Phil Gevertz
05-15-2011, 12:16 PM
We finished that, and then we did some facelift sketches. By that time, things were slowing down at Nash, and I got a call from Gordon Buehrig who was working at Ford. He said, "There's something opening up at Ford. I want you to come over to the house." So I went over there, and, God, he had the nucleus of the Continental Division -- Harley Copp, chief engineer; and John Reinhart, chief stylist; and several other guys that were there. And Gordon Buehrig was the chief body engineer. So I talked to them, and, jeez, they hired me as John's assistant. I was assistant chief stylist on the job. That was in the Fall of '52.
Of all work experiences, that was it. God, Bill Ford was wonder ful. He had his office right close to Reinhart's and my office. Then we had the old basketball court of the Trade School. We were in those old Trade School buildings in back of the World Headquarters, and the basket ball court was our design studio, and it was nice. And Bill was in every day, and Harley Copp, of course, he's a goddamned genius, that guy. He put together a lot of talented people to build that car.
It was so funny working on that Continental because at that time the stylists were really going berserk. We had bombs and chrome all over the place, and they were starting with the goddamned fins and everything. They told us right from the beginning, "Now, look, this is going to be the new Continental, and we don't want all that crap on this car." I'm sure you're familiar with that design contest they had.
Q: * * *Tell us about it.
A: * * *Harley Copp had set up a package based on a grid system so that perspective drawings -- any of the designers that were doing a design for the Continental -- had to adhere to the package. He had designed these acetate things with the package points on that they could put over top of a rendering and tell if it was high enough, if the air cleaner was covered by the hood and so on.
They did that. Harley worked on that along with the styling stu dio. That was quite a nice system. All of the perspective drawings were good, except the front and rear three-quarter drawings and the vanishing points were too close to the object, and they looked strained. They looked like they were coming out of the paper. It didn't look right. You have to cheat on perspectives. You can't make it exact to look right -- you have to cheat on it. Because when you look at an object, you've got two eyes -- not one eye -- so you have to cheat a little bit when you're doing a perspective.
We did three designs. The first design was a model that was sort of an update of the '48. It had the spare tire in the trunk and the general appearance of the old '48. Then there was another model that was a split-grille model. It was a little more up to date. And then the third model was completely up-to-date. In fact, it was the winning model, and it was the most up to date that was presented. It didn't even have a spare tire on it, which was unusual for designing a Continental. In con junction with that, they had four other design consultants that submitted designs. George Walker submitted three designs.
Q: * * *By this time, he's a consultant?
A: * * *Yes. He was a consultant at Ford. George Walker was one. Walter Buhl Ford did three designs. A fellow by the name of Vince Gardner, who was at Studebaker, did three designs. Buzz Grisinger and Reese Miller had a design firm at that time, and Buzz went with Ford later on -- so did Miller, actually. They did some designs. There were five groups competing against one another. They were out to do 3/8ths models, too, for their edification, but the design was going to be picked from these renderings, and they had to be all the same color -- all blue -- and they had to adhere to the grids. They had to be on package.
They put them up in our design studio over at the Trade School, and Bill Ford took all the members of the committee around separately. It was a design committee that was made up of Ernie Breech, Henry Ford, Benson Ford, Earle MacPherson, Jack Davis, who was head of sales, and I don't who else, but, anyway, I think that was about it. Bill Ford took these people around separately, and they voted on what they wanted. The most advanced model won, and we were really surprised.
Q: * * *Yours and John Reinhart's?
A: * * *That was the John Reinhart design. That was the one that won. So we were elated -- Oh, Christ! If one of those other guys had won, then we would have to build their models and work with them. But inasmuch as we won, now we were on our own to do our own models, which was a big plus. So we started full size from the 3/8ths that we had. We started doing a full size model.
Jack Davis came over one day, and he told us, "I don't think this is going to be a Continental without the spare tire on the back." He said, "You guys got to have a spare tire." We were relieved, frankly, because we wanted it, too.
Q: * * *Bill Ford did not, at this point, insist on a rear tire?
A: * * *No, at this point, he didn't insist, because we were all happy and grinning and would do anything. But when Davis suggested it, we were all happy that we were going to get a hump on the back for a spare tire.
