Packard designers: the Coming and Going of

Posted by Dave Brownell On 2014/10/14 9:45:10

This weekend's New York Times had a fascinating article about one of my favorite concept cars of the 1950s, the Lincoln Futura. Unfortunately, after years of neglect, this beautiful car morphed into the movie Batmobile.

After some staring at the one photo in the article, I started to notice some familiar Packard influences, especially the deeply hooded headlights and the "punctured" tailfins. Then I noticed that the designer credited was Bill Schmidt. I am assuming that it was "our" Bill Schmidt who worked with Richard Teague at Packard, later Studebaker-Packard. I became even more intrigued when another article mentioned that Bill Schmidt was also a close personal friend of Bill Mitchell, the GM designer. These two Bills were fishing buddies and both apparently used their inspiration of deep sea sharks in their individual automotive design work, most notibly Mitchell's famous Mako Shark Corvette.

Another article credited both former Packard designers, John Reinhart and Bill Schmidt with the beautiful Continental Mark II (1956-7). I could not find a timeline for Schmidt's tenure at Packard (both before and after at FoMoCo?), but it did shed some interesting light on how collaborative and fluid the Detroit design community was in the Fifties. Today's industrial secrecy would not permit such friendships or corporate movements. Other than the Kimes-edited book, there's little mention of Schmidt's time at Packard. By all accounts, he was a well-liked and talented guy.