Staying On Message

Chuck Felt, my boss and Chevy's creative director at the time, wrote the copy, and it says so much about what Chevy was all about back then - very competitive, and very aggressive.

The picture was taken before Felt's copy was written and was part of what we called an experimental shoot. We took two truckloads of Chevy prototype cars to the GM Proving Ground in Mesa, Arizona, to take pictures that could later be turned into ads. Most of the effort was made on the proving grounds, but we also found a secure location just east of Apache Junction.

It was a Western town constructed by one of the movie studios way out in the desert. Perfect for the kind of security Chevrolet demanded, so we rented it for a day. I spotted an old barn, and we put two cars in it for the picture you see. Warren Winstanley was the photographer and the young lady, as I recall, was later to become famous as the Perfect 10... Bo Derek. I think she was only in her teens at the time. My only regret is that we didn't do a bit of retouching on the cars.

Chevy's ad department approved the ad, and it moved on to the general sales manager. He thought the rope interfered with the cars and should be removed. While that was being done, Chevy general manager "Pete" Estes reviewed the ad. He thought, as we did, that the rope added considerably to the ad, so it was put back in. When the general sales manager made his final approval, he asked for the rope's removal. He would handle the problem with 1 Mr. Estes. Out came the rope again. In a final review, with Mr. Estes and the corporation, Mr. Estes ordered the rope back in. Win some, lose some. This time a win.

Camaro and Corvette had also shared ad space in 1968. "HUGGING COUSINS" ran in the buff books and Sports I Illustrated as a single page. This j fine ad was produced by the creative team of Jim Hartzell and Tony Longo. Hartzell was the copywriter who would later make us all memorable with his Baseball, Hotdogs, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet television and radio commercials. (Probably the most famous ever written for Chevrolet, or any other automaker.) One of our finest art directors, Tony was a great proponent of using large type as a design element. It would be difficult to imagine this ad with the tiny type used in most ad headlines today. Design styles come and go, and I bet it won't be much longer before art directors again discover the value of large-type headlines as a design element. Copywriters will be happy when they do.

If you can find a copy of the November 11, 1967 issue of Newsweek or the December 6, 1967 issue of Life magazine, you'll have a copy of the spread version of this ad. Single pages ran in other national magazines.

The idea of "HUGGING COUSINS" was more than just a nifty turn on an old saying. It played beautifully to a theme we had been using for Camaro since 1967: "The Hugger - The road-hugging fun car from Chevrolet." Actually, Corvette and Camaro had very little in common. Corvette was a real sports car, and Camaro was a fun sporty car. They both had bucket seats, and they both handled well in turns. The Camaro's handling capability was the reason for the "Hugger" designation. The most important thing the two vehicles had in common was your local Chevrolet dealer. When you inspect the way the sheet metal looks on both cars, you can see why I wish we had done some retouching on the other ad.

While quite different in their presentation, both ads did a memorable job for Chevrolet.

Camaro's "Hugger" handle came about in a meeting with Chevrolet ad executives, and the ad here is the first in which we made that claim. We had presented a round of new advertising that was fairly well accepted but had generated considerable conversation about the Camaro's handling capability. Tom Staudt had recently joined Chevrolet as its first real director of marketing, and he liked to discuss at length various aspects of the communications.

I liked and respected him very much, but I think it is fair to say he could be a little long-winded at times. Still, he was one of the few ad executives with whom you could win an argument if you presented him with a convincing point of view. After a long speech about the Camaro's road-hugging capabilities, Tom kind of stumbled on the idea of Camaro as "The Hugger."

The ad was pretty much put together and approved in the meeting. The creative people are most often the ones who come up with ad ideas, but there are plenty of times when good thoughts come from other places. The trick for the creative people is to grab the thought no matter where it comes from and run with it. In this case, it made all future Camaro ads a lot easier to get approved if there was a mention of "The Hugger." This ad could have been better if the car had been shown performing at high speed in a tight turn, but the water on the road does help some. In retrospect, I don't remember why we didn't use a better picture. Sometimes it just works out that way.

THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE ... OF CHEVY5

I love shooting cars - with a camera, not a rifle. I've been doing so since I was 10 years old, and that was more than four decades ago. My first "real" camera was a Yashicamat 124G twin-lens reflex (I still have it), and my current weapon of choice is a Nikon D200 while I wait to get a good deal on the latest D700 full-frame D-SLR.

The short story of how Gary and Gayle Stephan's 1970 C10 went from being seen at a Chevy show to the cover of Chevy Enthusiast is an interesting one. At a regional Vintage Chevy Club of America show, I picked it as one of my two "Editor's Choice" selections. (The other was a 997-point original-owner 1964 Chevy Chevelle Malibu.) In addition to a plaque, the other half of each award was to be a six-page feature spread in a future issue of Chevy Enthusiast. Little did Gary know that that future issue would come up immediately and that, in addition to a feature story, I'd selected his truck for the cover of issue two.