Then we started, and we finished the full-size model. We showed it over at the Design Center out on the patio, and they approved the model with minor variations. At one time, when we showed that model, we had beautiful louvers on the lower front fender. They were gorgeous, The reason we had the damned things, is that engineering requested it, and this is sort of unusual, too. They had a problem with heating under the hood, and they had a cross member that ran right next to the toe board, and they were trapping heat under the hood because of that. They solved the problem by moving the toe board back. They had excess leg room in the thing, anyway.
Q: * * *The toe board is below the firewall?
A: * * *The toe board is where you put your feet on where the accelerator is. They had a lot of leg room, anyway, so they moved that back, and that gave a space between the cross member and the toe board, and they no longer needed those louvers. God, we were heartsick. We thought, oh, Christ, we lost our louvers, and they wouldn't have them if they weren't functional. They just tossed them out.
Q: * * *This is body engineering?
A: * * *This was Harley Copp, chief engineer. Actually, this dealt more with chassis engineering because it was a heating problem under the hood. So, anyway, we lost our beautiful louvers.
Q: * * *Any drawings of those that survived?
A: * * *I've got pictures of the clay model. We finished the clay model then without our louvers, and then we made a cast of the thing and did a beautiful fiberglass model. That's the one on the front there [showing a picture]. If you'll notice, we had wire wheels on that thing. Dayton Wire had designed some wire wheels for us, and they were beautiful. God, they were gorgeous. And the unusual thing about them was the spokes were radial -- they weren't crossed -- and that's the reason we couldn't have them because they weren't strong enough.
Then after we got that model, then we started on the interior. That model was the first time that Ford ever had a model like that -- a non-running model -- that had seats in it that worked and doors that worked, and Ernie Breech and the rest of them could open it up and get in, and sit down, and evaluate the whole car -- look down over the hood. It was a first. The head of our shops -- a fellow by the name of Stan Braum-- he was magnificent. He worked his ass off to get that model finished.
The grille was made out of wood. That was chrome-plated. The bum pers were all fiberglass. Those were chrome-plated. A lot of details were made out of polished aluminum, and it was really beautiful.
Then we finished up our interior, and I was given the job of pre senting the interiors, and that's a mess. You've got all these different colors, and you've got all the variations of how you put them together with the exterior colors. We had all these people -- Ernie Breech and the Ford brothers -- and they were all sitting there, and I was standing in front of them scared to death. Fortunately, nobody gave me any trouble but Ernie Breech. He looked at our red that we were going to paint the car, and he says, "When I was at G.M. I had a Cadillac -- a maroon Cadillac -- and I loved that color." And he looked at our red, and it was a beautiful red color. We worked hard on this thing, and it was just right. All the other cars at that time in '56 -- you remember the awful colors they had? They had pumpkin, they had lavender, and the reds were just almost orange they were so bright. So I showed Ernie all the colors that they were going to have the '56 Cadillac and the '56 Lincoln . It didn't make a damned bit of difference to him. So I said, "Mr. Breech, we'll make that color look more like maroon," which we did. And he was right.
So, anyway, we changed the color, and they bought the whole interior, and that was it. And that model really sold the thing. That was beautiful, really gorgeous.
Q: * * *Full-size fiberglass?
A: * * *Full size. It had the seats in. When you think about it, when you have open doors, you've got to design all the door facings, and we didn't even have that designed yet. We had to guess at what that was going to look like. If you'll remember, the Continental had chrome ends to the doors in the hinge pillars -- the door pillars and the hinge pillars - so we had to chrome those things, and it was quite a job. It was really something.
One of the nice things about working for Bill Ford, he sent Reinhart and I to the Paris Auto Show a couple of years. The second year we went over there, Earle MacPherson was there along with Henry Grebe, who was the chief body engineer. MacPherson was married to a French woman, and they did a lot of traveling over there, and Paris was their home ground. Mrs. MacPherson would buy materials from a company called Tassinari and Chatel. It was a company that was formed back in 1750, and they did fabrics for the palaces. So MacPherson took us over to this place and introduced us to the manager. Reinhart and I were looking at all the silk brocades. God, they were gorgeous. They were samples and out of one of them we saw a little patch cut out, and it was the fleur de lis pattern of the [later] Cadillac, and we said to the guy, "What hap pened here?" He said, "There was an official here from General Motors, and he took that back." That's how Cadillac got that fleur de lis pat tern that they used for years on their trim.
