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Chapter 34

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Chapter 33: Shifting Ground 

The Concepts show that Ford President Red Poling didn’t get to see proved the unique value of our studio, our personnel and our techniques for getting the most out of our time and our facilities.  

We had dozens of properties, standard clay models as well as all the working models. We had Walid’s three-in-one ashtray, cup holder and coin dispenser, which the “vampire” guy had centered, mounted in a mock console and finished beautifully. We had Russ Ribbon’s cart. We had sturdy fold-down trays for real back seats with the gimbal on one side, the popup vanity mirror on the other and the light that came on when the mirror popped up. The sliding try for the Town Car trunk looked and functioned like the real thing. So did Janet’s armrest with the goodies inside. The only things that didn’t function like the real things were radios, tape players, CD players and climate controls but they looked real and they matched the internal components that did work.  

Although Ford had written off the fate of Concepts before the show was scheduled Calvin and I couldn’t believe that the company had written it in stone. How can a multi-billion dollar corporation abandon a process that demonstrably reduces lead-time by a minimum of 500 percent?  

Jack Telnack and Fritz Mayhew had a lot of influence in this matter. They wondered into the studio after most of the modelers and designers had left for the day and marveled at the properties Mime showed them. They didn’t see me because I was behind a partition of billboards set up to hide the work area of the studio. I got a candid earful of portions of their conversations, the most revealing of which came when Mimi stepped away from the men and they thought no one else could hear them. I could also see them through a space between the billboards 

As Fritz played with Walid’s rotating coin dispenser-ashtray-cup holder on a table next to the partition and Jack looked on, they talked like kids in a toy store about the working models in general. Neither of them had seen anything close to what we had done. They were defiantly impressed but something else in their tone and in their expressions told me that they were worried. I wondered at first if it was because they canceled the show with Poling prematurely, thinking that the properties would not be ready to present to him in time. But when I put together their words, their facial expressions and their body language I saw something different.  

These guys weren't viewing our properties like kids in a toy store. They were viewing them like executives at an auto show wondering what to do about being outclassed by a competitor. Our studio was the competitor.

The end of Concepts and Components did not come as quickly as Ford management wanted it to. They took away Concepts a little at a time the way they took away Components, leaving only the outward appearance that it was intact.  

Mimi didn’t notice. She wasn’t around to see how Components had started, how it had evolved into what she saw when she arrived and how it had turned back into a standard operation. She had too many things going on to appreciate Component’s change of direction. It was up to engineering to take our working models to the prototype stage. Meanwhile our efforts were concentrated on developing clay model instrument panels, consoles, doors and things like that the way we always did and bringing in new designers and modelers to do them.  

Mike Wyman was happy with the change. He told me that he didn’t like working the other way. I asked him why and he said, “Because I’m not good at it.” 

He wasn’t good at it. I didn’t see how that mattered. The studio needed everything that each of its modelers was good at and there wasn’t a better conventional modeler in the Design Center than Mike Wyman. That was his biggest strength as well as his biggest weakness. He brought his models to a beautiful stage of completion so quickly that he did more of them than he had to.  

Unlike most modelers, Mike Wyman applied a thin coat of shellac to his clay surfaces. It gave them a hard shell and a consistently superior appearance.  Most modelers didn’t take that extra step because it took extra time to do, extra time to change and regardless of how beautiful it looked in clay it was going to change anyway and it didn’t tell you anything about the appearance of the real material. But it showed off Mike’s talents to best advantage and Mimi loved him. He was her favorite modeler. When she wanted something done in a hurry she went to him. All designers wanted to see everything in a hurry so they could try out different ideas without thinking any of them trough. 

The heart of the simultaneous design, modeling and engineering process was the discipline it forced on designers to think about what they wanted to do, to accept what they had to do and to commit themselves. The more changes they could make the more changes they did make until time ran out and the modelers and engineers were left with making the best of what they had to meet the SLR date.  

You will recall that SLR once stood for Surface Layout Release, the final drawings used to make the tools and dies for the production parts. Now it meant Surface Layout Request, to accommodate the “creative” talents of young designers like Walid Saba. Everything we did could therefore be “re-SLRed” indefinitely, which meant the designers didn’t have to plan carefully or make a decision until someone at the top set a firm cutoff date or canceled the program.  

