Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (59 page)

In those days, GM previewed its designs for new cars in a traveling car show called Motorama. Before a new model was put into production,
a single concept car was built by hand and displayed at the show. Then, if the car was well received by the public, GM would gear up to manufacture it for sale. To save time and money, the body panels of the hand-built Corvette show car were made of fiberglass—literally plastic reinforced with glass fibers—instead of steel.

Chevrolet had a sense that the Corvette would be a hit when it made its debut at Motorama in January 1953, but the public reaction to the show car surpassed even their expectations. When was the last time you wrote a letter to an auto company? A
complimentary
letter? More than 7,000 people who saw the Corvette at Motorama wrote Chevrolet to tell the company that they would buy a Corvette if the company ever offered them for sale—and this was at a time when the entire U.S. market for sports cars was just over 11,000 cars a year. In fact, the response was so enthusiastic that Chevrolet rushed the Corvette into production to ensure that at least a few hundred of the cars would make it onto showroom floors before the year was out.

Initially the plan had been to manufacture the cars’ body panels out of steel, not fiberglass, just like every other car made by the big domestic automakers in the 1950s. But supply disruptions caused by the Korean War prompted GM to gamble on fiberglass and begin manufacturing what would become the first-ever high-volume, mass-produced car with an all-fiberglass body.

Three hundred cars were manufactured for the 1953 model year. Because the fiberglass body panels proved to be so different from the steel the autoworkers were accustomed to, all 300 had to be assembled by hand, just like the Motorama show car. And like the Motorama car, they were beautiful—bright red interiors, bodies painted “Polo White,” stylish wraparound windshields, headlights covered with chromed metal mesh to protect against stones, wide oval grilles with 13 chrome “teeth,” and a convertible top hidden beneath a rear deck lid so that the exquisite, flowing lines of the car weren’t disrupted by the clutter of the folded top.

For publicity purposes, Chevrolet set aside all 300 of the 1953
Corvettes for celebrities and VIPs. Ordinary customers would have to wait for the 1954 Corvette, now just a few months away and virtually unchanged from 1953, except that in addition to Polo White, it would be available in Pennant Blue and Sportsman Red.

If you were lucky enough to buy one of those ’53 Corvettes (sticker price: $3,498),
and
you managed to hold onto the car all these years, you must be very glad that you did. As the first of what would become the most successful line of sports cars in automotive history, those 1953 Corvettes have soared in value over the years. Today one in good condition can sell for more than $300,000 at auction—more than three times the price of a new Corvette. (The 1954s can fetch as much as $130,000.)

Those 1953–54 Corvettes are still a joy to look at, and considering how much they’re worth, it’s hard to believe how disappointing they were to the thousands of fans who’d waited months to buy one. They were beautiful, to be sure—especially if you stood back far enough—but the cars had so many problems that almost everyone found something to hate about them, including the automotive press. “The amazing thing about the Corvette is that it comes so close to being a really interesting, worthwhile and genuine sports car, yet misses the mark almost entirely,”
Road & Track
magazine wrote.

Sports car enthusiasts were turned off by the underpowered six-cylinder engine, and they
despised
the automatic transmission, which not only offered poor performance but also denied roadster drivers their God-given right to a stick shift. The suspension that had been borrowed from an ordinary sedan
felt
like it had been borrowed from an ordinary sedan, and so did the brakes.

Ordinary drivers who might not have been bothered by poor performance still found plenty about the 1953–54 Corvettes to scare them away from showrooms. For one thing, the cars were surprisingly lacking in standard amenities. No power steering? People were used to that. But no
roll-down windows?
The Corvette had “side curtains”—clumsy plastic panels that had to be removed and stored in bags in the trunk when not in use.

The 1953–54 Corvettes didn’t even have exterior door handles—you had to reach into the car and open the door using the inside handle. That was fine when the top was down, but when the top was up and the side curtains were in place, such as, say, during a rain storm—when you had to get into the car
right now
—getting the door open was a hassle. It also meant that the car couldn’t be locked securely if it was parked outside.

But the biggest problem of all was the fiberglass body panels—62 in all—that Chevrolet had gambled on without knowing what it was getting into. Fiberglass was a relatively new material in the 1950s and had never been used on a mass-produced car before. And as Chevy learned (to its dismay), fiberglass still had plenty of bugs that had to be worked out.

Chevrolet and its subcontractors had yet to figure out a way to manufacture the panels to a standard, uniform thickness. As a result, the pieces fit together terribly. The doors, hood, trunk, and rear deck lid could be out of alignment by as much as half an inch, and when they stuck out that far they not only spoiled the car’s flowing lines, they created huge gaps that were impossible to seal against rain and water on the road.

Painting the fiberglass was another nightmare. There were air bubbles in the fiberglass panels and in the material used to bond them together. When the cars were painted and placed in giant ovens to dry, the bubbles expanded and popped, ruining the paint job. Each popped bubble had to be sanded down and repainted, with no guarantee that the problem wouldn’t happen again. Some cars that were painted multiple times never did get a decent, unblemished coat of paint. After several failed attempts, they were just shipped to Chevy dealers the way they were.

Soon word of mouth surrounding the Corvette was so bad that the company couldn’t even find 300 VIPs willing to buy one. Then, when the 1954s became available, so many buyers complained about the poor quality of their Corvettes that some Chevy dealers stopped taking orders for the cars. More than a thousand unsold 1954s piled up on the Corvette factory grounds, prompting
Chevrolet to delay production on the 1955 Corvette until all the 1954s were sold. Result: Only 700 Corvettes were manufactured for the 1955 model year.