And Reinhart and I picked out a couple of fabrics which they gave us samples of. We were going to have the introduction of the Continental at the Paris Auto Show in 1955 -- in October. We were going to have spe cial trims with this French fabric, and we were going to do special colors. We had this thing all laid out, and it was going to be great. We had a fellow with us by the name of Alan Wilson, who was the assistant sales manager in charge of advertising, and he was going to set up the whole press thing over there. We went to the Palais Chaillot right across from the Eiffel Tower , and we checked the building out, and we found a place that we could put the cars. We wanted a layout of the building, and they didn't have any to give us, so Reinhart and I went down to the basement. They had a layout down in the basement, and we went out and bought some tracing paper, and we traced the layout of that damned building. That was quite a job.
We came back with all this stuff, and they looked at it, and they decided it was going to be too expensive. Do you know what they showed at the Paris Auto Show? One lousy car! No special trim, no special color, no nothing. It was just a grey car with a grey leather interior or something like that. It was the '56 Continental.
Q: * * *They only brought one?
A: * * *Yes. Mark II Continental. In the introduction that we had here in the States, was George Ferret playing the Continental on the piano, and they had a replica of the Eiffel Tower in the showroom. That's where they showed the thing to the press.
Then we built a new plant [in Dearborn ]. This is an interesting story because we were over there at the styling showroom, and we had our model there, and Bill was trying to get twenty-five million dollars to build the plant. He was on the podium practicing his speech. We had the model there, and we were getting the thing prepared and ready for the show the next day, and somebody said, "Hey, we need a crest for this god damned car." We didn't have anything. The podium that Bill was working on had three holes in it. They had the Ford crest, the Mercury crest, and the Lincoln crest. So they said, "We've got to have a crest." So I measured the hole, and then we went on working the rest of the day, and Reinhart and I completely forgot about it. The next morning I woke up at 6 o'clock in the morning, and I thought, my God, we don't have a crest for that damned meeting. So I showered and shaved and got into work. I had thought about the crest. You're always thinking about designing. I had thought about using sort of a combination of all the other three crests. For instance, I used the roundels from the Mercury crest, the rampant lions from the Ford crest, and the star from the Lincoln crest. I cut out a piece of black cardboard, and I was rendering this damned thing in, and Reinhart burst into the studio, and he said, "Hey, we need a crest." I said, "I'm working on it!" And he came over and looked at it, and he didn't have time to change it or do anything. He said, "Well, finish it up."
So I finished this thing up. I rendered it in poster water colors. We took it over to the meeting, and we took a piece of tape, and we put it underneath Bill's speech -- his text. If the thing was a success, then Bill was to take this and flip it over. We had it taped just per fect so it would come right down over the other three holes on top of it, so that it would look like a hole and look like we had our crest. And, sure enough, he sold the plant and got the twenty-five millions dollars, and when he did, he picked up his text, and he took that thing and flipped it over, and, Christ, everybody applauded!
The funny thing about that is that if we hadn't of done that at that time, we would have spent all kinds of hours on heraldry research and all kinds of drawings of things. But, as it was, that was it. I'll never forget one day in the studio, Bill Ford came in, and he was questioning Reinhart about those roundels. He wondered what the hell those were, and John said -- John was wonderful like this -- "Well, those roundels are berries. They represent the Ford brothers, because we think the Ford brothers are the berries." And Bill Ford laughed so loud he snorted. He walked out of the studio, and we never had to explain anything from there on. That was it.
Q: * * *That's a great story.
A: * * *Oh, God, that was funny.
Q: * * *You had a lot of fun in those days in the Continental studio?
A: * * *It was wonderful.
Q: * * *Largely because Bill Ford really let you do what you wanted to do?
A: * * *I'll tell you, we even had poker parties over at the Dearborn Inn, and that was sort of an experience to have Bill Ford mixing your Jack Daniels for you. He was a great guy. I think everybody over there was wonderful. And Reinhart and I, Christ, we were together all those years like brothers. It was quite an experience.
Then they pulled the rug out from under us when the car failed.
Q: * * *How did that happen?
A: * * *The premise of this thing was that we had to make money.
Q: * * *That's the only reason Breech would okay it?
A: * * *That's right. That's why it was priced at $10,000, because that was a lot of money in '56. It was going great. In the very beginning we were selling all kinds of cars. In fact, in the plant they were scratching to find out how to go from -- I think they were up to 16 cars a day. They wanted to go up to 28 or something like that, and they were trying to figure out how to speed up their production. Well, that didn't last long, because the sales just went down. So, we were disbanded. We had about twenty-five guys left over there in Lincoln-Continental design, and only eight of us actually got jobs back in main styling. Reinhart was demoted to an exec designer, and I was demoted to a design analyst, which is like a studio engineer. Christ, it took me six years to work back into styling.
