People · Harley Earl · Chapter 6 of 6

The Torch

Detroit — 1954–1958

Earl's bet nearly fails. The 1954 production run of 3,640 cars sells sluggishly — nearly a third sit unmoved on dealer lots as the year closes — and for 1955 Chevrolet cuts production to just 700. Inside GM's accounting offices, a car this slow-selling is a candidate for cancellation, full stop, no sentiment attached. What keeps the Corvette alive through this stretch is not really Earl's doing alone: Ford's new Thunderbird has just launched, and GM's institutional pride will not tolerate retreating from a fight it started in public. But Earl's early conviction — that the car was worth building at all — is the reason there was a fight to have.

The rescue, when it comes, comes from engineering rather than styling: Ed Cole's new small-block V8 lands under the hood for 1955, and a hard-charging Russian-born engineer named Zora Arkus-Duntov — hired that same year, in part because he'd written Chevrolet an unsolicited letter after seeing Earl's car at that very Motorama — starts turning Earl's beautiful shape into something that could also perform. It is a partnership neither man had planned and both needed: Earl supplied the reason the car existed at all; Duntov supplied the reason it deserved to keep existing.

Passing the studio

Earl runs GM Styling for another three years past the Corvette's rescue, still the tallest, loudest, most theatrical presence in any design review, still insisting that his name and no one else's be associated with the department he built from nothing in 1927. But GM's mandatory retirement age catches up with everyone eventually, even Harley Earl. In 1958, at sixty-five, he steps down as Vice President of Design.

His successor is not a surprise to anyone who has watched the studio for the past two decades: Bill Mitchell, recruited by Earl himself back in 1935, groomed through the Cadillac studio and a dozen landmark GM designs, is the obvious and hand-picked choice. It is, in its way, the same transition Earl staged for the Corvette itself a few years earlier — a creation handed off to someone with the conviction to keep fighting for it. Mitchell will spend the next nineteen years doing exactly that, reshaping the Corvette twice over in the process.

Earl dies on April 10, 1969, in West Palm Beach, Florida, following a stroke, eleven years into a retirement that never quite dimmed his reputation as the man who taught Detroit that a car's shape was worth fighting for. Every fin, every dream car, every design studio in the industry that followed his model — and, not least, every Corvette built since — carries some trace of the blacksmith's son who decided cars were costume long before Detroit agreed with him.