The historic design behind one of Detroit’s giants.

~Beautiful Machines~

The Cadillac has a story to tell. It’s a story that draws upon themes of friendship, war and American industry. It’s also a story about family. And like any good American car story, it starts in Detroit.

Priscilla Mead remembers the first time she rode in her grandfather’s one-of-a-kind 1952 Cadillac two-seat custom convertible not long after it was built in the Motor City.

“I was five years old when my grandpa first let me ride in it,” she says. “I jumped onto the armrest and, from then on, that was my special seat.”

And it was her family’s special car. Mead would come to better understand how special a car it was as she learned exactly how it came into being.

Mead’s grandpa was Harold R. “Bill” Boyer, an executive vice president at GM during the ‘50s, when General Motors commanded half of the US auto market. That was enough to inspire government officials in Washington to train their trust-busting cannons on the manufacturer for an extended period of time.

As auto brokerage hub Gooding & Company says on its Web site, it was a time when “General Motors bestrode the automotive world like a colossus; a time when its principals could dream ambitious, outsized dreams and then turn them into three-dimensional reality.”

Those principals included Boyer. As a VP, he worked closely with the undisputed father of car design, the man widely credited with leading GM to its mid-century near-monopoly, and the man who would design Mead’s unique convertible: Harley Earl.

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To say that Harley Earl had an effect on automotive design is like saying Thomas Edison did a little something for the lightbulb. Harley Earl literally invented the concept of making cars look good.

Before Earl, cars were a monotonous assembly line of black, tall shoeboxes, constructed to run, not to be admired or even remembered. Earl’s stylistic inventions became so deeply ingrained into automotive engineering so quickly that today they are second nature to all Americans, regardless of their affinity for automobiles.

As the first-ever head of GM’s Art and Color Section and later Vice President of GM Styling, he started a revolution. He came up with concept cars, the creative and futuristic models that have driven car design since their inception. He was the first to experiment with colors other than soot black. He was the first to use clay modeling to experiment with car designs, the first to introduce annual model changes. He invented the Corvette and a slew of stunning (and famous) prototypes like the original LeSabre and the legendary Firebirds. He introduced tail fins, Dagmar bumpers, two-tone paint jobs, electric windows, turn signals, hidden spares, and keyless entry. Along the way, according to Clyde Hensley, product expert at GM’s media archives in Detroit, “he single-handedly designed 50 million GM products.”

His work was so visionary, so evocative, that he drew comparisons not to other car designers, but to great artists of any medium. In automotive circles, he’s known as “da Vinci of Detroit.”

Hensley gives Earl a nod over one of history’s most celebrated artists when speaking of the recent auction of Earl’s F-88—one of his original concept cars, which Earl called “dream cars”—for a record $3 million in Arizona last January.

“They pay much more than that for a Picasso and you don’t know what it is,” Hensley says. “I can’t understand that. [The F-88] was a one-of-a-kind rolling piece of sculpture, of American history. I don’t see how you can put a price tag on it. It’s priceless.”

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Bill Boyer and Harley Earl were more than co-workers; they were also buddies. They would fly GM planes to Rose City, Michigan, for deer and duck hunting trips whenever they could, sometimes squeezing a trip out of just an afternoon off. They were also part of a staff working on top-secret projects that helped win World War II.

Richard Earl, who says he has spent 10,000 hours researching the legacy of his grandfather—and feels that GM has let his grandfather’s bold tradition of innovation slip away—contends Boyer’s and Earl’s participation on this staff was a sacred, if quiet, accomplishment. He describes it as an untold story behind Harley Earl, and, quite directly, the conception of Mead’s convertible.

He points out that they worked in very heavy secrecy on a range of products, and that Boyer served in a number of key capacities for the military during wartime, including director of military products and head of Cadillac tank production and manufacturing. He says Boyer often worked with Earl to develop cutting-edge technologies like the amphibious DUCW, or “duck,” that was so critical to the Allie’s successful D-Day invasion.

“They were working on a war effort, using American know-how to out-produce the Nazis,” Richard Earl says. “They were building an arsenal of democracy, an arsenal of designs.

“They were converting factories to more efficiently make war machines. They used a math-based engineering method that hadn’t been used before, a model GM used exclusively.” (Earl lists this breakthrough—development of a model of modern design in mass production—as number three in his grandfather’s top 10 milestones on his Web site, www.carofthecentury.com, a massive, dazzling compilation of information dedicated to Harley Earl’s genius.)

“If it wasn’t for GM’s volume of production expertise,” Richard Earl says, “World War II—a war of attrition—would’ve been prolonged.”

And just maybe, according to him, that nice ride wouldn’t have been built for Bill Boyer.

“Harley designed cars for celebs, dignitaries, military leaders. Bill was a very good friend, but there’s more to the story.

“He did it because Bill Boyer was part of the team that won World War II.”

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In a January 23, 2005 Financial Times article about the viability of classic cars as investments, noted car auctioneer Craig Jackson of Barrett-Jackson was quoted as saying, “A car with a story often appreciates in value.” Car dealers like to call profound histories like the one behind Mead’s convertible “provenance.”

But that’s not to say that the custom ‘52’s sleek aesthetics and strong engine won’t rival that of any roadster at Pebble Beach’s Concours d’Elegance this Sunday, backstory or not.

According to Mead, her grandpa requested that his drop-top be an extravagant two-seater—inspired by the dream car LeSabre and XP-300 two-seaters Earl was developing at the time—built on the lengthy platform of the contemporary Cadillac. It was a bold vision that stretched the limits of elegance even for Earl, who argued the body was just too big to carry a two-person carriage with any grace.

Nevertheless, in 1950 the two friends pulled a new 1951 Coupe de Ville off the assembly line and the transformation began in a building across from GM headquarters, where Earl maintained his office upstairs. There he could personally oversee the design of the car “from the tire treads up,” as Richard Earl says, starting with the shortening of its wheelhouse and doors. He then added a top that disappeared slyly under a hinged metal panel, a design first that would go on the iconic LeSabre dream car and carry over to the industry-shaking Corvette. Later he added ’52 Cadillac grill components, ’53 Eldorado wire wheels, and a customized tuck-and-roll leather-trimmed bench seat. For the pilot that flew Earl up for their hunting trips, the legendary designer added aircraft instrumentation on the dash that included a manifold pressure gauge, an altimeter, a tachometer, a compass and a stopwatch. Boyer eventually added a 250-horse, 1955 Cadillac V-8 engine after he took delivery of his one-off masterpiece.

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Priscilla Mead, who bought the Cadillac from her grandfather’s estate when the family wanted to auction it off in 1988, anticipates a moment Sunday at Pebble where emotion will kick in.

“I see myself holding my breath to the point of not realizing it,” she says. “Probably crying, knowing it’s been my baby, that it’s been in the family for 53 years. But the market is hot and I want someone to have it who can take care of it, use it so other people could enjoy it. It’s meant to be viewed.”

For his part, Richard Earl would like to see her hold onto her Cadillac until the untold stories of Harley Earl truly circulate and the significance sets in that the car was built for a patriotic purpose by the country’s foremost design mind.

“She has no idea what she has,” he says. “I told her the car’s worth $1.5 million.”

Hearing that the auction house Gooding & Company has the car posted on their Web site with a $350,000-$500,000 range, Earl sounds disgusted. “They don’t know what they’re talking about,” he says. “Harley’s inside story is so true and so fresh that even veteran auction houses don’t understand why the man’s automotive artwork can fetch so much.”

He pauses. “The story just hasn’t been told.”