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Of all work experiences, that was it. God, Bill Ford was wonder ful. He had his office right close to Reinhart's and my office. Then we had the old basketball court of the Trade School. We were in those old Trade School buildings in back of the World Headquarters, and the basket ball court was our design studio, and it was nice. And Bill was in every day, and Harley Copp, of course, he's a goddamned genius, that guy. He put together a lot of talented people to build that car.
It was so funny working on that Continental because at that time the stylists were really going berserk. We had bombs and chrome all over the place, and they were starting with the goddamned fins and everything. They told us right from the beginning, "Now, look, this is going to be the new Continental, and we don't want all that crap on this car." I'm sure you're familiar with that design contest they had.
Q: * * *Tell us about it.
A: * * *Harley Copp had set up a package based on a grid system so that perspective drawings -- any of the designers that were doing a design for the Continental -- had to adhere to the package. He had designed these acetate things with the package points on that they could put over top of a rendering and tell if it was high enough, if the air cleaner was covered by the hood and so on.
They did that. Harley worked on that along with the styling stu dio. That was quite a nice system. All of the perspective drawings were good, except the front and rear three-quarter drawings and the vanishing points were too close to the object, and they looked strained. They looked like they were coming out of the paper. It didn't look right. You have to cheat on perspectives. You can't make it exact to look right -- you have to cheat on it. Because when you look at an object, you've got two eyes -- not one eye -- so you have to cheat a little bit when you're doing a perspective.
We did three designs. The first design was a model that was sort of an update of the '48. It had the spare tire in the trunk and the general appearance of the old '48. Then there was another model that was a split-grille model. It was a little more up to date. And then the third model was completely up-to-date. In fact, it was the winning model, and it was the most up to date that was presented. It didn't even have a spare tire on it, which was unusual for designing a Continental. In con junction with that, they had four other design consultants that submitted designs. George Walker submitted three designs.
Q: * * *By this time, he's a consultant?
A: * * *Yes. He was a consultant at Ford. George Walker was one. Walter Buhl Ford did three designs. A fellow by the name of Vince Gardner, who was at Studebaker, did three designs. Buzz Grisinger and Reese Miller had a design firm at that time, and Buzz went with Ford later on -- so did Miller, actually. They did some designs. There were five groups competing against one another. They were out to do 3/8ths models, too, for their edification, but the design was going to be picked from these renderings, and they had to be all the same color -- all blue -- and they had to adhere to the grids. They had to be on package.
They put them up in our design studio over at the Trade School, and Bill Ford took all the members of the committee around separately. It was a design committee that was made up of Ernie Breech, Henry Ford, Benson Ford, Earle MacPherson, Jack Davis, who was head of sales, and I don't who else, but, anyway, I think that was about it. Bill Ford took these people around separately, and they voted on what they wanted. The most advanced model won, and we were really surprised.
Q: * * *Yours and John Reinhart's?
A: * * *That was the John Reinhart design. That was the one that won. So we were elated -- Oh, Christ! If one of those other guys had won, then we would have to build their models and work with them. But inasmuch as we won, now we were on our own to do our own models, which was a big plus. So we started full size from the 3/8ths that we had. We started doing a full size model.
Jack Davis came over one day, and he told us, "I don't think this is going to be a Continental without the spare tire on the back." He said, "You guys got to have a spare tire." We were relieved, frankly, because we wanted it, too.
Q: * * *Bill Ford did not, at this point, insist on a rear tire?
A: * * *No, at this point, he didn't insist, because we were all happy and grinning and would do anything. But when Davis suggested it, we were all happy that we were going to get a hump on the back for a spare tire.
Then we started, and we finished the full-size model. We showed it over at the Design Center out on the patio, and they approved the model with minor variations. At one time, when we showed that model, we had beautiful louvers on the lower front fender. They were gorgeous, The reason we had the damned things, is that engineering requested it, and this is sort of unusual, too. They had a problem with heating under the hood, and they had a cross member that ran right next to the toe board, and they were trapping heat under the hood because of that. They solved the problem by moving the toe board back. They had excess leg room in the thing, anyway.