By now the Corvette was such a disaster that GM was seriously considering killing the whole program. So what saved it? The 1955 Thunderbird, Ford’s answer to the Corvette. Ford had been secretly working on its own two-seater convertible since 1952, when Franklin Q. Hershey, Ford’s head of styling, saw a picture of the Corvette show car at a dinner party and ordered his employees to come up with some kind of a response. Ford higher-ups killed the project in late 1952, but when the Corvette show car made its huge splash at Motorama in January 1953, the Thunderbird was revived—in other words, the car that saved the Corvette was itself saved by the Corvette.

Introduced to the public in September 1954, the 1955 T-Bird was everything the Corvette wasn’t: It was powerful, with a V-8 engine instead of an underpowered six-cylinder engine, and it offered buyers a choice of either a three-speed manual transmission or a three-speed automatic. It had roll-up windows, exterior door handles and locks, and it was made of
steel,
not fiberglass. It wasn’t really a sports car—Ford called it a “Personal Luxury Car”—but it was beautiful and a lot of fun to drive.

Ford set out to sell 10,000 T-Birds in 1955 and ended up selling more than 16,000. It probably would have sold a lot more than that, had the factory been able to build them fast enough.

The Thunderbird proved that a two-seater convertible could be successful,
if
it was built correctly. Its strong sales were a big blow to Chevrolet’s pride. Now that the T-Bird was a success, dumping the Corvette was out of the question. Killing it would be an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that Ford knew how to make a two-seater and GM, the world’s largest automaker, did not.

The Corvette was safe…for the time being.

 

“I would never die for my beliefs because I might be wrong.”

 

“It has been said that man is a rational animal. All my life I have been searching for evidence to support this.”

 

“We still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man.”

 

“Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.”

 

“The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.”

 

“A life without adventure is likely to be unsatisfying, but a life in which adventure is allowed to take whatever form it will is sure to be short.”

 

“Every man is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.”

 

“Anything you’re good at contributes to happiness.”

 

“Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

 

“To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.”

 

“Freedom is the absence of obstacles to the realization of desires.”

 

“If all our happiness is bound up entirely in our personal circumstances, it is difficult not to demand of life more than it has to give.”

 

“It is preoccupation with possessions, more than anything else, that prevents men from living freely and nobly.”

 

“I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn’t wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.”

For whatever reason—a changing marketplace, a negative image,
a lawsuit—well-known, long-established companies sometimes
change their names. (By the way, the
Bathroom
Reader
is now called
LooRead
.)

Story:
The World Wrestling Federation was a “sports entertainment” business founded in the U.S. in 1979. The World Wildlife Fund is an environmental preservation group established in Switzerland in 1961. For 20 years, the two organizations were able to share use of the abbreviation “WWF,” probably because one was a business and the other was a charity. But in 2000, the nature WWF sued the wrestling WWF for unfair trade practices, claiming the wrestling WWF had used the WWF abbreviation internationally, which, under a 1994 agreement, was the charity’s domain.

New Name:
A British court ruled in favor of the charity, forcing the wrestling organization to change its name (and abbreviation) to World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE).

Story:
Established in 1997, Blackwater Worldwide was a private security and military service. During the war in Iraq, the U.S. government contracted with the firm to provide private troops and security. (Essentially, its troops are mercenaries.) But between 2006 and 2008, Blackwater became the subject of a number of controversial charges, including opening fire on civilians (killing

12), smuggling weapons, and helping a jailed Iraqi politician escape prison and the country. In February 2009, Blackwater was expelled from the country by the Iraqi government. And its contract was not renewed by the Obama administration.

New Name:
To disassociate itself from all of its Iraq-related problems, Blackwater rebranded itself Xe (pronounced “zee”).

Story:
By the early 2000s, the Phillip Morris company was a $30-billion
corporation that had diversified beyond its original core business of tobacco. No longer just the manufacturer of Marlboro, Virginia Slims, and Chesterfield cigarettes, it also made Kool-Aid, pudding, Cool Whip, instant coffee, mayonnaise, and cheese—the company owned an 84 percent stake in Kraft Foods. After losing several wrongful death lawsuits because of the cigarettes they manufactured, the company wanted the public to focus on its wholesome foods divisions, not the tobacco.

New Name:
In 2003, Phillip Morris became Altria. The word is a derivative of
altus,
the Latin word for “high.”

Story:
Diebold is an American company that today is best known for making electronic voting machines—the ones that didn’t work properly during the 2004 national election. The company’s primary business is selling safes and automated teller machines; voting machines were produced by an individual division within the company called Diebold Election Systems. In 2007 the main corporation sought to distance itself from the troublesome voting machines and the segment of the company that made them. By selling off the division? No—they just changed its name.

New Name:
Premier Election Solutions

Story:
In 1919 General Motors created its own financing branch, General Motors Acceptance Corporation, in order to help World War I veterans buy their first cars. Over the past 90 years, GMAC expanded to offer not only car loans, but also mortgages and insurance. Technically, it wasn’t a bank; it was a loan agency. But in the 2008 financial meltdown, GMAC struggled with the same problems that banks had—they were hemorrhaging money because consumers weren’t keeping up with their car loans or mortgage payments. So in December 2008, GMAC converted to a bank, entitling it to receive part of the $700 billion federal bailout money. It got about $6 billion.