing more to talk about. He huffed and puffed and hung up.  

In an undated memo, which followed my Cason letter, this is how Lucy Berkowski, characterized what happened: 

“Mr. Marth called Mr. Garrison to invite him to discuss his issues and Mr. Garrison informed him that he would not meet unless there was another employee present, or unless he cold bring a tape recorder. Mr. Marth told him that he was interested in what Mr. Garrison had to say but he would not meet with him under those circumstances. The meeting never took place.

“A meeting was held with the Employee Relations Representative and the 2 supervisors who were writing Mr. Garrison’s 1989 performance review. On April 20, 1989, Mr. Garrison was given his performance review and was rated Outstanding. 

“A letter dated April 19^th written by Mr. Garrison and addressed to Mr. Maxie Cason, Michigan Department of Civil Rights, was received by the NAD Personnel Office on April 21^st.  

“Mr. Garrison’s merit was reviewed and revised, and he received a 9% merit, effective May 1, 1989, based on his new rating of Outstanding. 

“We are awaiting a response from the Michigan Department of Civil Rights.” 

More about those dates later… This is what really happened: 

Before I got the call from Marth, I agreed to see John Ewald in his Design Center Personnel office. Ewald was the guy Lucy Berkowski wrote in her previous memo was indisposed so she was turning over her files to Mr. Harris. I’d spoken to Ewald three weeks earlier. The things he said to me in our first “confidential” meeting were so outrageous, so unyielding and so biased against me that nobody would believe he said them. I couldn’t even repeat what he said without sounding like a liar. That’s why I insisted on a tape recorder for our second meeting. 

Ewald objected to the tape recorder on the same grounds that his boss would object, using the identical words, so I asked him if I could bring Greg Arceri with me as “a fly on the wall.” Ewald trapped himself with his answer to why that request was not acceptable. He said that Supervisors were not allowed to sit in on meetings with their subordinates and Personnel because the meetings were “confidential.”  

Both of us knew the real reason.  

“Why does it have to be confidential?” I asked. 

“So that you won’t be afraid to speak freely.” 

I almost laughed. “In that case I would feel more comfortable in expressing myself freely if Mr. Arceri was there.  

“I can’t do that?” 

“Why not? If you don’t think Mr. Arceri is acceptable I’m sure we can agree on someone who is acceptable to both of us.”

“Ford regulations prohibit it.” 

“Will you show me the regulation?” 

I knew that he couldn’t do it because I knew that no such regulation existed. If it did I couldn’t have had the 3-party meeting that I had with Greg Arceri and Lucy Berkowski. He reluctantly agreed to the observer. 

The day of the meeting was bad for me. I stayed up ‘til 3:00 a.m. that morning working on a solution to a unique problem with the components assembly that would take the process to a higher level. I couldn’t tackle it on the job because it wouldn’t have looked to Ed Jaquet like I wasn't doing anything but doodling and munching on snacks. I had to get up at 6:00 to make it to work on time. I wasn’t mentally alert.  

I asked George Green to come with me because he was the one who suggested I bring a tape recorder and I knew that he had the courage to do it. He told me that he wouldn’t sit in on the meeting because he believed a tape recorder was the only way to go. I was looking at a problem of appearing to be uncooperative and unreasonable if I didn’t accept Ewald’s invitation to meet with him on mutually acceptable terms. The observer idea was a reasonable compromise that I proposed and Ewald accepted so I asked Cal Morrison to be the observer. Cal had the guts for it as well as a reputation for integrity. If I said anything stupid, everyone who knew Cal knew that he would tell the truth about it.  

The meeting began with John Ewald and I awkwardly feeling each other out. He seemed no sharper than I was that morning. But a half hour or so into our discussion I noticed a clear pattern in his mental ups and downs.  

Ewald handed me a barely readable copy of his typed, eleven-point investigation report, which demonstrated that he hadn’t investigated at all. He had simply spent three weeks cherry-picking the company records to justify my low place in my pay grade and the performance review that Gerry Folgmann gave me.  