Q: * * *The toe board is below the firewall?
A: * * *The toe board is where you put your feet on where the accelerator is. They had a lot of leg room, anyway, so they moved that back, and that gave a space between the cross member and the toe board, and they no longer needed those louvers. God, we were heartsick. We thought, oh, Christ, we lost our louvers, and they wouldn't have them if they weren't functional. They just tossed them out.
Q: * * *This is body engineering?
A: * * *This was Harley Copp, chief engineer. Actually, this dealt more with chassis engineering because it was a heating problem under the hood. So, anyway, we lost our beautiful louvers.
Q: * * *Any drawings of those that survived?
A: * * *I've got pictures of the clay model. We finished the clay model then without our louvers, and then we made a cast of the thing and did a beautiful fiberglass model. That's the one on the front there [showing a picture]. If you'll notice, we had wire wheels on that thing. Dayton Wire had designed some wire wheels for us, and they were beautiful. God, they were gorgeous. And the unusual thing about them was the spokes were radial -- they weren't crossed -- and that's the reason we couldn't have them because they weren't strong enough.
Then after we got that model, then we started on the interior. That model was the first time that Ford ever had a model like that -- a non-running model -- that had seats in it that worked and doors that worked, and Ernie Breech and the rest of them could open it up and get in, and sit down, and evaluate the whole car -- look down over the hood. It was a first. The head of our shops -- a fellow by the name of Stan Braum-- he was magnificent. He worked his ass off to get that model finished.
The grille was made out of wood. That was chrome-plated. The bum pers were all fiberglass. Those were chrome-plated. A lot of details were made out of polished aluminum, and it was really beautiful.
Then we finished up our interior, and I was given the job of pre senting the interiors, and that's a mess. You've got all these different colors, and you've got all the variations of how you put them together with the exterior colors. We had all these people -- Ernie Breech and the Ford brothers -- and they were all sitting there, and I was standing in front of them scared to death. Fortunately, nobody gave me any trouble but Ernie Breech. He looked at our red that we were going to paint the car, and he says, "When I was at G.M. I had a Cadillac -- a maroon Cadillac -- and I loved that color." And he looked at our red, and it was a beautiful red color. We worked hard on this thing, and it was just right. All the other cars at that time in '56 -- you remember the awful colors they had? They had pumpkin, they had lavender, and the reds were just almost orange they were so bright. So I showed Ernie all the colors that they were going to have the '56 Cadillac and the '56 Lincoln . It didn't make a damned bit of difference to him. So I said, "Mr. Breech, we'll make that color look more like maroon," which we did. And he was right.
So, anyway, we changed the color, and they bought the whole interior, and that was it. And that model really sold the thing. That was beautiful, really gorgeous.
Q: * * *Full-size fiberglass?
A: * * *Full size. It had the seats in. When you think about it, when you have open doors, you've got to design all the door facings, and we didn't even have that designed yet. We had to guess at what that was going to look like. If you'll remember, the Continental had chrome ends to the doors in the hinge pillars -- the door pillars and the hinge pillars - so we had to chrome those things, and it was quite a job. It was really something.
One of the nice things about working for Bill Ford, he sent Reinhart and I to the Paris Auto Show a couple of years. The second year we went over there, Earle MacPherson was there along with Henry Grebe, who was the chief body engineer. MacPherson was married to a French woman, and they did a lot of traveling over there, and Paris was their home ground. Mrs. MacPherson would buy materials from a company called Tassinari and Chatel. It was a company that was formed back in 1750, and they did fabrics for the palaces. So MacPherson took us over to this place and introduced us to the manager. Reinhart and I were looking at all the silk brocades. God, they were gorgeous. They were samples and out of one of them we saw a little patch cut out, and it was the fleur de lis pattern of the [later] Cadillac, and we said to the guy, "What hap pened here?" He said, "There was an official here from General Motors, and he took that back." That's how Cadillac got that fleur de lis pat tern that they used for years on their trim.
And Reinhart and I picked out a couple of fabrics which they gave us samples of. We were going to have the introduction of the Continental at the Paris Auto Show in 1955 -- in October. We were going to have spe cial trims with this French fabric, and we were going to do special colors. We had this thing all laid out, and it was going to be great. We had a fellow with us by the name of Alan Wilson, who was the assistant sales manager in charge of advertising, and he was going to set up the whole press thing over there. We went to the Palais Chaillot right across from the Eiffel Tower , and we checked the building out, and we found a place that we could put the cars. We wanted a layout of the building, and they didn't have any to give us, so Reinhart and I went down to the basement. They had a layout down in the basement, and we went out and bought some tracing paper, and we traced the layout of that damned building. That was quite a job.