Cover selections are usually planned months in advance, with numerous factors coming into play. But because we're just getting this magazine off the ground, things are a bit more... fluid. I can make such decisions without much filtering. I'll discuss things with Senior Managing Editor Eric Kaminsky, who is the one burdened with cleaning up the production messes created by my last-minute decisions, and with my Publisher John Nichols, who has entrusted me with almost complete autonomy for what goes in-between the covers of Chevy Enthusiast. Because we've made a strong commitment to truck coverage right from the start, after seeing Gary's C10, John was 100 percent behind my decision to put it on the cover.

We both wanted an action photo for the cover, which means what we call a "car-to-car" shot. This process involves me hanging out the back of one vehicle, in this case a minivan being driven at about 15 to 20 miles per hour. Here, I'm holding my camera blindly just inches above the pavement on a deserted street at dusk. When the shot works, the target vehicle is tack-sharp and the wheels and background are blurred,
 requiring a minimum of post-shoot Photoshopping.

After getting the tracking shots "in the can," I wanted to take advantage of the great light just as the sun set below the horizon. So I positioned Gary's C10 about 200 feet away and put my D200 on a tripod for some low-angle, long-lens (200mm) static shots. Because it was nearly dark, and I was kneeling in the middle of the street, my driver Francisco Villalpando positioned the minivan behind me with the flashers on.

The reason for this precaution is simple. About 18 months ago, I was kneeling behind my D200, getting one last shot of a vintage Corvette in fading light, when I was struck from behind by a Toyota Solara coupe traveling 15 or 20 miles per hour. (The shot here was 10 seconds prior to impact.) Luckily, I never knew what was coming, and so was fairly relaxed when the Solara's grille left an imprint on my backside. My most serious injury was a painfully separated right shoulder. I'm reminded of this incident whenever I reach for the two-three upshift on my Corvair. My shoulder stings.

As Sergeant Phil Esterhaus said in 77 episodes of the '80s TV classic Hill Street Blues, "Hey, let's be careful out there." I know I am whenever I'm shooting.

Stiff Competition

The company churned them out by the hundreds of thousands annually. As a result, the Nova - and/or Chevy II, as it was known from its debut through the end of 1968 - is today a plentiful and inexpensive foundation for powerful street machines.

If you fancy the idea of turning your grandmother's grocery-getter Nova into the next Chevy Enthusiast cover car, take this bit of free advice from Brent VanDervort at Fat Man Fabrications.

"Novas can be great performance cars," he told us on a recent visit to his Charlotte, North Carolina, shop, "but their suspensions are very fragile. Everything ahead of the firewall needs to be beefed up and modified; otherwise, a powerful engine is just wasted."

Power was the last thing on the minds of Chevrolet's engineers when, in the late 1950s, they drew up specs for the new small car.
The Chevy II was designed to be an economical daily driver for the budget-minded buyer. It was cheap to build, and the lightweight unit-body chassis was fitted with unhurried four- and six-cylinder engines exclusively during 1962-63.

"Although V-8s fit under the hood just fine," VanDervort said, "one look at the subframe - especially on the early cars - shows they were not designed for high-performance. For one thing, there is no cross bracing from the radiator until you get to the transmission. Chevy was using the engine itself as a structural support."

For the past 18 years, Fat Man has been selling a kit engineered to bring the Nova's subframe into the modern world. This month, VanDervort and crew finished researching an updated Nova design that should be in the catalog by the time you read this.

Unlike other kits that require torching the front rails and substituting atubular subframe built around Mustang II mechanicals, the Fat Man conversion has bolt-on components that can be installed more easily and with greater accuracy. The centerpiece of the new design is a cross member made from 5/ie-inch plate steel that allows the car to be converted to McPherson struts, rack-and-pinion steering, and disc brakes - all with parts you can buy off the shelf at a local store (or junkyard) or as a complete kit from Fat Man.

The Way CHEVY Moved the Metal

Magazines and outdoor advertising were right up there too, but newspaper ads were where the dealers were recognized at the bottom of every ad with an invitation to come see them. Later, television would be where most of the money was spent. But in the Fifties, we produced five nearly full-page ads every month. One ad ran each week, and a fifth called a swing ad took the place of another in a market where exposure was needed on one product rather than another. Chevrolet made those determinations.

Newspaper ads back then needed special attention to get good reproduction. Printing presses tended to wobble and have too little or too much ink for good reproduction. That was the reason behind the kind of illustration art developed by Jim Hastings for Chevy ads. The illustrations were done all in line and halftone elements added later. The line illustrations were like the type in newspapers and held the illustration together no matter what happened. Few illustrators were capable of this kind of work, and Hastings used several artists from San Francisco until a group from Detroit could learn the technique. Color was just beginning in newspapers, and this approach was perfect for it.