Ewald talked to no one on my witness list and compared my salary level to unnamed Sculptors who began their careers in 1977. His report said that I was doing better than they were and better than some sculptors who had 15 years more seniority than I had. He ignored my clam that Ford stole ten years of seniority from me. He ignored the fact that the people with 15 more years of experience and lower salaries were few and the company had labeled all of them deadwood twenty years before. 

The sharper I was in rebutting those points the duller Ewald became. Every time I expressed myself clearly, concisely and incontrovertibly he got this look on his face that you might see if you were trying to discuss cultural anthropology with a Chihuahua. When I was vague and inarticulate his face lit up and he seemed to follow me better than I could follow myself. Much better. That’s when I made a colossal mistake. 

Ewald asked me how I knew something that I stated as a fact, something that took only elementary reasoning skills to discern. I replied that I knew the same way I knew that he took a shower before he got dressed to come to work.  

He grinned like a Cheshire cat and told me that I was wrong. He said that he hadn’t taken a shower in weeks. Cal couldn’t say anything but I knew that he was as incredulous as I was until the man scooted out from behind his desk and showed us the plaster cast on his leg.  

I goofed, all right, but so did he. He showed me that all the time we’d been talking, he’d been looking for an opening to slip in a grenade. I couldn’t deny anything that either of us said because Calvin witnessed the whole thing. I would have told the truth anyway, but John Ewald didn’t know that. He didn’t understand the power of the truth. I did. 

Ewald’s report on his investigation looked like a document prepared for litigation. I couldn’t allow it to stand alone long enough to mutate into hundreds of other complicated legal documents that I would have to respond to one at a time on the company’s timetable. I had to go on the attack and I had to do it immediately.  

I burned the midnight oil in preparing my rebuttal to the Ewald report. I titled it “The Ewald Investigation” with the subtitle “A paragraph by paragraph response by Jasper Garrison. I numbered each of Ewald’s paragraphs and included his report with my numbers in my reply[1]. I did not date it or address it. I did not indicate who would get copies. Instead, I ran off several copies of Ewald’s report and my report on his report and dropped some of them off in the Design Center’s Personnel office. I made sure that everyone there saw that I had more copies. I sent one set to Bob Marth and let Ewald worry about what I was going to do with the rest of them.  

Now you know why my meeting with John Ewald’s boss Bob Marth came to be scheduled and why it didn’t come off.  

Back up a couple of pages and you will see some words and dates in bold type on Lucy Berkowski’s memo. Keep in mind that all of this happened early in the first quarter of 1989. According to the memo, it looks as though my performance review was adjusted upward one day after I wrote my letter to Maxi Cason but Personnel didn’t know I had written it until a day after I got the PR. Nonsense. I wrote it on the 19^th and hand delivered it to the Design Center’s Personnel office on the 20^th, the same day “the Employee Relations Representative” met with “the 2 supervisors who were writing Mr. Garrison’s 1989 performance review.”  

The memo does not name the Employee Relations Representative and it does not say what years the “1989” review was written for. A modeler could go for two years without getting one and the merit increase it was based on. The longer you went without an increase the lower your actual annual increase was for the preceding time interval. A 9% increase could work out to an annual increase of 6% or less depending on when you got your next one and the timing of your next one was set secretly when you got your previous one.  

The timing of all my raises had been set to make it appear that I was getting anywhere from 5 to 9%. The “annual rate of progression,” as the true increase percentage was called on the Supervisors’ conversion chart was 6%. The ARP for “top performers” was between 7 and 10%.  

If this stuff is hopelessly confusing to you, rest assured that it was meant to be hopelessly confusing. Ford paid experts top dollar to make it that way. They could produce documents to show anything they wished. It took an insider to understand what it meant and to see where information was changed, omitted or deleted to make it look like something it wasn’t.