We came back with all this stuff, and they looked at it, and they decided it was going to be too expensive. Do you know what they showed at the Paris Auto Show? One lousy car! No special trim, no special color, no nothing. It was just a grey car with a grey leather interior or something like that. It was the '56 Continental.
Q: * * *They only brought one?
A: * * *Yes. Mark II Continental. In the introduction that we had here in the States, was George Ferret playing the Continental on the piano, and they had a replica of the Eiffel Tower in the showroom. That's where they showed the thing to the press.
Then we built a new plant [in Dearborn ]. This is an interesting story because we were over there at the styling showroom, and we had our model there, and Bill was trying to get twenty-five million dollars to build the plant. He was on the podium practicing his speech. We had the model there, and we were getting the thing prepared and ready for the show the next day, and somebody said, "Hey, we need a crest for this god damned car." We didn't have anything. The podium that Bill was working on had three holes in it. They had the Ford crest, the Mercury crest, and the Lincoln crest. So they said, "We've got to have a crest." So I measured the hole, and then we went on working the rest of the day, and Reinhart and I completely forgot about it. The next morning I woke up at 6 o'clock in the morning, and I thought, my God, we don't have a crest for that damned meeting. So I showered and shaved and got into work. I had thought about the crest. You're always thinking about designing. I had thought about using sort of a combination of all the other three crests. For instance, I used the roundels from the Mercury crest, the rampant lions from the Ford crest, and the star from the Lincoln crest. I cut out a piece of black cardboard, and I was rendering this damned thing in, and Reinhart burst into the studio, and he said, "Hey, we need a crest." I said, "I'm working on it!" And he came over and looked at it, and he didn't have time to change it or do anything. He said, "Well, finish it up."
So I finished this thing up. I rendered it in poster water colors. We took it over to the meeting, and we took a piece of tape, and we put it underneath Bill's speech -- his text. If the thing was a success, then Bill was to take this and flip it over. We had it taped just per fect so it would come right down over the other three holes on top of it, so that it would look like a hole and look like we had our crest. And, sure enough, he sold the plant and got the twenty-five millions dollars, and when he did, he picked up his text, and he took that thing and flipped it over, and, Christ, everybody applauded!
The funny thing about that is that if we hadn't of done that at that time, we would have spent all kinds of hours on heraldry research and all kinds of drawings of things. But, as it was, that was it. I'll never forget one day in the studio, Bill Ford came in, and he was questioning Reinhart about those roundels. He wondered what the hell those were, and John said -- John was wonderful like this -- "Well, those roundels are berries. They represent the Ford brothers, because we think the Ford brothers are the berries." And Bill Ford laughed so loud he snorted. He walked out of the studio, and we never had to explain anything from there on. That was it.
Q: * * *That's a great story.
A: * * *Oh, God, that was funny.
Q: * * *You had a lot of fun in those days in the Continental studio?
A: * * *It was wonderful.
Q: * * *Largely because Bill Ford really let you do what you wanted to do?
A: * * *I'll tell you, we even had poker parties over at the Dearborn Inn, and that was sort of an experience to have Bill Ford mixing your Jack Daniels for you. He was a great guy. I think everybody over there was wonderful. And Reinhart and I, Christ, we were together all those years like brothers. It was quite an experience.
Then they pulled the rug out from under us when the car failed.
Q: * * *How did that happen?
A: * * *The premise of this thing was that we had to make money.
Q: * * *That's the only reason Breech would okay it?
A: * * *That's right. That's why it was priced at $10,000, because that was a lot of money in '56. It was going great. In the very beginning we were selling all kinds of cars. In fact, in the plant they were scratching to find out how to go from -- I think they were up to 16 cars a day. They wanted to go up to 28 or something like that, and they were trying to figure out how to speed up their production. Well, that didn't last long, because the sales just went down. So, we were disbanded. We had about twenty-five guys left over there in Lincoln-Continental design, and only eight of us actually got jobs back in main styling. Reinhart was demoted to an exec designer, and I was demoted to a design analyst, which is like a studio engineer. Christ, it took me six years to work back into styling.
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