Word: eds
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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With a dozen first-class engineers, Ed Cole for four years designed and discarded scores of wooden mockups. He tried everything: front engine with front-wheel drive, front engine with rear-wheel drive, rear engine with front-wheel drive, but he always returned to rear engines with rear-wheel drive. By the spring of 1956, when Cole's team produced a prototype power plant and suspension, he disguised it with a German Porsche body shell. One of Cole's friends recalls the scene that day at the Chevy Engineering Center. "Ed jumped...
...Something." Still he had to lick the biggest problem: winning approval from G.M.'s top management. In July of 1956, Ed Cole got a much freer rein to press the project: Chevy Boss Tom Keating moved up to head all G.M. passenger-car divisions, and Ed Cole replaced him as the Chevrolet general manager, became a G.M. vice president...
...September of 1957, Ed Cole casually asked Red Curtice out to take a look at something new at the G.M. Technical Center. With a knowing wink, Cole lifted the canvas protecting the clay mockup. Red Curtice stood back, his blue eyes narrowing. Then he peppered Cole for two hours with questions. There were many obvious problems...
...snowplow, hitched a horse to it and in the winter cleared his customers' driveways. Summers he hawked Ford tractors to farmers, found that the best way to sell was to demonstrate the plows himself; he would plow the farmers' land, and the farmers figured that if young Ed could do it that easily, so could they. He earned $600 a summer. Winters he built and sold radios. He also rebuilt two nearly wrecked cars, thus became, at 16, one of Marne's rare two-car owners...
...hauled out his longtime crony, Harry Barr, now Chevy's chief engineer. Said Cole, starting the car, "Listen!" Barr listened, said it sounded fine, and went back in to sing. But Cole stayed outside, listening to his engine music all night. "That," says Barr, "was the way Ed went to parties...