Nothing in those files could have given you a hint of what I did in Small Car or what I was doing in Interiors while the claims I made for my performance in Small Car were being “investigated” by Personnel…. 

Thanks to the system I devised for turning out the components, all of our car lines would have them a full year ahead of schedule. When the components group went back to the way it was operating before I got there all was not lost. I still carried the knowledge of how we accomplished what we did and how that knowledge could be applied to what we supposed to do in Concepts. 

Concepts’ rookie product designer Janet Lee was the pivot point that the scope of our operations swung around. She couldn’t draw as well California’s Art Center or Detroit’s Center for Creative Studies graduates could but she could draw well enough and communicate well enough verbally to do what she was hired to do.  

Although Janet lacked the technical skills to be called our resident inventor, she was the closest thing to it with enough technically trained people around her to do what she couldn’t do.

One of the smartest things Ford ever did was to hire Janet Lee, largely on the strength of her unique design for a car mirror. She took the standard flat mirror you see on the inside of car windshields and combined it with the wider view you get from those little domed mirrors you could buy to stick in the corners of outside mirrors. All she did was add a slight bend to the right corner. Her model was crude by professional standards and the plastic mirror surface did not have the reflective quality of a real one. Nevertheless, the fact that it was a working model let us see that the principle worked. It didn’t have to be a slick prototype to do that.  

I saw the implications immediately. So did Calvin. 

Calvin was now working on a console with a gearshift lever. The aesthetic designers had determined how they wanted it to look and the engineers had designed a sphere of motions for the gearshift lever that determined how it had to work. The sticking point was in trying to determine whether the cosmetic design and the engineering design were compatible. Calvin solved the problem on his own by treating the engineering drawing, which was laid out in a hundred little oddly shaped pieces, like a three dimensional puzzle. It scared me to look at it.  

Calvin cut each piece out of Masonite, fitted them together as only a genius could have done, and hot-glued them together. When he was finished he had a sphere, a physical object that proved the validity of the drawing and took all of the guesswork out of whether the gearshift lever would work in the consol.  

It was amazing to see how easily Calvin cut through the doubletalk of engineers standing around the clay model with the wooden gearshift lever giving complex explanations for why the consol had to change. All of that talk was contained in the Masonite sphere. Whenever an engineer began to rattle on about the necessity of moving a fixed design element to accommodate the gearshift lever’s range of motion Calvin simply placed the sphere in the relevant zone. All discussion ceased. What more could any of the engineers say? Cal’s sphere came from their drawing. 

Normally discussions like this went on for several months with designers pulling one way and engineers pulling against them. That’s how long it took to find out whether the designers or engineers were right or for one side to gather enough political strength to move the other.  

This sort of thing never made sense to Cal or me until we were working together on a package tray for a Lincoln Town Car. An engineer told us that the redundant light housing we had on the package tray wouldn’t work. When he told us why it wouldn’t work, Calvin and I suggested some things he could do to make it work. He told us why our suggestions wouldn’t work, either, but in the process of telling us, he thought of something that might work. He told us that he would see what he could do and get back with us.  

A few days later the suitless engineer came back with his boss and a few other engineers with suits. He had worked out a solution to the problem with the redundant light housing that would give design the appearance it wanted but his boss would't let him present it.  

The BOSS was a young guy with slick black hair, a tailored suit, manicured fingernails, an expensive gold watch and the biggest gold ring I had ever seen. A gold chain around his neck complemented his GQ shirt and necktie. He had a perfect smile. He flashed it often when he explained to the engineer assigned to the redundant light why the only solution to the problem was to remove the light from the package tray and put it on the roof of the car. He quoted federal regulations word-for-word by date and paragraph number.  