The company expected reduced lead-time to come from their investment in computer technology, which they believed as early as 1980 would replace clay modeling altogether. That’s why the company gave all of its, designers and modelers classes in PDGS between 1985 and 1987.  

In mid 1990 Greg Arceri sent me back to PDGS class at its new ongoing training facility a mile away to refresh and update my previous training to the newest PDGS software revision. I got my first PDGS certificate on revision # 6. I went back to learn rev-12 so I could computer model the radios and other components for a process called stereolithography.  

The idea behind stereolithography was simple. The PDGS operator would model the part on the computer. The computer would digitize the information and turn in into data that could be transferred directly to a machine that built up the part in thin plastic layers, thus eliminating the need for clay modeling.  

I had already eliminated the need for clay modeling component parts by going straight to the hard part, so I was less than impressed with what stereolithography could do. It took longer to model the parts on the computer. You couldn’t see what you were getting until the parts were done. And the finish was so crude that it had to be finished by hand. Moreover, the computer had no sensitivity for creating subtle contours in a way that didn’t jeopardize their integrity when the multitude of tiny ridges that formed each layer were sanded smooth. Cleaning them up was a nightmare that seemed to go on forever.  

The potential for the process was clear but it had a long way to go before it could do what upper management thought it could already do.  

When Red Poling saw the components a year after Don Painter and I made our last ones, he came away thinking that the ones he saw were done by stereolithography. None of them had been done that way. He didn’t even see the best models. He saw the ones that the designer did – the ones that took far more time and had far more flaws because the designer made them in a haphazard way to create as much overtime as he could get. The Concepts properties were not available for Poling to see because they had been turned over to Prince.  

Hidden practices like these where why Poling held his first meeting with the Design Center group that turned things around for the Taurus and why he said he wanted to meet with the same group again. On this visit to the Design Center he thought that he was seeing the same group. Some of the people from the first group did meet with him but I wasn’t invited, neither was anyone else who could tell him what had happened in Concepts and Components and what it meant to the company. 

Worker morale in the Design Center was sinking to an all-time low. Not even all the people like me who got O performance reviews where happy with the performance review system because it was unfair, dishonest and inscrutable. Outstanding performance did not assure that you would get an O. Getting an O did not assure that you would get top dollar, a promotion or full recognition for what you did to earn it. Outstanding temps like Evelyn Bowman, Kevin Schaeffer and Carl Johnson were being promised permanent Ford employment but not getting it. Some groups like women and blacks were being undervalued in general.  

Dianne Hammer was a prime example of what was happening with female modelers. Most of the women who came into modeling when she did in ’77 had seen the writing on the wall by 1990 and gone into other fields where women were welcome. Dianne stuck it out but she was so damaged psychologically by constantly being treated like an inferior that she couldn’t take charge of her jobs. She was so afraid of being downgraded for making a mistake that when she drew a line on the clay she asked her job leader if it was okay before she continued. When she was confronted with a difficult task she bypassed her leader if he wasn’t a Master Modeler and asked a Master Modeler to help her.  

Once, when I told Dianne that she didn’t need help she angrily told me that I wasn’t a Master Modeler and cursed me out. Calvin told me that when he gave her the same advice I did, she did the same thing to him.  

Neither Calvin nor I was offended. We were saddened. We had been treated the way Dianne had for most of our careers and only our vision of ourselves as mighty warriors had kept us from falling into the same trap. When the old trooper or the old marine got punched we punched back. Dianne didn’t know who to punch or how to do it. That’s why she unloaded her frustrations on Cal and me. She knew that she we wouldn’t hurt her. When Ford gave her a generous separation offer, she took it.  

Ford lost a good modeler. The sad thing, from the company’s point of view was that it never appreciated the asset it lost.  

Some of the newer female models, starting with Jay Sharkey in 1986, were treated differently. I knew why because I knew the history of female modelers at Ford. The company had to begin placing some of them in studios where they could perform and move them up the ranks to guard against lawsuits. Jay never questioned anything management said or did. She figured that if she worked hard and did her job well Ford would reward her. It was true for her. She saw no reason that it wouldn’t be true for anyone else who did more work and less complaining.  