The 1955 ad above was illustrated by Charles Allen and represents a kind of picture content that would belong to Chevrolet along with the tagline "SEE THE USA." Many newspaper ads in the fifties and early sixties were like magazine ads in that they helped build a brand image for Chevy that continues today. Dinah Shore helped a bunch too, with her live TV show. Nobody could sing the Chevy theme like Dinah. I have always marveled that a car with a French name could be regarded as "America's Car" rather than Ford, considering all the contributions Henry
Charles Allen is still with us, and you can see more of his work by going to his blog (charlieallensblog.blogspot.com). You can see more Chevy ads by going to my blog, About Old Chevy Ads (oldchevyads.blogspot. com). Unfortunately, few of the newspaper ads survived as most were simply thrown away.

These two 1956 ads represent the look of Chevy ads in news-papers that began in 1955 and would continue for many years. Most of the artists Jim Hastings was using were in San Francisco at a studio named Patterson and Hall. Hastings worked there as an illustrator before moving to the RW Webster agency in LA.

He was then hired byCampbell- Ewald chairman Ted Little to put more gusto into Chevy advertis¬ing. In the beginning, he had no official title but reported directly to Big Daddy. That's what we called Chairman Little but never to his face. Hastings worked with his illustrator friends in San Francisco as a kind of outside group to come up with ads like those seen here and the '55 ad. They were shown in competition with the regular Chevy creative group headed by Halsey Davidson. The Chevy people liked them in part because they were so different from other car ads, as well as from previous Chevy ads. A whole new direc-tion for Chevrolet print had been established. The relationship with America had its beginning with ads that showed long, beautiful highways and people enjoying the bounty of our country. Pete Booth, a superb copy and creative guy, began working with Hastings to transform the agency. They had adjoining offices with only a cur-tain to separate them, something that was unheard of back then — art and copy working closely together.

Nonnast. It has all the warmth and feeling that had been missing from pre-1955 Chevy ads. And look at the plane about to land. It's a prop- driven Constellation. I wonder if Howard Hughes could be the pilot? The copy theme is pure Chevrolet; more car for your money. The 1955, 1956 and 1957 Chevrolets were a huge hit in the market and continue to be high-priced collector items today.

The ad with the car on the mountain road was illustrated by Haines Hall, another of Hastings friends. Haines was more than a fine illustrator; he was part owner of the Patterson Hall Art Studio in San Francisco. The studio still is in business although all the old illustrators have long ago retired. Today it is known as P & H Creative Group and is run by Bruce Hettema. Bruce is very interested in the history of the studio and has a fine collection of ads and art from days gone by.

How's chevy's future?

I HAVE SEEN THE FUTURE, AND IT IS GOOD! YDU MAY HAVE HEARD THAT THE "NEW GENERAL MOTORS" INVITED A PASSEL OF AUTO MEDIA AND ANALYSTS TO ITS WARREN, MICHIGAN, TECH CENTER LAST AUGUST If (A MONTH AND A DAY AFTER IT EMERGED FROM CHAPTER If DANKRUPTCYJ TO OPEN ITS CORPORATE KIMONO AND SHOW WHAT'S COMING IN THE NEXT FEW YEARS.

I was part of that group and can report that just about everything looked pretty fine. New President and CEO Fritz Henderson began with a one-hour live webcast and Q8A. "Our goal is to make the customer the center of our universe," he asserted, adding that GM would use its "fastlane" blog (www. fastlane.gmblogs.com/blog) for customer research. And he said to expect no fewer than 25 new GM cars and crossovers in the next 24 months.

Then he made the announcement that would dominate auto news for the next several days: The Chevy Volt range-extender electric vehicle's projected EPA city rating should be "at least" 230 miles—based on early drafts of an EPA rating process that will see most drivers use zero fuel for the first 40 miles of battery electric driving and very little once the extended- range engine cranks up to keep it going. (The actual EPA city test covers 51 stop-and-go miles, of which only the last 11 will burn any fuel.) And he added that even the EPA "combined" city/highway rating should come in at better than 100 mpg.

GM began building pre-production test and development Volts in mid June at a rate of 10 a week and will have completed its run of 80 by mid- September. Speculation is that the sticker will be in the $40K range (minus a $7,500 federal tax credit) when the first production examples arrive in late 2010. "We haven't priced it yet," Henderson said. "But it's a Gen

I vehicle, and the cost is high. As with all Gen I vehicles, the objective is to get to Gen II." Long-term, as costs go down, they'll have to price it more affordably to get the volume they'll need to help meet CAFE standards.

Next were visits to Buick and GMC design studios, where we were treated to off-the-record looks (they even taped over our camera-phone lenses) at a variety of future models. These included 2011 mid-size Regal and 2012 compact (Chevy Cruze-size) Buick sedans and a very distinctive-looking compact crossover for each brand.

