bulgemobile!
- adman 5-26-2008 12:03 am [add a comment]

And progress Buick certainly did. While it is easy to fault the amount of chrome used or the bizarre aspects of the design, in its day the voluptuous Buick was a highly-regarded automobile, only one step down from a Cadillac, and to be behind the wheel of Buick was a sign of a successful career. Forecasting the growth of the automobile market, in 1945 Curtice had persuaded General Motors' chief executive Alfred P. Sloan to fund an expansion programme to increase Buick's manufacturing capacity to over half a million vehicles a year. It was a couple of years before that total was reached, but 1950 saw it exceeded by a wide margin and Buick leapt to number three in the sales charts, behind Chevrolet and Ford - a remarkable achievement.

The curvaceous nature of the Buick was accentuated by a body line that sloped down from the top of the headlight and dipped in front of the rear wheel before climbing back up and giving a distinct definition to the rear fender. This was at a period when most other body styles tried to eliminate the rear fender shape, and harks back to Harley Earl's 1939 Y-Job Buick concept car which foretold many of the styling ingredients that were to become identified with Buick in the 1950s.

One of the smallest of these styling artifacts was the gunsight or bombsight hood ornament. Back in 1946, Nickles produced a design that would be suitable for mass production, based on the Y-Job ornament, and the feature remained until 1958. Undoubtedly more of a Buick trademark were the VentiPorts on the sides of the front fenders. Nickles is almost always credited for these (copied from a fighter plane exhaust stubs) when he cut holes in the hood of his '48 Roadmaster convertible and fixed lights behind them wired to the distributor so they would flash like exhausts.

Ragsdale was horrified at seeing Nickles' customizing and complained to Curtice that the young designer had ruined a perfectly good car. Curtice looked for himself and, far from censuring Nickles, incorporated the portholes in the 1949 Buick models. Initially these VentiPorts were said to release fumes from the engine compartment and were fu!Sy functional. For various reasons - not least reports of inebriated passers-by using the orifices to urinate on the engine - the holes were blanked off and they became purely decorative. For 1950 models, the VentiPorts were elongated to look like slots; the more expensive models had four per side, while others had three.

The excess chrome on postwar Buicks was explained by Nickles as coming about due to a shortage during the war. Once free of restrictions, designers used chrome for glamor and perhaps overdosed on the shiny stuff. Nickles was quoted as saying: "...we were entertaining people with chrome on cars..." and it surely did that. Not all designers took such a sanguine attitude in iater years, Henry Lauve calling it 'Club Sandwich Chrome' and you can see what he means. Lauve also said that the huge teeth only came about because "...we wanted to be different..." Again, there can be little argument that they succeeded!

However, looking at the era in which the 1950 Buicks were conceived, they were totally appropriate for their time. Big, bold, brash, certainly - yet they established keynote features that would instantly tell you that the car was a Buick from a block or more away, not something that can be done that easily in the Nineties. Stylish? Yes, the 1950 Buick had style aplenty and it showed.

nichols 1951 bombsite hood ornament
- bill 5-26-2008 2:28 am [add a comment]

Ned Nickles Credited with Buick's Famous Post-War Design Features

Buick developed a number of well-remembered design themes in the years immediately following World War II, including hardtop convertible styling (eliminating the center side pillar), massive "carnivorous" grilles, portholes (originally called VentiPorts) and the "sweepspear" side decoration.

Most can be attributed to GM designer Ned Nickles, but partial credit for one of them goes to Edward T. Ragsdale, then Buick's manufacturing manager, and his wife, Sarah.

Recalled Nickles: "It was about 1945. Ragsdale looked at my model of the hardtop and said his wife always wanted convertibles because she liked the styling, but never put the top down because it made here hair blow around."

This observation by Ragsdale, later a Buick general manager, was credited with helping "sell" the idea as a production feature in 1949.

Although historians credit Chrysler's 1947 Town & Country cars with being the first "hardtop convertibles," only seven were built. Buick popularized the idea with more than 4,000 hardtop convertibles in 1949, the first of hundreds of thousands it would produce over the next few years.

A few of the 1949 Roadmaster Rivieras (the Riviera name at that time referring to hardtop convertible) included the sweepspear, described as a bright metal side decoration that began in the front fender as a slim horizontal molding and became wider as it swept in a downward curve along the doors, dipping to the base of the leading edge of the rear fender, and then kicking up over the real wheel openings. It would become another long-lived Buick identity feature from Nickles that would change in detail, though not in concept.

While Ragsdale supported the hardtop convertible idea, he didn't think much of Nickles' portholes. Nickles had cut holes in the sides of the hood of his own 1948 Roadmaster convertible and behind them installed amber lights attached to the distributor. The lights, flashing on and off, suggested an unusually powerful engine with flaming exhaust. Nickles said he got the idea from World War II fighter planes.

Ragsdale saw the custom work one day and complained to Buick General Manager Harlow H. Curtice that Nickles had "ruined" his convertible. Curtice, however, was so intrigued he immediately ordered the portholes into production for 1949 - but without the lights.

(Curiously, Nickles soon afterward designed two Buicks now considered "modern classics" - the 1953 and 1954 Skylark - and in both cases he eliminated the portholes which were on all other models in those years. He also created the first design of a later Buick classic - the 1963 Riviera - under the direction of GM styling chief Bill Mitchell.)

The vertical-bar grille theme was started on 1942 Buicks (an abbreviated run before Buick turned to war production), with the grilles becoming ever more massive after the war.

On styling in general during this period, Nickles said: "I have heard criticism of the amount of chrome we used on those postwar Buicks, but I come from a different perspective than some of these writers. You have to judge things in the context of their times. We had just come through a war, and you couldn't get chrome during the war. So in the postwar years, we were entertaining people with chrome on cars. I think the cars fit in well with the times."

Speaking of Buicks, apparently this one , from 1968, was the love of my dad's life.
- L.M. 5-26-2008 5:11 am [add a comment]

ahh. a riv....
- bill 5-26-2008 5:20 am [add a comment]