With the end of Concepts as we knew it in the last quarter of 1990 and a return to business as usual and no recognition from Mimi that anything had changed, I pulled back on the inventive things I used to do. Janet had become a bit of an ogre, making demands on the modelers that only she and Mimi were getting credit for. She ordered Don Painter to make a hinge like the one I made for the vault in her armrest. He told her that he didn’t know how. He told her that the engineers didn’t know how and he told her that I wasn’t going to do it. He was right on all counts.  

When Ed Jaquet announced his retirement, the company sent in a big sheet cake and coffee to give him a happy sendoff. Jack LaBlanc dropped by and stood next to me in the crowd of celebrants as Ed gave a long speech in which he thanked the people who made his Components group a success. He thanked the designer who was assembling the current models. He thanked Mike Wyman and Ed Fulwider. He thanked Mimi and Dennis Phinney. He did not mention Bob Scott, Don Painter, Jack LaBlanc or me.  

Coming to work was no longer an adventure. From time to time, Calvin or Benny DeNaro would come up with a useful modeling innovation or solve an “impossible” engineering problem but I was out of the invention business for the time being.  

I modeled a conventional IP out of clay that flowed into a consol. I did it for a rookie designer named Gordon who got his training from Sam Mayers. Gordo’s drawings were well thought out, well drawn and easy to interpret in thee dimensions. Dean Zimmerman, the young modeler who impressed Mimi and Greg with how quickly he could produce a high-quality clay model, worked next to me on an IP for Nellie. On my other side, another rookie designer had an IP going with Emery and Jay. Nellie had the designer doing so many things that his modeler could have been anyone. It would have made no difference.  

Dean got out of the blocks ahead of Emory, Jay and me. He had his Instrument panel roughed in before I finished my armature but he didn’t check any critical points before he started so his first change required a total tear-up. His next change also required a total tear-up. By the end of the week I was refining my IP and the console. Dean was frantically trying to recover from another tear-up and Nellie was berating him for being so far behind me and not have a console – even though her design did not call for one.

The other designer blew a fuse and cursed at Nellie when she pulled him away from his IP to make a logo or some damn thing. He told her that nobody could do everything she wanted him to do.  

Nellie calmly replied. “Dennis Moses can.” Dennis Moses could and he did and Nellie’s harried designer knew it. 

Yes, it was business as usual. I came off looking like a superstar. Dean came off looking like a goat. Emory and Jay didn’t register on the performance meter because their designer never gave them a complete design. Nobody in authority had learned anything. I got so depressed that I made serious plans to quit Ford and work for Prince.  

Ray Fregard was the modeling manager for Prince. He couldn’t pay me enough to move to Holland and live in the Prince community, which was conservative, religious, 99.9 percent white and rigidly structured to stay that way. He wanted me to set up and run a studio in Detroit to continue doing what I had done when his son Eric worked with me. It was going to be a tough sell despite the advantage of having a studio on the doorsteps of Ford, GM and Chrysler design headquarters with the creator of the modeling system Prince was trying to emulate running it.  

When Ray couldn’t sell the idea of building a Prince satellite studio in Detroit, our deal fell through. He sill wanted Prince to have as much know-how as I could give it so he asked me to meet with one of his supervisors to show him the basics. Ford wasn’t going to use the system and I didn’t want it to wither on the vine so I told him I would do it if Ford gave me permission.  

I passed on Ray’s request to Greg, who passed it up the ladder to upper management. The request went all the way up to Jack Telnack.  He gave it his blessings. 

Ray’s representative took me to lunch and came clean at the outset on why he wanted to talk to me. It had nothing to do with the fact that his boss and I were old friends or that Tom Truan who had worked with me in Small Car on Dave Turner’s Tempo was running the Ford division of the Prince modeling studios. The issue boiled down to the variety, quantity and quality of work he wasn’t getting out of his Ford division. Tom was in step with the job leaders who were doing work for GM, Chrysler and Toyota but the work we did in Concepts blew away everything Prince had going in all of its automotive divisions. The gap was so great that Prince finally gave up on ever being able to close it.  

