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The first time Edwin Rasmussen proposed building the Plymouth Barracuda, he was standing ankle-deep in the cold edge of Walloon Lake with a fishing rod in one hand, a half-eaten ham sandwich in the other, and five Chrysler executives behind him explaining why there could not possibly be any fish where he was fishing.

It was September of 1962, the sky over northern Michigan was the pale blue of a washed-out work shirt, and the annual Plymouth Division fishing retreat had already produced thirty-seven empty beer bottles, four sunburned vice presidents, two lost anchors, and a single yellow perch too small to have developed self-respect. The executives had spent the morning drifting over the same stretch of water because Luther Fairchild, vice president of product planning, had caught a respectable walleye there in 1958 and regarded the event as proof that fish, like automobile buyers, were creatures of habit.

Edwin had not been invited because anyone considered him important. He had been included because an assistant director of styling had canceled at the last moment, leaving an empty bunk at the lodge and a prepaid meal plan that Accounting refused to waste. Edwin was thirty-eight years old, held the ambiguous title of senior design development coordinator, and occupied an office in Highland Park only slightly larger than the drafting table inside it. Before joining Chrysler, he had drawn wing structures for military transports, kitchen appliances for a company that folded during the Korean War, and one remarkably graceful electric can opener that had been rejected because housewives allegedly distrusted elegance in anything intended to attack canned peaches.

At Chrysler, he had acquired a reputation for noticing when everyone else was pretending not to notice. He kept twelve sharpened Dixon Ticonderoga pencils arranged beside his blotter in descending order of length, smoked Chesterfields until the filters browned, and drove a 1959 Plymouth Savoy with a primer-gray left front fender that he had been meaning to repaint since Eisenhower was president. His wife, Helen, had long ago concluded that Edwin could visualize an automobile from six angles simultaneously but could not see an overflowing laundry hamper directly in front of him.

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He was also the only man in the fishing party catching fish.

Luther Fairchild watched Edwin lift a second walleye from the reeds and regarded the accomplishment as a breach of corporate protocol.

“You don’t stay put very long, Rasmussen.”

Edwin slipped the hook free, placed the fish in the creel, and looked across the lake toward the three company boats still circling the same empty water.

“The fish moved.”

“We caught them over there before.”

“That was four years ago.”

“Fish are creatures of habit.”

“So are executives.”

Fairchild stared at him.

Edwin took another bite of his sandwich.

“Fish don’t read last year’s maps.”

That evening, after supper, the executives gathered around a stone fireplace at the lodge and resumed discussing Ford.

Nobody at Chrysler knew precisely what Ford was building, which had not prevented everyone from developing a precise opinion about it. The rumor had begun with a supplier representative who had seen unfamiliar quarter-panel dies being moved near Dearborn. It had grown legs when a junior Chrysler engineer claimed his cousin’s neighbor was dating a secretary in Lee Iacocca’s office. By the time the story reached the fishing lodge, Ford was supposedly preparing everything from a two-seat roadster to a miniature Thunderbird with hidden headlights, fuel injection, and an optional hardtop that folded itself into the trunk.

Fairchild believed it was a Falcon with bucket seats.

Howard Kessel, the finance director, believed it was a publicity stunt.

Milton Crane from manufacturing believed Ford had not yet decided what it was building and had spread the rumors to make Chrysler waste money worrying about it.

Donald Pryce, vice president of marketing, believed young buyers were an unreliable demographic because they listened to Negro music, wore dungarees in public, and had recently made a hit record out of a song about mashed potatoes.

The fifth executive, Stanley Voight, said very little. Voight ran body engineering and possessed the compact, joyless posture of a man who had spent twenty-six years being asked to make things that styling had already promised to the public. He distrusted sketches because they lacked welds, tolerances, invoices, and consequences.

Edwin sat near the end of the sofa repairing a fishing lure while the others argued.

“They’re calling it Cougar,” Pryce announced.

“That’s Mercury,” said Fairchild.

“My information says Ford.”

“Your information thought the Edsel grille would test well with women.”

“It did test well with women.”

“Which women?”

“The ones we tested.”

Crane poured himself another bourbon. “Whatever it is, they’re building it off the Falcon. That much is certain.”

Kessel nodded. “Which means it’s cheap.”

“Cheap to build,” Edwin said without looking up.

Five faces turned toward him.

Pryce frowned. “Is there another kind?”

“Cheap to build and cheap to look at aren’t the same thing.”

Nobody replied, so Edwin returned to the lure.

Fairchild leaned forward. “What exactly are you suggesting?”

“I’m not suggesting anything.”

