Word: buick
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...years ago, a G.M. designer in his spare time tricked up his Buick with holes in the fender and flashing lights inside to create an impression of supercharged power. Curtice happened to see the car. Result: the next models were the three-holer and four-holer cars. When Harley Earl first showed Curtice the panoramic windshield on the experimental Sabre and Buick XP-3OO, Curtice's reaction was typical: "Boy, that's good. Let's put it into production." When G.M. engineers experimented with such devices as the foot parking brake and Dynaflow transmission, Curtice, the perfect...
...make the changes he wants, Curtice can also find corner-cutting tricks. When he first saw sketches of a Buick that carried the fender line back into the body for the first time, he did not wait for the year-long process of changing dies. Instead, he devised a method of bolting extra panels of metal on to the old body to get the new style into his showrooms as quickly as possible. While looking over one recent model, Curtice spotted a flaw in its lines, was told that it was far too late to do anything about it. Said...
...from Flint, where he lives simply with his wife in an eleven-room house that is cared for by only one servant. (Daughters Dorothy Anne, 21, and Catherine Dale, 17, are away at school; Mary Leila, 25, is married.) On weekends he likes to drop in on the nearby Buick division, shoot the breeze with anyone from a sweeper to a foreman...
...Spread. With time out for a World War I stint overseas in the field artillery (he came out a private first class), Curtice rapidly rose to AC assistant general manager, vice president, and, at 36, president. Then, in 1933, came an opportunity born of disaster. General Motors' Buick, for years a notable success as the safe, sound and respectable "doctor's car," was in dire trouble. It had gone up in price, fallen behind in styling, grown fat and heavy (one model was inelegantly nicknamed the "pregnant Buick," the "bedpan Buick" and the "bathtub Buick"). When Depression struck...
Curtice's first decision was to "make a car to sell at lower cost"; his second was to get Harley Earl, who was driving a Cadillac at the time, to design a Buick "you would like to drive." The result was a new, light and cheap Special. As the new car was being readied for production, Curtice swung around the country getting to know his harried dealers, talking over their problems and boosting morale. On many a trip, he took his wife and even his mother, who played poker with Curtice and his associates between stops...