Prince had a state of the art prototyping facility that could make anything on its premises that you could conceive. No automotive company had the tools and materials at its immediate disposal that Prince had. The rep couldn’t image how Ford Concepts could do anything faster and better than his company could with less of everything to do it.  

That was his first mistake. I told him so and he pulled out a pen and notepad and started taking notes.  

I showed the Prince rep a small part that I made by hand in less than an hour to illustrate my process. It was a urethane tube with one plugged end like the casing of a bullet. A coiled spring that I also made by hand fit inside with a ball bearing on top of it. A thin urethane lid with a hole in it slightly smaller than the circumference of the bearing fit on top. I left it unattached to show the inner workings but it was easy to see that when the cap was chemically welded to the tube the part would be a self-contained unit.  

The rep looked over the part and handed it back to me. “We have a shop that could turn out hundreds of these things dirt cheap in an hour. You give the guy a drawing or tell him what you want and he does it. No problem. We do stuff like that all the time.” 

Obviously, he missed the point. When you are building a working model you know that you can turn out hundreds of little things like the spring-loaded “bullet casing” quickly for pennies or a fraction of a penny. That’s why you make one that works.  

You know ahead of time what it has to do and, if it’s visible, how it has to look. You don’t know the optimum dimensions, the necessary clearances, the required tensions, etc. You don’t now precisely where or how it will fit into the whole. If it has to be invisible you don’t know where or how to hid it. You take your best guess, you make it and you test it until you get it right. The earlier you can get the job to talk to you and tell you what it needs the faster you can go to prototype without the expense of having to change something in the prototype that didn’t work they way you expected.  

You could put the bullet anywhere and move it around until you found the best place for it. Then you could lock it in, go back and measure where you put it. A competent professional at any point in the process would have to make a determined effort to screw it up. The part I chose to make my demonstration was integral to the demonstration. It was small enough to carry in my shirt pocket. It had moving parts. And you could see by its crudeness that the casing started as a hole I drilled in a block of plastic to accommodate the spring and that I sanded down the corners to make it tubular.  You could see that it didn’t necessary have to be a tube but you could also see way a tube would be better and cheaper.

The light of comprehension broke across the rep’s face and he stared scribbling notes. “Get the part to talk to you early,” he said as he wrote. When I said that, he didn’t understand. When his brain finally caught up with what it meant, my job was done. Tom, Ray or another good modeler could take it from there and run with it.  

That conversation took place October or November of 1990. By the end of 1992 every major model making company in the world was doing what we did in Concepts to some extent and applying the latest computer and laser technology to do it faster, cheaper and better. Nobody got the entire process but enough of them got enough of it to take industrial model making in general to a higher level.  

Think what Ford could have done if it used the process and not given it away. I thought about it a lot. I think about it a lot today. I think about Ford letting Russ Ribbon get away, about Ford forcing Kevin Schaeffer to go to GM and turning thumbs-down on one of the most brilliant and prolific young designers I have ever seen… 

Racism, sexism and other illegal and irrationally discriminatory “isms” practiced at Ford in the last quarter of the 20^th century manifested themselves in different ways than most people would suppose. They mutated like viruses and sometimes it took years to see the patterns that identified them. Sometimes they looked benign. 

Ford recruited a product design apprentice from China named Chelsea Yang along with Russ Ribbon. Chelsea had a quirky and irresistibly likeable personality that reminded me of Russ. Like Russ, her unique sense of humor flowed naturally into her conversations on just about any subject. Because she came from a different culture and she looked so child-like and innocent she could get away with saying outrageous things to anybody. They were the same sorts of things that got Russ into trouble. You never knew what she was going to say but you knew that it was going to be honest, direct and some of it was likely to be funny.  

Chelsea was a world-class artist. She didn’t have a clue about cars but was so obviously capable of mastering what she needed to know that it would have been stupid not to hire her. Besides, females in some aspects of Ford interior design were in vogue based on the sexist notion that women were generally better at doing those jobs than men. Male and Female Asians were generally desirable in Ford at that time because Asians were viewed as being exceptionally intelligent as a group. If Chelsea had been black she wouldn’t have stood a chance. 

