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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.

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

Thanks for the updated information on Bill Schmidt. Then he had a hand in those fabulous 1949-51 Lincoln Cosmopolitans that were based on the Mercury substructure. And then, on the 52-55 Lincolns that were the most expensive Mercuries that you could buy. I wonder if Schmidt left Ford when he got the word that his 55 Lincoln would not get the new wrap-around windshield body that virtually every other car maker had that year. But the 56 Lincolns more than made up for it in my mind's eye.

I also wonder what it was that lured him to Packard in mid-1955 cycle? Surely by then, the writing was beginning to appear on the financial walls of Detroit. Was it the combination of Schmidt and Teague that convinced Packard management to do all that they did to make some costly styling changes to the do-or-die 1956 Packards and Clippers? No bean counters, today, would have approved the changes that they made in tooling, let alone differences in other parts of the cars like aluminum castings for the 56 Ultramatics.

I'll have to get the Holls book for my library. Thanks for the citation. It's people like Dick Teague whose career at GM, Packard, AMC and Chrysler, that makes this subject fascinating for me. His work spanned the post-war Cadillacs,1951 Packards, through the Jeep Cherokee to the Dodge Neon. Was it Bill Schmidt who encouraged Teague to never say never and do more with less as the corporate walls were falling around them?

Here is a timeline for Bill Schmidt's employment. Says he began at Packard in "early 1955." Wow, that was a leap of faith.

moaaad.org/artistlink.php?artist=Schmidt

Hi DaveB845

Exerpting from the William M. Schmidt biography in the book, Ford Design Department Concepts & Showcars, 1932-1961 by Jim & Cheryl Farrell, page 140:

"Bill Schmidt graduated from the Henry Ford Trade School in 1940 and took a job as a tool designer"

After a stint with the aircraft group at Willow Run working on bomber projects.

"Although he never designed cars before, in 1944, Schmidt transferred to Bob Gregorie's Design Department, where he helped complete the design for the Light Ford that later became the French (Ford) Vedette. In 1947, John Oswald named Schmidt head of the Lincoln studio, where he redesigned the 1950 and '51 Lincolns"

The original all-new 1949 lines were a ambitious and complicated program, had two size levels for each make but shared some common body tooling. There were far more models within each make than ever before. The 1949 Mercury, Lincoln and Lincoln Cosmopolitans are generally created to E.T. Gregorie and staff; certainly Bill Schmidt had a hand in some parts of the designs. Tooling for what became the 1949 Mercury was well along in July 1946 when Ernie Breech came from Bendix to essentially run Ford Motor Company while Henry II learned the ropes. He immediately recognized the intended 1949 Ford was too large and heavy to be sold profitably as a Ford. With tooling well along, he kicked it up to be the 1949 Mercury. Breech then initiated the crash programs to come up with a 1949 Ford design based on a smaller package. Competing with the in-house stylist was George Walker, the design consultant. All prior designwork was shuffled: the Custom Mercury became the Lincoln that shares the Mercury body. The Lincoln Cosmopolitan was to include 125" and 132" wheelbase models, the latter as Continentals which were nixed.

In order to understand how it all came about, I recommend the above cited text plus the book, Edsel Ford and E.T. Gregorie: The Remarkable Design Team and Their Classic Fords of the 1930's and 1940's by Henry Dominguez.

Further, quoting from Farrell "He also lead the team that designed the 1952-56 Lincolns, the XL-500 (Phantom), the Futura and the 1953 Lincoln Golden Anniversary and 1954 Lincoln trim and color show cars."

"In early 1955, Schmidt was recruited by Jim Nance of Studebaker-Packard and, for a substantial increase in salary, left Ford to become vice president and head of Studebaker-Packard's design department. While at Studebaker-Packard, Schmidt, Dick Teague and Stan Thorwaldsen designed the Packard Predictor concept car which shared many design features with the concept cars Schmidt designed at Ford"

Although the financial situation was becoming acute, Schmidt was lured by the money and status as well as the prospect of producing fresh, original designs that might have lifted S-P out of their doldrums. Lincoln was scheduled for a new body for 1955 but, as Richard Stout wrote, internal politics and intrigues undid that plan until 1956.

Most of the styling changes between 1955 and 1956 Packards and Clippers were merely an effort to keep the styling up to date in hopes of greater customer response. Although they were costly to make, the tooling bill was still significantly lower than would have been required for an all-new body. Every automaker in that period was expected to make noticeable changes annually, S-P could hardly afford to do otherwise. It was also a reaction to their lack of major styling changes from 1951 through 1954. They couldn't get away with it then, not in the face of the GM styling juggernaut steam-rolling along.

Of Dick Teague: His experience at Packard had to imbued him with the idea to make do with very little but have the maximum affect. Cutting his teeth doing more with less served him well once he took over at AMC. There, it had to be a way of life, since they never had the finances to do the kinds of programs the Big Three could afford. Eventually, even that caught up with AMC in the 1970's when they no longer could afford a major re-designs, were condemned to re-hash the same old bodies in hopes of looking new enough.

Steve