“You’re always suggesting something. Usually after everyone else has agreed not to.”

Edwin tested the hook against his thumbnail. “Ford has the Falcon. We have the Valiant.”

Pryce made a sound ordinarily associated with stepping into mud.

“The Valiant is practical transportation.”

“Exactly.”

“I fail to see your point.”

“If Ford is building a sporty car out of Falcon parts, we could build one out of Valiant parts.”

Kessel laughed first, and the others joined him with varying degrees of confidence. Edwin waited until the room quieted.

Fairchild wiped his eyes. “A sporty Valiant.”

“You can say it slowly, Luther. It still means the same thing.”

“The Valiant looks like something designed by a committee that hated each other.”

“It was.”

Pryce shook his head. “Young people don’t want economy cars.”

“Young people don’t have any money.”

“That is precisely my point.”

“They aren’t buying the car,” Edwin said. “They’re buying the dream. Their parents are buying the payments.”

The room became quieter.

Voight, who had been staring into the fire, finally looked over. “What would you change?”

“The roof.”

“Only the roof?”

“The roof, the rear glass, the deck lid, and enough of the quarters to keep the whole thing from looking like a Valiant somebody backed under a loading dock.”

Crane smiled into his drink. “That sounds like more than a roof.”

“It sounds like less than a new automobile.”

Fairchild studied Edwin for several seconds, then gestured toward the writing desk near the lodge office.

“Show us.”

There was no drafting paper in the lodge, so Edwin used the back of a placemat advertising Petoskey’s annual mushroom festival. He began with the Valiant’s known dimensions, marking the cowl, wheelbase, windshield angle, and door openings with the quick certainty of a man who had already drawn the car in his mind. Behind the door, his pencil rose into a long, clean fastback roof that flowed toward the tail without the usual three-box interruption. He widened the rear glass until it wrapped around the sides like the canopy of a fighter aircraft, then added a short deck beneath it and sharpened the rear quarter panels just enough to give the little Plymouth a set of shoulders.

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The executives moved closer.

The car on the paper was unmistakably a Valiant, yet it no longer apologized for being one. The front clip remained familiar. The wheel openings, doors, windshield, and basic body structure were all recognizable. But the great sweep of glass transformed the proportions, pulling the eye rearward and making the compact look longer, lower, and faster than the arithmetic said it had any right to be.

Voight stepped behind Edwin.

“That glass can’t be made.”

“It can.”

“Not in one piece.”

“It can if somebody wants the contract badly enough.”

“The rejection rate would be murderous.”

“So would letting Ford have the market alone.”

Kessel reached for the placemat. “What would this cost?”

Edwin kept his hand on it.

“To draw?”

“To manufacture.”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“How badly you want Ford explaining why they copied us.”

The executives laughed again, but not as loudly.

Three weeks later, Edwin stood at the far end of a conference table in Highland Park while twelve men in dark suits stared at a larger, cleaner version of the fishing-lodge sketch mounted on foam board behind him. The room smelled of coffee, wool, cigarette smoke, and the slow death of enthusiasm. Outside the windows, Detroit rain streaked the glass and turned the Chrysler complex the color of wet concrete.

The meeting had begun at nine. By ten fifteen, Marketing had proposed additional chrome. By eleven, Finance had objected to the additional chrome. By eleven twenty, Manufacturing had objected to the meeting. At noon, sandwiches arrived and nobody ate them because Pryce had begun explaining that Plymouth’s average buyer was forty-eight years old, which he presented as evidence of brand stability.

“Wonderful,” Edwin said.

Pryce smiled, pleased to have finally reached him.

“In twenty years, they’ll all be sixty-eight.”

The smile left.

Fairchild rubbed his forehead. “Rasmussen, please confine yourself to the proposal.”

“The proposal is that we need younger buyers before our present buyers begin selecting automobiles based on whether their walkers fit in the trunk.”

“Plymouth has always built dependable, sensible transportation,” said a division manager named Edgar Mott, who had never knowingly worn a necktie with more than two colors.

“Exactly,” Edwin replied.

Mott waited.

“If we keep building what we’ve always built, we’ll keep selling to people we’ve already sold.”

“That is called customer loyalty.”

“It is also called running out of customers.”

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Stanley Voight sat halfway down the table with a thick engineering folder unopened before him. He had spent the previous two weeks attempting to disprove Edwin’s arithmetic and had come to resent the arithmetic for refusing to cooperate. The proposed car could use the Valiant’s existing front structure, floorpan, suspension, powertrain, dashboard, windshield, doors, door glass, front fenders, hood, bumpers, lamps, steering gear, brakes, and most of the interior hardware. The list of new pieces remained irritatingly short.