The suitless engineer had told Cal and me about the regulation – without the date and paragraph number – as well as the stricter Ford regulation. He had researched the Ford regulations and discovered that they were based on outdated technological considerations. Redundant lights didn’t exist and weren’t even contemplated by anybody when the Ford regulations were written. This argument didn’t fly. The BOSS countered with a recent supplement to the Ford regulation, a supplement that just happened to land in his mailbox the night before, which backed his original position. He quoted that regulation verbatim, too, with the date and paragraph number. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he wrote it.  

The suitless engineer stood red-faced and trembling, fighting to control his anger and frustration. Calvin and I empathized with him. He was the type of engineer we wanted to see but without the right clothing ensemble and a change in attitude we could see that he would go nowhere in his department. He didn’t look “right” and he violated a major tacit precept of Ford engineering. No inventions.  

“No inventions” was a good rule of thumb. You don’t want engineers experimenting with ways of doing things that could produce unforeseen consequences or to waste their time on developing technology that has already been developed. You don’t want them reinventing the wheel. On the other hand, if you turn that rule of thumb into a strict policy, you can never advance from the wheel to the tire.  

Obviously, Ford engineers had to invent to stay up with the competition or to have any chance of getting ahead of the competition. That’s what the “research” part of Research and Engineering was supposed to be about. The trouble with the way Ford did it was the politics involved in who could invent and who couldn’t. To invent, or at least to get credit for it, you had to work in the right department or have the right rank or title. You had to be a designated inventor. 

Janet Lee was a designated inventor, although she did not have all the tools she needed to invent on her own. She did have the modelers. To begin with, she had me…. 

I was working for Dennis Phinney on a Town Car armrest that folded up between the seats. Dennis had me make a clay model to design and engineering specifications. Locating the optimum pivot point was a tricky job for the engineers to work out on paper in a way that didn’t compromise the design, so I worked it out myself with an acetate cutout and a pushpin. We cast the clay model in fiberglass and we proceeded from there with the goodies Janet was designing to go into it.  

Janet was having a hard time with her rendering and her foam-core mockup. Both of them were embarrassingly crude for a professional designer but not for a talented student, which she was. She asked me if I could help her with her mockup. It was beyond help so I told her I would do what she wanted in the fiberglass model. Between her sketches, her rendering, her mockup and her explanation of what she wanted the armrest to contain and how she wanted to work, I had everything I needed to make a good working model.  

It struck me then that all interiors product designers could save a heap of time by following Janet’s example. Her drawing skills would improve with time to a professional level but the method she brought with her for turning a concept into a working model – because she didn’t know the “right way” to do it – needed no improvement. This was the way to go. 

Janet could get away with coming directly to me with her project because she hadn’t been in the business or the Design Center long enough to know better. I could get away with helping her the way I saw fit to do it because Dennis Phinney was occupied with other tasks and we were in a holding pattern with the armrest waiting on more engineering data.  

I thought it was silly to wait for the engineers, anyway, because the best source of information we needed at the time was the Trim Shop.  

In making the fiberglass armrest, we had allowed for the thickness of the material that was going to cover it. The design called for material cut-lines that didn’t necessarily match what could be done on the real part. The established practice for this sort of thing was to convene a consul of experts in materials, adhesives, stitching, etc., who conducted studies, held meetings and took their best guess at what we could do next. 

I went to the Trim Shops and got two of their experts to look at the model and apply the material right in the studio. Watching them work we could see where the material could bend, stretch and mate where we wanted it to and where it couldn’t. Janet could immediately design around the trouble spots and I could see what was necessary to make everything fit.  

Janet wanted the armrest to contain a strongbox, two cup holders, a knickknack try and a Chinese game board with dozens of little dimples for the game pieces. The engineers said that the strong box was out of the question because to make it so that the lid would open and close we would need gaps too wide for security. The hinges they said we had to choose from left a gap too big to be acceptable to design or a nasty raised strip that would not allow it to lie flat. It had to lie flat for the tray to fit property, so the tray was out, too.  

