"Corvette was a little thing that I started" said HJE
LOOK magazine article states, Harley and Thomas Keating, Chevrolet's top man, takes "cornering" demonstration in the Corvette, first mass-produced plastic-body car. Designer Harley Earl is at the wheel.
The National Corvette Museum promotes, "Harley Earl is the father of the Corvette. The Corvette was his idea pure and simple." 70-years in the making, the Corvette has grown into a phenomenal brand and has a unique and amazing history all its own.
What we do below is present some new historical documentation (facts from the 50s) on the rise of the Corvette and two of its prime players.
After all, the Corvette has become a shinning success story over the last half-century and provides countless positive examples coming out of America's automotive capital. Since the heritage is such a big winner, it's natural to want to build on the legacy and share newly discovered material. Tom Keating and Harley Earl were two giants behind the rise of the Corvette and were also known in Motordom's heyday for kicking butt when it came to sales leadership and gaining new market share for GM's greatest brand, Chevrolet.
The First All-American Sports Car To Go Into Production
Their names (especially the synergy of Keating and Earl working together) often remains elusive in today's auto world, but their business relationship and playbook tactics are timeless. Key ingredients behind their "heightened cooperation" in business leadership can be duplicated, leveraged and re-spun by auto execs inside Chevrolet and GM today who are naturally taking a stab at being auto-victorious once again. It's not some complicated system either, just a simple means to an end. We spotlight these dynamic leader's techniques knowing first-hand that the process is inspirational, and, the leaders from Detroit's winning auto world past can be reused as role models for auto industry leaders, especially in America, moving forward.
The Corvette dream car was so freshly minted in late 1952, GM's PR guys in NYC misspell "COURVETTE" inside the Jan., '53 press release. Over the last 50-years, this rare historical press release (click to read pg-1 of 4) was never published in any book or magazine.
This photo above (notice original full-size Corvette rendering cross promoting new '55 Chevy) shows how GM began leveraging the new Corvette brand to sell other Chevrolet products from the very beginning. Why? Because the sports car was an overnight sensation in the public eye and hence a huge promotional home run for GM. The first Corvette came to life in the Chevy Studio of GM Styling at the Argo Bldg. in downtown Detroit.
Regardless of what most tried and true Corvette enthusiasts and auto execs have read up to this point on the early years of Corvette, Tom Keating may very well be the second most important hero behind this sports cars creation. Back then, Keating was like many of GM's finest leaders, the strong and silent type. He was softhearted, but hard-nosed when he had to be. For example, prototypical of GM's leadership team members of this era, Keating never made a habit of tooting his own horn or seeking out a photo op of him with sexy new Chevy product designs (which there were plenty) coming to market. At this time, self aggrandizement by top GM leaders was verboten.
Saying this, and knowing how GM's leaders went on to change going into the 1960s, it is no surprise Keating's name is not well-known these days in Corvette history. Boiling down on the facts presented at this link allow anyone to see Keating was Harley's right-hand man in Chevrolet. Dated newspaper articles, below, clearly support Keating being the top champion within Chevrolet nurturing the infant Corvette baby to life during its most tender phase.
What's Good for Chevrolet and Corvette are Good for the American Auto Industry
In as far as important new concepts (like the '54 Corvair sister of the Corvette featured above), Harley dealt directly with the Chevrolet Division's high boss, Tom Keating.
Thomas Keating with Diane Shore at the Motorama.
Creating new offspring, Keating and Earl collaborated on fostering the rise of brand new different kinds of Corvettes, too. As reported above, these were the sister Corvette cars known as the Motorama Nomad and Corvair. Earl and Keating are the unsung leaders (the decision makers) who built up the early weaker-performing Corvettes and steered the brand they'd brought to life to quickly become America's first high-performance race car. Other second tier Chevy engineers coming up inside the division, before Keating stepped down in late 1956, were not making important decisions regarding Corvette's future. Plus, Keating went on to be one of GM’s powerful board of directors.
Fast forward to 1980, and Keating's dominant role played in the beginning of the Corvette had been greatly diminished in most Corvette history books. Why? Because a new corporate culture had risen up in General Motor from 1965 to '79 when the leaders during this period were repeatedly shocked year-after-year by the numbers and stats supporting a new market share direction for every division of GM, especially the prized one, Chevrolet. All were trending lower! So, misinformation on any recent winning history, particularly the coveted Corvette brand, was in short supply. As went the new downward direction of GM (and it was still the largest company of the twentieth century), an all-new bias gained traction: GM's leaders began spinning corporate history “differently” to suit their own agendas. It's not like this is some rare occurrence in the worlds of big business, politics and history.
Worth noting, nobody inside GM ever did anything wrong. We’re just exposing this story’s inside-take that, when closely examined, has a great deal to do with human nature tendencies.
'54 Chevy Corvette Corvair "fast back" design. Afterwards, Harley's vision was to do for the Buick division what he’d just done for Chevrolet and he created the two seater Wildcat II. Since Buick had bigger engines than Chevy, the Wildcat II, pictured below offered a V-8! Of course Harley had no intentions for this recipe to stop with just two of GM's "Fabulous Five Brands" so he continued and developed other high performance vehicles (you could call them GM's first post WW II muscle cars) by creating La Espada and El Camino for the Cadillac luxury brand; Oldsmobile had the F-88 and Harley and his team of design engineers at GM Styling gave Pontiac the Bonneville Special.
The 1954 Buick Wildcat II dream car helped launch the "muscle car" theme and/or offering inside Detroit's modern auto world. Most of Earl's custom Motorama show cars boasted V-8s, and the auto writer Art Lauring's comment nails it, “the Wildcat II is propelled by a 220-h.p. engine that boasts four carburetors with flame arresters.” published in the L.A. Times during March ’54.