Edwin walked to the drawing and tapped the windshield header with his pencil.

“This is already engineered.”

He tapped the door.

“This is already stamped.”

The rocker panel.

“Already tooled.”

The dashboard.

“Already paid for.”

He moved around the car, pointing as he went.

“Front suspension, rear axle, brakes, steering column, seats, wiring harness, heater box, engine mounts, transmission tunnel. We own all of it. We know how to build all of it. We know what it costs, we know where it breaks, and we know which fellow on the night shift installs the glovebox crooked.”

Someone near the end of the table chuckled.

“The roof is new. The backlight is new. The deck lid and rear quarters are new. Some interior trim is new. That’s the gamble.”

Kessel folded his hands. “And your sales projection?”

“Thirty thousand the first year.”

The laughter rolled around the table faster this time.

Edwin waited.

Kessel smiled. “On what basis?”

“On the basis that Ford believes there are at least that many young people who would rather not be seen in their mother’s Falcon.”

“That is not market research.”

“No. It’s eyesight.”

Pryce lit another cigarette. “Young buyers are fickle.”

“All buyers are fickle. Young buyers simply have the decency not to pretend otherwise.”

“And what makes you think they’ll choose a Plymouth?”

“Because it won’t look like the Plymouth their father drives.”

Mott leaned back. “But it will be built from the same parts.”

Edwin nodded. “Now you understand the proposal.”

The room drifted into silence. Rain ticked against the windows. Somewhere in the building, a stamping press struck with enough force to tremble the water in the coffee glasses.

Voight finally opened his folder.

“The backlight supplier says the glass is possible.”

Fairchild turned toward him. “At what cost?”

“Too much.”

Kessel nodded as if this ended the matter.

Voight continued. “But not enough too much.”

Kessel stopped nodding.

“The curvature will require new tooling. Rejection rates will be high at first. Shipping will be difficult. Installation tolerances will be narrow, and the weather seal will give us ulcers. But it can be done.”

Edwin looked around the table.

“There it is, gentlemen. The highest compliment Engineering has ever paid an idea.”

Voight gave him a look that could have frozen radiator water.

Fairchild rose and walked toward the drawing. He was not a timid man, but he had survived in the automobile business long enough to understand that every successful car created a dozen fathers and every failure became an orphan before the first recall. He examined the fastback roof, the great curved glass, and the Valiant face beneath them.

“What do we call it?”

Pryce brightened. Naming things required no tooling.

“Valiant Sport.”

“No,” said Edwin.

“Valiant GT.”

“No.”

“Valiant Sprint.”

“Sounds like a shoe.”

“Plymouth Arrow.”

“Sounds like a refrigerator.”

Mott suggested Valiant SS, after which someone pointed out Chevrolet’s increasing fondness for those letters. Crane proposed Charger, but the room decided the name deserved something larger and more aggressive than a compact with a slant-six. A junior marketing man whispered Falconer, then denied doing so when everyone turned toward him.

Fairchild looked at Edwin. “You have an opinion.”

“I generally do.”

“Then let’s suffer through it.”

Edwin glanced at the drawing.

“What eats Mustangs?”

Kessel frowned. “Mountain lions.”

“Men with rifles,” said Crane.

“Old age,” said Mott.

Edwin shook his head. “A barracuda.”

There was laughter, but it faded sooner than before.

Pryce repeated the word. “Barracuda.”

“Fast,” Edwin said. “Aggressive. American enough to pronounce. And it doesn’t sound like something a mother drives to the supermarket.”

Fairchild continued staring at the drawing.

“Plymouth Barracuda.”

Nobody said anything for several seconds.

Then Kessel asked the question that had been sitting at the table all morning.

“If this fails, who owns it?”

Edwin looked at him.

“If it succeeds, it’ll be somebody else’s promotion.”

Crane laughed. Voight almost did. Fairchild did not.

The project received provisional approval at four forty-five that afternoon, partly because Ford’s rumored car had become too dangerous to ignore and partly because Edwin’s proposal offered Chrysler the rare luxury of taking a risk with equipment it already owned. The official program accumulated committees, code numbers, budgets, revisions, and executives who later remembered having supported it from the beginning. Edwin’s name disappeared from the paperwork almost immediately, which he found reassuring. At Chrysler, nothing truly existed until enough people could claim credit for it.