From my work at home on hinged molds for a tabletop golf game, I knew how to make a strong hinge that would allow the lid to lie flat and butt snugly on all sides to the mating parts. I made the lid out of an 1/8^th inch brass plate so I could easily solder my hinge to it and make easy changes by hand if I had to. Then I started on the knickknack tray. 

The standard procedure was to model the part out of clay using engineering’s fit and finish margins, to cast it a silicone rubber mold or make a drawing from the clay for the Wood Shop to fabricate. I decided to make it myself using acrylic plastic and metal body filler.  

Things were going along splendidly until somebody decided to have a show on all the interior parts then moved up the show date. Dennis Phinney was giving me the evil eye for taking so long. The tray had several compartments and Dennis sat down to give me hand with them. About an hour into the work he looked up at me and gave me a simile that said, now I know what’s taking you so long. His words were, “There’s a lot more fitting to do than I thought.” 

Now he understood what I was doing and why I was doing it that way. You could take all the measurements you wanted on parts like this but they never fit the way they were supposed to because of tiny adjustments you had to make as you went along to get the right look and the right fit. We could not have seen everything we needed to see in clay and there was no telling what errors or distortions might have crept into the process of creating a molded part from the clay or a wooden part from drawings. Whenever we got them back, we would have had to change them again.

The engineers gave us practical reasons for why the game board had to go away. They also told us we had to use a massive locking mechanism for the outside lid that would have ruined the entire design. We were able to get around their objections by creating our own locking mechanism. I designed the mechanism, built it, installed it, demonstrated it and left it to the engineers to find something wrong with it. They couldn’t. It was smaller, simpler and cheaper to produce than the one they had. It gave them wider applications and they had a world of materials to choose from to meet any requirements for ease of operation and durability in the prototype. Prototypes cost an arm and a leg.  

The difference between our working model and a prototype is that the prototype would contain all of the actual parts and materials. We used only the parts and materials that showed what the armrest would look like and demonstrated the basic operational principles in a way that we could easily modify as the need arose.  

For instance: Where we used brass, a soft metal that we could cut on a band saw and easily solder or braze, the prototype part would use a hard metal. Where we used weak springs because we could make them and modify them quickly and easily, the prototype would have springs with the ideal tension for its purpose. Where we used hand-made parts, the prototype would use molded parts. With a good working model the prototype could be made faster and cheaper because fewer expensive modifications would be needed to give it the desired aesthetic and functional characteristics.  

When we finished the tray we knew how the production part would look, how it would work and what had to be done to get everything we had into the production part at the lowest cost and highest consistent quality. It took us less than two months to get where we were with a working model of the armrest. Normally it would have taken closer to a year. We now had a solid foundation to build on for future innovations and a minimum of five times more freed up man-hours to create them.  

In other words, Ford could have paid every man and woman working on these project twice as much as it was paying them, reduced the price the customer had to pay and still turned a hefty profit. That’s what productivity means and why it costs big companies like Ford less to pay their most productive employees more. 

None of this would have been possible if Mimi Vandermolen hadn’t taken her ex-husband’s place as our Studio Executive. I doubt that Al Ornes would have allowed us to do a fraction of the things Mimi encouraged us to do. Al was as intelligent and competent in his way as Mimi was in hers. The critical difference was in what they tried to achieve. They had different agendas.

Looking back, I believe that the company replaced Al with Mimi because the executives who made the decision didn’t expert her to accomplish anything substantial. They had plans for dismantling the studio before her arrival – before the Concepts section of the Interiors studio had been conceived. Everything we did in Concepts and Components was supposed to be a transition to bigger and better things that could be done faster and cheaper by an outside vender. The vendor, a company called Prince in Holland, Michigan, was already working on parallel projects. How could our “top team” have predicted that Mimi would preside over an unprecedented 500% increase in productivity?  

Mind you, that 500% increase is a conservative figure. Every project we worked on taught us something that increased our productivity at an accelerating rate. We were not bound by conventional ways of doing things because the things we were doing either worked or they didn’t and we could tell on the fly when to back up, change course or go full speed ahead. We didn’t need a platoon of engineers to tell us how everything would come together or what kind of interference issues we had to get around because everyone could see them. And because we weren’t engineers, we could do things that were supposed to be “impossible.” 