Parade of Success from the ’50s
At this time in GM's history, everything "concept" and "experimental car" related, came to life in Earl's GM Styling fortress. Don't take our word for it, there's a trove of irrefutably news articles of the era, like the ones shown here, on GM's first modern high performance sports cars that were all brought to life (hand-made) within the Styling Section of this company that went on to debut at all GM’s Motoramas. As many car historians recognize, these famous new smaller car offerings were often ahead of their time. Although Tom Keating left Chevrolet in '56, he stayed on in GM as a VP who also sat on the board of directors at GM. He and Harley introduced engineering and design advancements that went on to define the top selling performance and strength of all Chevrolet cars and trucks moving into the late 1950s and early '60s.
They called it "Styling Leadership" and Chevy was gaining new market share hand over fist. Chevrolet's share was north of 25% in '56. America's greatest auto maker hasn't seen rising sales stats like these ever since!
Of course there were secondary team members, many of which were "new-hires," from both Chevy's engineering world and GM Styling, but let's not forget that this unique time period preceded a 5-year window (1957 to 1962) that produced Mr. Earl's very last designs, that coincide with Chevrolet's market share peaking out at an all-time high of 32 percent in 1962! New historical insight (newspaper stories here support the claim) that these leaders were able to make big behind-the-scenes decisions to get the job done; all the while other rivaling divisions in GM along with leading auto journalists often didn't have a clue what was going on until the product designs were about to be launched. And in the end, maverick leaders like Earl and Keating shared the credit with their up-and-coming subordinates.
This news story (Feb, '53) on Corvette shows the secrecy Earl and Keating used to not only fool the auto journalistic community, but GM's largest competitors, too. This news writer reports the Corvette is probably a year away and will be built in steel, when in fact Keating knows his Chevrolet Div. is only four months away from launching America's first volume production sports car and it's going to be built from a revolutionary new composite, Fiberglass. GM's leaders knew how it was best having a veil of secrecy before, during and after the launch. It also helped to create more mystique behind a product.
This full-page ad in the Los Angeles Examiner demonstrates HJE's first Chevrolet car design for the bowtie division back in '27, with flapper girls, and 26-years later he's releasing modern well-engineered vehicles most Americans find, "drop-dead gorgeous" and are a quantum leap from any production cars made in the 1920s!
There's a mountain of evidence (news stories like this one), from the 1920s into the 1960s factually demonstrating, in and outside of GM, H.J. Earl was a multifaceted "Engineer" and/or "Designer."
Modern Engineer
After Harley Earl's death in 1969, it became commonplace for GM not to mention this man's "Engineer” title when describing him in any historic record. Hence, a new corporate vernacular was used thereafter to sum up Mr. Earl’s career milestones and legacy in the history books to historians, media members and the general public. It wasn’t malicious, GM just believed it was in their best interest, or a good idea, to categorize Harley Earl as being, "a Designer" or "a Stylist" over his entire GM career. But this pigeonholing has proven to be very harmful for it’s not factually correct. After all, Harley Earl was one of GM and Detroit’s most powerful engineers of the 20th Century.
Often, Harley's all-new position within GM created intense unrest and after retiring, leading traditional engineers and financial treasury officers of General Motors had a field day carving up his GM Styling empire. Last sentence in above article, "That's why it pays to dream a lot if your job happens to be figuring out what lies ahead in the automotive field" was a significant new area and/or profession for all auto makers, and yes, it originated in Pioneer-Earl's very first design dept. within GM.
Another vivid full-page Motorama newspaper ad promoting GM's revolutionary, "Twelve Plastic Dream Cars."
In three short years, Corvette had become a racing success story and on its way to being an American Legend. Sporting NASCAR's logo, here's the official '56 pacecar with racer Betty Skelton; also notice HJE's Corvette round logo behind back wheel.
Going into the mid-1960s, Chevrolet's sales statistics started waning. Did this have to do with the new mantle of leadership inside Chevy and GM? That's for you to decide, but what's critical right now is the current market share of Chevrolet (near 16 percent) in 2020. More importantly, what direction is GM headed? We believe at this website that providing inspiration behind the greatest leaders of Chevrolet's modern history, like auto execs from the 1950s who were truly legendary at gaining market share, can only assist this company's current leaders to go out there and, "kick some butt" and win and gain new market share! Having the right role models is everything. So, in order to reverse the market share curse (of a decade's long downtrend) auto execs might want to rediscover GM's most prolific winning streak, every year from the late 1920s into the early 1960s).
Putting together an action plan which includes drawing a line in the sand declaring, "no more losing market share" is a necessary part of this process. It's imperative for GM's largest brand, hell anyone in the auto business today knows that, "Chevrolet is GM" to start regaining market share. Only great leadership and posting proven positive results can pull something like this off again.
When interviewed, Chevrolet car designer, Robert (Bob) Caderat said, "We believed the 'E' stood for Earl, but Harley said the ‘E’ (notice second logo, above, on first Corvette generation, rendered by Bob Caderat) was for 'Engineering.' "
Harley's first logo style, above, shows his American and checkered flag symbol. But GM Legal balked (it was still a couple of decades before it became okay and cool in marketing and advertising to use a U.S. flag). So, Harley Earl took the legal eagle's cautious cue and instead cleverly fused in a metaphorical "red flag" with the same decorative fluer-de-lis design he used on styling his very first car for GM in '27, the Cadillac La Salle. For the most part, Harley's timeless Corvette emblem endured on all the different Chevy Corvette generations leading up to current C-7 model. Having learned many great show-business tactics during his years making autos in California for Hollywood bigwigs, long before having moved to Detroit, this unique car architect not only knew how to create a great brand, but the necessary mystique to stand behind it!
Original '53 Corvette brochure cover.