The following eighteen months were consumed by clay, steel, glass, profanity, and the endless negotiation between what designers drew and what factories could tolerate. The stylists refined the roofline. Engineers reinforced the opening around the immense rear window. Glass suppliers produced curved pieces that cracked, distorted, or emerged from the molds with optical waves capable of making a telephone pole appear seasick. Weather seals leaked. Trim buckled. Hinges objected. Accountants circulated memoranda suggesting a smaller rear window, and the memoranda were ignored with unusual courage.

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Edwin moved through the program without becoming its leader or surrendering his influence. He carried revised drawings from Styling to Engineering, translated the complaints of each department into a dialect the other could understand, and developed the useful habit of standing quietly near arguments until everyone had exhausted the reasons something could not be done.

One night, well past ten, a young draftsman named Leonard Boone found Edwin alone beside the full-size clay model. Most of the studio lights had been turned off. The car sat beneath the remaining lamps like some smooth-backed creature that had crawled out of the future and was waiting to see whether the present would allow it to stay.

Boone walked around the rear.

“It doesn’t look like a Valiant.”

“It does from the front.”

“Is that bad?”

“Depends which direction it’s coming from.”

Boone touched the clay lightly with two fingers.

“Do you think Ford’s car looks like this?”

“I hope not.”

“Why?”

“Because then one of us has wasted a lot of time.”

By early 1964, the automobile was ready. The finished Barracuda retained more of the Valiant than Plymouth’s advertising would emphasize and less than skeptical executives had feared. It had the same compact bones beneath it, but the long roof and enormous wraparound rear glass transformed the familiar structure into something fresh, unusual, and faintly daring. It did not possess the low hood or long nose of a traditional sports car. It was not a European grand tourer, a Corvette rival, or anything else that could be easily described without eventually returning to the phrase sporty compact.

That ambiguity was part of its charm.

At the press introduction, a gold Barracuda stood beneath white lights while photographers crowded around its flanks. The paint carried a muted metallic warmth, neither brash nor apologetic, and the black bucket-seat interior made the cabin look more serious than anyone expected from a Plymouth with Valiant door handles. The rear glass seemed impossibly large, curving around the passengers and flooding the car with light. It was both its greatest engineering extravagance and the one feature no reporter could ignore.

Fairchild stood beside Edwin near the back of the room as the cloth came off.

For several seconds, the only sound was the clicking of camera shutters.

Fairchild whispered, “I’ll be damned.”

Edwin watched the reflected lights slide across the glass.

“I know.”

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The Barracuda reached dealers on April 1, 1964. Plymouth had done it. Chrysler had taken its least glamorous compact, redrawn the roof, and produced a new kind of automobile before Ford could unveil the mysterious machine everyone in Detroit had been whispering about. The company issued press releases, bought advertisements, trained salesmen, and congratulated itself with the cautious satisfaction of a man who had crossed a river first and had not yet noticed the bridge being built behind him.

For thirteen days, Plymouth owned the future.

Then Ford introduced the Mustang.

It did not arrive so much as erupt. Television cameras loved it. Newspapers loved it. Young buyers loved it. Parents who had never considered themselves young loved the idea that owning one might provide clerical correction. Ford placed convertibles in parades, hardtops in showrooms, and the Mustang name into the bloodstream of the country before Chrysler had finished counting its first month’s orders.

Dealers sold them from transport trucks. Customers ordered them in colors they had not seen. Reporters called it a sensation, a phenomenon, a revolution, and several other words that made Plymouth executives reach for antacids.

The first Mustang sales report arrived in Highland Park on a gray Monday morning.

The same men who had approved the Barracuda gathered around the same conference table. Nobody smoked for nearly a minute, which was how Edwin understood the seriousness of the occasion.

Kessel adjusted his glasses.

“We beat them.”

Fairchild continued reading the report.

“I know.”

“We were first.”

“I know.”

Mott looked toward the window, where the Chrysler smokestacks stood against the sky.

“How did we lose?”

Edwin sat near the end of the table with one of his pencils balanced across his finger.

“We didn’t.”

Everyone looked at him.

Pryce pushed the sales report across the table. “Have you read this?”

“Yes.”

“They’ve sold more cars in three days than some divisions sell in a quarter.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t consider that losing?”

Edwin placed the pencil on the table.

“Ford sold the world’s first Mustang.”

Fairchild waited.

“We sold the world’s first Barracuda.”

“That sounds like the same thing.”

“It isn’t.”

“What’s the difference?”

Edwin looked again at the numbers.

“About four hundred thousand cars a year, apparently.”

Nobody laughed at first.

Then Crane did.

Voight followed, reluctant but unable to help himself. Fairchild finally leaned back and smiled. Even Kessel permitted a brief breath through his nose that, under more generous circumstances, might have passed for amusement.