The modelers I worked with learned quickly, as I knew all along, that impossible usually meant untested. Engineers, like all people who get very good at doing certain things, develop functional fixes. They see a problem and immediately decide how to approach it using proven formulas. The modelers didn’t know the formulas. We just farted around with ideas we thought had promise and let the models in progress tell us what to do next. The trick was to get the model to “talk to us” quickly. We did the things we could work out quickly on paper, made our best guess as to how to do the things we couldn’t work out quickly on paper and we went right ahead and built the damn thing. 

Walter Z, the man in charge of procurement was more of an obstacle than an asset. But in a way, he was responsible for our next big breakthrough. I dealt with him a few years earlier when I was trying to get enough brushes for the turps bottles to meet the demand and to see if I could also get the company to pay for the bottles. He told me that he couldn’t order the brushes for clay modelers. The Plastic Shop used them in bulk and discarded them after one use. They were, therefore, dirt cheep, so I knew that cost wasn’t the issue. Walter Z told me the bottles were out of the question. He didn’t want to discuss it further and left me standing in his office while he left to take care of another matter. 

Art Berry worked for Walter Z. He overheard the conversation and saw how steamed up I was over my encounter with his boss. He couldn’t help me with the bottles but he took the trouble to show me why. Ford’s procurement process was so convoluted that it was a wonder anybody could get anything in a reasonable amount of time. Ford had contracts with certain suppliers for all of its supplies – which assumed that the company knew before it signed the contracts what supplies it would need. There was no way I could rely on this process. To get what I needed I had to rely on individuals like Art Berry. 

Art Berry ordered the brushes. Unfortunately the ones I needed were made in the USA and some financial wizard had found cheaper ones that were made in Brazil. The people in the Plastic Shop hated them because the bristles fell out and they had to use more of them with more hassles to get the job done. I had the same problem with using them for the turps bottles. I went through at least half a dozen of them before I could get one to work…for two or three uses. The people in the Plastic Shop gave me all of the made-in-the-USA brushes they could find. When they could find no more that was the end of it. There were no more to be had anywhere because the Brazilian company put the American company out of business.  

I continued getting the small plastic bottles from an F&M thrift store but ran into a brick wall with F&M when I tried to find out where the store got its bottles. It wasn’t ordering them anymore and had no record of where they came from.  

That experience should have prepared me for what I ran into when I tried to order two Dremel, high-speed motor tools for Concepts and Components. Dremels were compact, light, inexpensive, ergonomically designed and versatile. They were ideal for our purposes. Ford did not have a contract with Dremel. Its tool of choice was a bulky, expensive, hard to handle Fordum, which was suited mainly for heavy-duty industrial use. I brought in my own two Dremels from home. 

In the beginning, I could supply the tools and materials we needed as we needed them. Instead of submitting an order and waiting weeks or months for Ford’s cumbersome procurement process to deliver the few items it could deliver, it was less of a headache to buy everything myself.   My expenses were negligible because the tools were mine and I could buy most of the materials at Joe’s Hobby Shop for the cost of a birthday cake and a few pounds of coffee. 

When the projects expanded I saw that we needed a way of getting the necessary tools and materials that did not depend on the willingness of one person to provide them. It wasn’t a cost problem. It was a systems problem. We didn’t have an easy, reliable procurement system. For me, that was an integral part of a viable process for making working models. A good system with good people could run itself.

Dennis Phinney saw the same thing I did, although he was more concerned with the money that was coming out of my pocket. He suggested that I get the money from the studio’s petty cash fund.  

Chuck Jones was now working in Concepts and he had a better idea. Between us, we decided that we needed a cache of “stuff,” small metal rods, tubes and sheets and piano wire of various sizes and anything else we could think of that might be useful. We agreed that Joe’s Hobby Shop was the place to go. Chuck suggested that we use Greg Arceri’s Ford credit card. 