Then we hiked to GM's Design Dome to inspect an impressive array of 2010, 2011, 2012 and beyond Chevrolet cars and CUVs, so many that — even without any trucks — they were spread most of the way around the vast viewing floor. Smallest of the bunch was the youthful, sporty Spark, which won a consumer competition over two other concepts, is already marketed as the Beat in India and will arrive stateside in early 2012. "It's not a penalty box," said Chief Designer Dave Lyon. "It has wonderful detailing, style and character."

Next up was the next-gen (Korean-built) Aveo, which looks nothing like any Aveo to date. It may be polarizing but looked pretty cool to me, and it'll certainly stand out among cookie-cutter small cars. Then came the much more conventional compact Cruze, which will replace the Cobalt in the third quarter of 2010. Its projected EPA highway rating has been touted as 40 mpg, yet — like every new and future a wonderful interior.

The next-gen Malibu, probably a 2013 model, is a handsome, cleanly sculpted piece with a surprisingly rich interior that looks like twice its (expected) price. "Our job is to make Chevys look like $40,000 to $50,000 cars," Lyon said. Its only sour note is a near copy of the tall, bustled decklid (good for aero and trunk room) that was widely reviled on recent big BMWs.

An especially pleasant surprise was the 2011 Orlando. A Cruze- based crossover substantially smaller than the excellent new 2010 Equinox CUV, it offers three roomy rows of seating...highly unusual in this fast-growing class. Also on display were a 2010 Corvette Grand Sport (a fairly affordable base-powertrain 'Vette with Z06 bodywork and exterior, interior and chassis enhancements), a gorgeous 2011 Camaro Convertible and a black Volt with a pair of interior bucks — one with white, the other black, ultra-modern touch-button trim surfaces.

Notable for its absence was a next-gen Impala. There has been speculation both inside and outside the company that the hot Australian Holden-engineered PontiacG8 rear- drive sedan (now that the Pontiac brand has been summarily axed by GM's government overseers) could be re-faced and rebadged as a high-performance Buick and/or a new full-size Chevy. Latest word from on high: Ain't gonna happen- too costly, not enough volume and not fuel-efficient enough (given future CAFE requirements) to make a large, rwd sedan a viable business case. For late-breaking news on future rwd Chevys, read about the Caprice PPV on pages 10 and 11.

Unveiled last were a stunning pair of future Cadillacs: a sleek, rear-drive coupe (there will also be a sedan) smaller than the current CTS and a regally handsome Mercedes S-Class-size front-drive sedan to replace the long-running fwd DTS and rwd STS, probably by 2013.

We also toured the pre- production build shop where those 80 test and development Volts are being assembled and drove a variety of new GM products at the Milford Proving Grounds.

"I now have no doubts about the future of this company," said a magazine-editor friend at the end of the day. Provided that the government gets out of its way, I couldn't agree more.

New Chevy Pop Car

In an attempt to wrestle away sales from Ford (who is finally sending the ancient Panther-platform Crown Vic out to pasture), as well as the more modern Dodge Charger, Chevy will introduce a new Chevrolet Caprice police patrol vehicle in 2011. It will feature a 355hp 6.0-liter V-8 that will extend the long arm of the law in most pursuit activities. On the inside it will feature a huge optional in-dash screen for electronics, as well as seats designed for officer comfort when wearing utility equipment belts.

While rumors floated this past summer a new rear-wheel-drive sedan based on the highly regarded Pontiac G8, this won't be it. Rather, Chevy will be offering a left-hand-drive version of the long-wheelbase Holden Statesman, which is currently sold in the Middle East as the Chevrolet Caprice. It shares elements of its rear-wheel-drive Zeta architecture with the Camaro, and it will be manufactured in Australia, as was the case with Pontiac GTO and G8. (It rides on a 118.5-inch wheelbase, the longest of any vehicle using GM's global rwd platform which, besides underpinning the Camaro, is also used in the Chinese-built Buick Park Avenue.)

While this car will be offered to police agencies, there are no current plans to offer it to the general public, probably owing to GM's desire to have as little impact as possible on its CAFE numbers. It looks like it will be a few years - when law enforcement agencies dispose of high-mileage early-sale cars - until we'll get a chance to drive a black and white Caprice for ourselves. That is, unless it's in the back seat taking advantage of the four extra inches of legroom it provides over Ford's Crown Vic. I think we'll pass on that driving impression.

Carlisle Events is partnering with Jeff Gardner, of Gardner Competition Engines, and Chevy Enthusiast magazine to give away a 383 cubic inch Chevrolet small-block V-8 at the 2010 edition of the All-GM Nationals. The event will be held June 25-27, 2010 at the Carlisle Fairgrounds at Carlisle, Pennsylvania.