The Barracuda continued. It grew stronger, faster, and more distinct with each generation. It acquired V-8 engines, broader shoulders, louder colors, and eventually enough menace to make the original gold fastback appear almost innocent by comparison. The Mustang became a national symbol. The Barracuda became something more private, cherished by people who preferred their legends with fewer witnesses.

Edwin remained at Chrysler for another eleven years. He contributed to automobiles both memorable and deservedly forgotten, attended meetings about tail lamps, roof pillars, door apertures, bumper regulations, and why Americans continued buying vinyl roofs despite possessing eyes. He received two promotions, neither of which included enough authority to prevent unnecessary meetings. His fishing-lodge sketch vanished into a corporate archive, then into a warehouse, then presumably into the same dark administrative country where rejected hubcaps and pension records went to die.

When Edwin retired in 1975, Fairchild gave a speech crediting him with “valuable contributions to the evolution of Plymouth design.” Edwin told Helen this meant nobody could remember exactly what he had done but everyone agreed it had taken a long time.

He spent retirement fishing.

Years later, on a warm afternoon in the late 1980s, Edwin took his twelve-year-old grandson Michael to a public boat launch near Traverse City. Edwin had grown thinner, his hair had gone silver, and his hands trembled slightly until they closed around a fishing rod. He still carried his lures in labeled compartments. He still changed locations when the fish stopped biting. He still believed most problems survived because people remained emotionally attached to where they had first encountered them.

They were loading the aluminum boat when a low golden automobile turned into the gravel lot.

Edwin recognized it before the sunlight reached the great rear glass.

The 1964 Barracuda rolled past them and parked near the water, restored but not over-restored, its muted gold paint glowing softly beneath the trees. The black interior was visible through the open window. The front bucket seats, simple dashboard, round instruments, and white-topped floor shifter looked almost exactly as he remembered them. At the rear, the immense curved glass wrapped around the cabin with the same impossible sweep that had once made Stanley Voight insist it could not be built.

Michael stopped carrying the tackle box.

“What is that?”

“A Plymouth.”

“I know it’s a Plymouth.”

Edwin looked at him.

“Then your education has not been entirely wasted.”

The owner, a man in his thirties, noticed them admiring the car and walked over.

“Sixty-four Barracuda,” he said. “First year.”

Edwin nodded.

“Nice car.”

“Most people think the Mustang came first.”

“Most people think a lot of things.”

The owner rested one hand on the roof. “Plymouth beat them by a couple weeks.”

“Thirteen days.”

The man smiled. “You know your cars.”

“I’ve been accused.”

Michael walked around the rear, staring through the enormous glass.

“Grandpa, did you ever own one?”

“No.”

“Did you want one?”

Edwin studied the roofline, following the curve from the windshield header to the short rear deck. The proportions were familiar in the way an old melody remained familiar even when played by strangers. He remembered the mushroom-festival placemat, the lodge fireplace, the cold lake around his boots, and Luther Fairchild explaining that the fish ought to be somewhere else. He remembered the boardroom smoke, Kessel’s laughter, Voight’s impossible glass, and thirteen glorious days when Plymouth had arrived first.

“I already had one,” he said.

Michael frowned. “You just said you didn’t.”

“Ownership is a complicated subject.”

The boy looked toward the Barracuda, then back at his grandfather, but Edwin had already lifted the tackle box into the boat.

They pushed away from the launch a few minutes later. Michael sat in the bow while Edwin worked the small outboard, guiding them toward the reeds where the water darkened beneath the overhanging trees. Behind them, the gold Plymouth remained beside the lake, its black interior cooling in the shade and its vast rear window holding a perfect reflection of the sky.

Michael glanced back at it.

“Was it better than the Mustang?”

Edwin shut off the motor and allowed the boat to drift.

“No.”

“Was the Mustang better?”

“No.”

“Then which one won?”

Edwin opened his tackle box and selected a lure the color of a small wounded perch.

“Depends who’s writing the headline.”

“That doesn’t answer the question.”

“It’s the only answer history ever gives.”

He tied the lure, tested the knot, and cast toward the edge of the reeds. The line flashed briefly in the sun before settling onto the water.

On shore, the Barracuda gleamed quietly, still carrying the roofline that had once existed only in the mind of a draftsman nobody had invited on purpose. It had been first, but not famous for being first; bold, but built from ordinary pieces; forgotten by the headline and remembered by the people who looked closely enough to see what had happened.

Edwin watched the line.

After a moment, Michael asked why they had not stayed near the boat launch, where three other fishermen were casting.

Edwin smiled.

“Fish don’t read last year’s maps.”

Then the line tightened in his hand.

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