Greg didn’t like the idea of us using his credit card to buy “stuff” at Joe’s Hobby Shop, especially when we told him that we didn’t know what we were going to get or how much it would cost. When I pointed some of the little oddball things I used to make Janet’s armrest, he gave in.   

Our little shopping trip was fun and exciting. We went thorough Joe’s picking up everything we thought we might have some use for even if we couldn’t think of a specific application. If it looked cool, we bought it.  

The charges came to a little over $300. Greg looked at the figure and the things we bought and started trembling. He told us that he might have trouble justifying how we spent the company’s money. He thought that we spent too much and he couldn’t see how we could use a third of the things we bought. Chuck and I looked at each other, silently communicating the same message: That’s why we did the shopping instead of Greg! 

Before the year was out we used every single item we purchased and the success of some projects we completed was directly attributable to having those items on hand to do it. That was because ready access to the materials often led us to do things that we would not have ordinarily have thought we could do.  

When we needed to make a pop up mirror with a light that came on when the mirror popped up, we had what we needed. We had piano wire of the right gage that we could cut with the Dremel tool and bend for the springs. We had the lights, the electrical wiring and the soldering equipment. When I needed coil springs of a specific size to make a coin dispenser, I made the springs.  

The coin dispenser was one feature of a thee-sided gadget designed by a young, wealthy and talented new designer named Walied Sabba. When I say talented, I do not mean he was a talented designer. He was one of a breed of young designers Ford was hiring in droves because of their fantastic artistic ability and “wild” ideas. Walied also had a remarkable gift for gab, which was aided by his unflinching willingness to lie.

Walied came to Ford with advanced billing of having the potential of becoming one of the greatest designers in the world. Ford’s top executives thought he was so brilliant that they couldn’t follow what he was doing. That’s how I came to work with him. Few people could follow what I was doing, either, but the results consistently spoke for themselves. On top of that, I knew everybody he would have to deal with and I had a good working relationship with the shops that would help him cut through the red tape of putting his brilliant ideas into practice. At least, that’s the way Frank DeBono explained it to me. 

Frank DeBono was now the clay modeling Supervisor of Mustang. He asked Greg to borrow me specifically to work with Walied. The challenge sounded good. I thought that Walied and I were going to make a good team, but when he showed me his beautiful “way out” drawings and tried to explain them to me I found myself completely befuddled.  

A good drawing should explain itself to an experienced model builder. Moreover, Walied told me that he had an engineering degree, which should have simplified things for me and made it easier for us to communicate. We were supposed to be doing an instrument panel with beautifully designed hoses running from one place to another with no apparent function and other beautifully designed parts that I couldn’t identify. Walied buttered me up with smooth lines about what a genius he heard that I was and how only a genus could appreciate what he was trying to do. I didn’t get it. I didn’t get any of it. 

Genius was not a rare quality in the Design Center so I took Walied’s over-the-top complements to mean that he heard I was particularly good at understanding the sorts of things he could not explain to others.  I did not tell him that I couldn’t follow him, either. I hoped that enlightenment would come before too long. Sure enough, it did. 

I was trying to reconcile the apparent conflict between two views of a Sabba design when it suddenly hit me why I was having such a tough time with it. The views did not match and the illusion that they did was created by my belief in his engineering credentials and the sheer complexity and elegant shading and highlighting of the design. I was looking at a clever collogue of optical illusions. There was no design on paper for anything that could be made in three dimensions. The entire project was bullshit.  

It was Walied’s good fortune that his instrument panel was canned because the protruding parts did not meet federal safety guidelines. It was my misfortune that Walied Sabba was transferred to Concepts and Components where I was again assigned to work on two of his “way out” designs. Ironically, these designs did have something going for them and Walied pulled out all the stops to sabotage the working models.