Emiline King was Ford’s first and only black female designer. Ford had a place for her, too – in publicity photos. Ballerie Foskey had no interest in designing cars but when she saw that she was on a dead end street as a modeler she switched to Color and Trim where any young, talented woman had an edge on any talented man. The highest qualifying test score ever achieved for Color and Trim was scored by an older white male, Howard Thompson. Ford declined his application.  

Black men need not have applied for a job in interior design. Ford already had Dennis Moses. Management didn’t want another black man doing what Dennis did. That is not to say that many people of any color or sex could do what he did. 

I know how crazy all of that sounds but that’s how it was. Age, race and sex came before individual talent and individual potential in job placement and advancement. Indeed, Ford measured your potential for success in any given sphere of its operations based primarily on the age, sex or ethnic group you belonged to. If you belonged to the wrong group at the wrong time you could hang it up.  

Janet Lee and Chelsea Yang made the benefits of recruiting product designers from nontraditional sources undeniable. Although Ford would never admit it, I’m sure that Russ Ribbon’s cart had a lot to do with it, too. I suspect that’s why Ford sent Dick Petit around the country to evaluate potential product designers at nontraditional schools.  

Petit visited product design departments in colleges that no one in the business would think of as promising grounds for recruiting automotive design talent. It sounded like an excellent plan but when I saw the billboard of group photos showing the students and their projects I knew that it was just another Ford public relations game. The winners and losers popped out of the photos like four-karat diamonds and buckets of snot. You didn’t have to see the photos to know who the winners were going to be. You only had to look at the names of the schools.  

Petit, Calvin, and I viewed the photos together. Petit glowed with satisfaction. Calvin and I scowled. Before us were dozens of snapshots featuring over a hundreds college kids gathered around group’s model. We saw many groups of young white men, a few groups of young white men with a few young white women, a few East Indians and a few East Asians. The students from the automotive art schools we knew had well-designed models with some professional qualities. By comparison, the models that the students from the other colleges made looked as though unsupervised elementary school children threw them together at recess. 

We saw one group snapshot of six or seven young white men and one young black man from North Carolina State. Their foam-core model was laughable but most of the students were grinning as though they had done something wonderful. The black one didn’t look happy at all. If his color hadn’t attracted my attention because his face was the only black one on the board, his expression would have.  

The color issue was difficult to get a handle on. We knew Dick Petit well enough to know that he didn’t select the schools he would visit based on the race of students enrolled in product design classes. As far as Ford was concerned, Jews belonged to a separate race than white people and if blacks weren’t in those classes it was because they chose not to be in them. They could have chosen to be there. None of us was in a position to judge why only one black person in a hundred made that choice. 

I waved my hand across a broad section of the board that didn’t include North Carolina State with its one black student. But what I said included everyone in the photos Petit took at non-traditional auto design schools.  

I said, “This is nothing but show biz. These kids don’t know the basics and you can’t tell what they could do if they did. They can’t win.” 

Petit argued that he made a sincere scouting effort. He said that he took into account the specialized training that accounted for the qualitative differences in the models. He said that he evaluated the students individually and that he saw promise in some of them.  

Calvin pointed to the photo with the black student, the one that stood out most because he and I were black, there were no other blacks on the board and that group had the worst looking model, hands down. He challenged Petit to tell him honestly if he would bring any of those kids to the Design Center.  

Petit accepted the challenge and recruited one student in the photo that he said made a positive impression on him. His name was Guy Martial. He was the unsmiling black student.  

Looking only at the color of the faces on the board you would think that the odds of picking Guy were too slim to be unrelated to his color. That would have been true if the selection was supposed to be random. It was supposed to be based on merit.  

Guy proved that Dick Petit’s selection was based on merit. Like Janet and Russ Guy’s field was industrial product design in general, anything from telephones to tennis shoes. He didn’t grow up drawing cars the way the overwhelming majority of auto designers did and he had no special interest in auto design. Yet, with the help of Dick Petit and Sam Mayers, he was drawing cars at the level of a CCS graduate in less than a month. He left Janet in the dust and he was improving effortlessly at such a phenomenal rate that I expected him to surpass his CCS and Art Center counterparts in less than a year.  

