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Ran into Will Lambert over at the Grounds for Divorce. He said he thought he might see me there and had something he wanted to show me. Thought I’d get a kick out of it.

He said he found it amongst a bunch of old letters and yearbooks he found in his granddad’s attic while cleaning the place out. Apparently his grandfather had written a letter home back to his folks in Fort Stockton after having moved to Detroit and gotten a job at GM’s Styling Studio right after the war. It was yellowed, but completely legible. The words were block-printed rather than written in cursive, the mark of a real draftsman. It read:

10/4/1945
Dear Mom and Pops,

The work here is crazy. The Top Dog is Mr. Earl, and quite a dandy he is. Comes to work every day dressed like he’s in Hollywood rather than Detroit. Kind of a grandstander – but he has the clout to back it up.

He says the cars we’re working on are going to change the whole industry. He took us all out to the airfield last week and had us look at the new Lockheed P-38 Lightning. Three fuselages and tall vertical wings at the tail. Looks like the future! He said he wants the new Cadillacs to look like an automotive version of that plane.

Hot diggity dog! I don’t know how we’re going to pull it off, but the first sketches are the craziest things you’ve ever seen. I guess Mr. Earl could see the big smile on my mug when he walked by my drafting table because he kind of busted my chops and told me to get back to work.

I drew a cockeyed version of a backend that had the taillights perched on top of vertical fenders, like the wings of the P-38, just being kind of funny. Mr. Earl saw it and nearly flipped his wig. He loved it!

I got into a bit of a rhubarb with Jimmy, the draftsman at the table next to me, over who came up with it first. I had to tell him to keep his peepers on his own work.

If they go through with it, this new Cadillac is going to be the craziest new design you can imagine. When some of the brass came down to the studio to see what we were working on, it really raised some eyebrows. Mr. Earl said, “I’ll put smokestacks right in the middle of the sons-a-bitches if I thought it would sell more cars!” (Sorry for the salty language, Mom, that Mr. Earl is a character.) Later he told me the taillight idea was a brainchild and I could expect some extra clams in my next paycheck.

Hope he wasn’t just whistling Dixie! Bad part is, I don’t know how we’d ever top it.

I’ve got another date tonight with Eileen. Turns out she’s a ducky shin cracker on the dance floor. Might be one I’d consider bringing back to Fort Stockton for Christmas.

Give everyone my best over at The Rusty Hammer Hardware Store,

Art Lambert

I offered to buy the letter from Will, but he said he was going to frame it and put it right next to a diecast of a ’49 Cadillac on his mantel.

I think it’d look better next to the real thing.

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