Re: Did George Romney turn down the presidency of Packard?

Posted by 58L8134 On 2012/11/8 8:41:16

Hi

George Mason was a big man that must have loved bourbon and cigars. Seems as if in about half the pictures of him, he has a cigar in hand or smoking one. He looks every bit the part of a portly auto executive of the era.

Anyone else notice the '52 Nash styling is not much more than the prototype Metropolitan design scaled up to a large car size? The story, related by Bob Thomas in his book Confessions of an Automotive Stylist , who worked in Nash Styling at the time, was they had been developing a conventionally-styled prototype for 1952 in competition to the Farina effort. In his words:

"Ed Anderson's styling staff had now grown to about ten people and we were all waiting breathlessly for the Farina car. When it was brought into the studio, we were astounded. It was awful. The model was beautifully crafted but as a complete design it was terrible. From the windshield forward the hood broke downward and took the front fenders with it. The deck from the backlite to the rear did the same thing. The car was in three parts. Diving front and rear ends attached to a straight through body. I must say that the body and greenhouse were good. And, of course, it had the offset below the belt line with the vertical lines.
It was so bad that we put a cover over it and stored it in the corner of the styling studio. Now, we had to come up with proposal of our own."A similar description of events is found in A Century of Automotive Style: 100 Years of American Car Design by Lamm and Holls (required reading by any auto design student of the period, IMHO).

At that point, Styling and top management put the Farina design aside until Mead Moore of Engineering, who butted heads frequently with styling director Ed Anderson, convinced Mason to go with the Farina design or a version thereof. Sounds as if it was a revenge move just to make Anderson and his staff's lives miserable turning it into a crash program as an all-new Nash was scheduled for their 50th anniversary 1952 models.
So, Styling kept the Farina central body section but must have scaled up the Metropolitan front and rear clip configurations to make the overall design....something of a "cut-'n-paste" synthesis. This whole ugly episode resulted in a very late introduction of the 1952 Nashes called Golden Airflytes on March 14, 1952, well into the model year.

See, bizarre corporate machinations weren't just the province of Packard management personalities!

Steve