Re: Packard designers: the Coming and Going of

Posted by 58L8134 On 2014/10/14 12:06:01

Hi DaveB845

Bill Schmidt became Studebaker-Packard styling director May 1, 1955 from Lincoln-Mercury. He had been with that Ford since 1940, lead Lincoln styling from 1947-55, where he had a hand in all the production and concept designs for those early 1950's years. He's created with the 1956 Lincolns, probably his most successful production design.

The similarity between the '56 Lincoln and the never-built 1957 Packards is more than purely coincidental. Design features such as the waterfall sides, hooded headlights, broad integrated bumper/grille, undercut fins housing the taillights, sculpted deck-lid, "tiara" windshield surround, reverse-angle roof pillars are all hallmarks of his work.

He was one of the last Packard employees to leave the remnants of the Detroit operation in January 1957. He went to Chrysler for two years then into his own industrial design consulting business in the 1960's.

Along with Teague, Thorwaldsen, Hudson, Bonstedt et al, he created an immense amount of fine design work in those last "days in the bunker" for Packard. It's a shame we didn't get at least a few production years of their designs even if the house eventually did fall.

The best book one can take the time to read on automotive design over the last century is A Century of Style: 100 Years of American Car Design by Michael Lamm and Dave Holls. It details every period and make, yields insights unavailable anywhere else. To say the Detroit styling world in the period was an insular and intimate one is to make understatement.

Steve