Guy didn’t think he would last 90 days. His negative attitude surprised me. He thought that drawing car exteriors instead of designing products to go in them was a waist of his training and abilities. I agreed with him. Janet Lee and Russ Ribbon did not have to spend all of their time at work drawing cars. I never even got to see any of Guy’s interior product ideas. He told me at lunch, where we could speak freely, that he knew he wasn’t going to make it at Ford because of his color.  

Guy’s prediction would have sounded like paranoia if he weren’t so new to the brand of racism in the Design Center that I had gotten used to and if Janet hadn’t made similar observations when she was new. It would have sounded like a self-fulfilling prophecy if Guy had been doing anything to undermine his own success. He was doing everything that should have assured his success. In the end, Ford did cut him loose.  

Dick Petit, Sam Mayers and other designers I talked to told me that they lobbied to bring him back. Sam told me that Ford offered to bring him back but he refused the offer. It sounded familiar…. 

The ground beneath my feet shifted suddenly when Greg Arceri and Frank DeBono presided over an “Integrity” seminar for modelers from Interiors and Mustang. The integrity issues the seminar was supposed to address involved Ford employees’ dealing with Ford’s growing number of outside vendors. Attendance was mandatory, although none of us could see how ethical behavior with vendors applied to us. We didn’t choose them. We didn’t make deals with them. We couldn’t accept gratuities from them for special favors if we wanted to. 

It was hard enough for me to get past the hypocrisy of Ford management mandating a class on integrity for the GSR employees it was embezzling money from. Watching the silly videotaped vignettes of people trying to decide on the ethical course of action in various situations with Greg and Frank leading us through the ethical decision making process was harder. It felt a little like being in Sunday school with teachers put there only because they were adults and we were children.  

The company supplied the “teachers” with question and answer sheets to guide them in asking the right questions and giving us the right answers in case we got them wrong. The vignettes were written for morons so it was impossible not to grasp the issues we were supposed to see and the answers we were supposed to give. I could stomach the first two little morality plays but the company slipped something into the third one that I couldn’t ignore….

A white man and his black friend were playing golf at a country club that the white man belonged to. Right away I knew that we weren’t supposed to see color and we were supposed to ignore the history of white country clubs in the United States where African-Americans could not become members. That was okay as long as the “integrity” issue we were asked to resolve didn’t require the black man to turn down an improper gift offer from his white friend that was reserved for members only.   

That’s exactly what it required. I kid you not.  

The country club scenario presented us with a genuine integrity issue. The fact that we were obviously suppose to overlook it made it that much more important for me not to. To me, it was like the fatally flawed baseball game exercise with more serious ramifications. I was looking at a formula for any kind of Trojan horse Ford could get its workers to accept without seeing it for what it was. I had only one ethical alterative, which happened to be the only logical way to answer the question.  

I asked, “Can black people join this club?”  

Greg Arceri turned red. Frank DeBono turned into a statue and modelers started grumbling. Some hooted derisively. Some laughed. Some jeered. 

“I knew it,” said one of the modelers. “I new that they would turn this into a race issue. “They” did not refer to the people who wrote the vignette, cast the roles and approved it to present to the troops. It referred to the two black modelers sitting together, one of us speaking and the other nodding his head. 

Greg sputtered. “How am I supposed to know? It doesn’t matter. Why would you ask a question like that? 

I tried to answer. I got shouted down.  

Frank DeBono calmly tried to explain why color didn’t matter.  

Calvin tried to explain why it did. All we needed was one white voice to weigh in on our side. We didn’t get that voice. The session deteriorated into a personal attack on me for turning the session into something that it was not supposed to be. To keep it from getting worse, I left.  

On my way out I saw Charles Purnell. I thought that he was still on foreign assignment in Germany. Later he told me that Frank DeBono said, “I used to respect that guy. Now I don’t.” "That guy" was me. Paul Takessian told me to watch out because Frank threatened to “get” me. Purnell is the one who had to watch out. He now worked for Frank and Frank went after him.