As a 19-year-old, Chuck Jordan received encouragement from his mother to enter a design contest sponsored by the Fisher Body Division of General Motors. Jordan spent 700 hours on his 1/12-scale dream car, which featured a convex windshield and a pillarless hardtop design.
For his efforts in the 1946 Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild competition, he won the First Senior prize and received a $4,000 scholarship to be applied to his studies at MIT. Jordan went on to work for GM, rising to become Cadillac’s director of design when he was 30 years old; he ultimately became vice president of design.
It was supposed to work that way. The Craftsman’s Guild competition started in 1930, three years after GM created its design department, then known as the Art and Colour Section. Harley Earl, the director, brimmed with ideas, but he found a dearth of trained designers to execute them. The solution, it seemed, was to engage young minds, hearts, and hands.
GM had acquired a 60 percent interest in Fisher Body in 1919, and it became the automaker’s main coachbuilder (a full merger was completed in 1926). Under its aegis, the Craftsman’s Guild competition benefited from extensive promotion through magazine ads.
Boys aged 12 to 19 enrolled in the Guild for free by mailing in a business reply card or signing up at any GM dealership. (The card also solicited consumer data on names, styles, ages, and colors of cars in the family fleet.)
“The Fisher Body Corporation sponsored this inspiring movement,” an ad stated. “(It) believed that this exercise of creative talent, this quickening of the hand of youth, are essential steps toward the development of high ideals — that only by training the coming generation can fine craftsmanship be perpetuated and superior coachcraft be assured.”
Contestants ordered and assembled a 1/18-scale paper replica of the Napoleonic carriage that became the “Body by Fisher” logo in 1922. Awards amounted to $75,000, and the recipients included grand prize winners who received $5,000 each for university tuition in the United States or Canada. Two winners from each state or the Canadian Guild district got $100 each and came to Detroit for an all-expenses-paid convention. Other cash awards were distributed across the country.
The model kit of four printed sheets required a toolkit comprising scissors, a sharp pocket knife, and glue. Paper strips and medium-weight cardboard would stiffen wheels, body braces, and spring leaves. Thin brads served as axles, and hairpin wire made up the door handles and footman’s handrail.
Edward Matusek, of Royal Oak, entered the 1932 contest. Although he didn’t win, he received a certificate “in token of his energy in carrying this task to completion and in recognition of his efforts to develop his abilities and to perfect himself in the knowledge and practice of sincere craftsmanship.” His model survives today in the collection of the Detroit Historical Society. Matusek later founded his own model-car company, called General Models, and helped to launch the plastic model-making craze.
The Henry Ford in Dearborn has the Napoleonic coach made by Charles Gadd, of Spokane, Wash., who went on to MIT and spent 39 years on GM’s research staff.
From 1937 until 1968, when the competition ended in the U.S., the contestants’ dream cars emerged as the focus. Napoleonic coaches were phased out in 1947. Copycat competitions were established in the 1960s through GM operations in the United Kingdom, West Germany, Switzerland, and Australia. The German program lasted until 1979.
Historian A. Wayne Ferens writes that, in the late 1950s, Fisher Body “employed over 200 Guild graduates working in their engineering department; at GM Styling, 35 percent of the stylists were Guild graduates.”
By then, transportation design programs were being established at the college level; digital design tools have more recently become pre-eminent. Paper models may now seem quaint, but there’s no denying their effectiveness.
