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In the summer of 1956, General Motors was not particularly worried about the future.

This was understandable. General Motors owned most of it.

Nearly one out of every two new automobiles sold in the United States came from one of its five passenger-car divisions. Chevrolet was Chevrolet. Pontiac was moving upward. Oldsmobile had horsepower and prestige. Buick was what successful men bought before they became Cadillac men, and Cadillac had reached the enviable position where its name no longer described an automobile so much as the achievement of having arrived somewhere important.

Ford was a competitor, certainly. Chrysler was a competitor in the same sense that the second-place horse remains relevant to the one in front. Studebaker and Packard still existed, although increasingly in the manner of elderly relatives whose Christmas cards reassured everyone that they had survived another year.

General Motors had the market, the money, the engineering, the dealers and, most importantly, the confidence that comes from having been right for so long that being wrong begins to seem structurally impossible.

Then Chuck Jordan went to lunch.

Jordan was twenty-eight years old, already one of the bright young men inside GM Styling, and possessed of the particular defect that makes a good automobile designer dangerous to his employer: curiosity. He had heard something about what Chrysler was preparing for 1957. The details were vague, but the Chrysler facilities were only a few miles away, lunch lasted an hour, and there are worse things a young designer can do with company time than investigate the competition.

Following the tip, Jordan drove toward a Chrysler storage yard, pulled over and walked toward a chain-link fence.

What he saw on the other side changed Detroit.

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Parked in plain view were unreleased 1957 Plymouths and other Chrysler products, weeks before the public was supposed to see them. Virgil Exner’s Forward Look had finally become more than sketches, clay and corporate promises. The cars were real, and sitting there under ordinary Michigan daylight they were devastating.

They were low. They were clean. They were sleek. Their roofs looked light and airy. Their bodies seemed to be moving even while parked. And rising from their rear quarters were fins that did not appear to have been attached as decoration but seemed to grow naturally from the shape of the automobile itself.

Jordan stood at the fence and stared.

Then he thought about what General Motors had coming.

That was when lunch ended.

The problem was not that General Motors had ugly automobiles in development. The problem was worse. GM’s forthcoming cars represented precisely what General Motors had spent years teaching Americans to admire: mass, chrome, substance, ornamentation and the unmistakable impression that the owner had purchased considerably more automobile than his neighbors.

Across the fence, however, Chrysler had changed the question.

The Plymouths didn’t look richer.

They looked newer.

There are few sights more frightening to an automobile company than something newer.

Jordan returned to the Technical Center and found Bill Mitchell, the brilliant, volatile designer already positioned as the likely successor to Harley Earl. Jordan told him what he had seen. Mitchell listened, then did what intelligent men occasionally do when presented with unpleasant information.

He went and looked for himself.

Mitchell took other GM stylists with him. Soon a small procession of General Motors designers was standing on the wrong side of a chain-link fence looking at the future somebody else had designed.

Among the men who eventually heard about the Chrysler sighting was Warren P. Treadwell, Assistant Director of Product Planning Coordination at General Motors and the only man in the building whose immediate reaction to the 1957 Plymouth involved a hamburger stand in Fort Stockton, Texas.

Nobody at General Motors knew what the P stood for.

Warren had discovered years earlier that a mysterious middle initial on a business card suggested old money, an advanced degree or possibly a grandfather who had been governor. In Warren’s case it stood for Preston, but he had never seen any reason to spoil the effect.

He had grown up in Fort Stockton, where his father sold irrigation pumps and his mother taught fourth grade. Warren had spent his teenage summers changing tires, unloading feed sacks and learning that Pecos County could produce temperatures normally associated with the manufacturing of glass. He had left for college, gone to war, returned home just long enough to confirm that Fort Stockton was still there, and then headed north.

By 1956 he was forty-one years old and living in Birmingham, Michigan, with his wife Margaret and two daughters. He had an office at General Motors with a door that closed, a secretary who answered his telephone and a walnut credenza containing absolutely nothing he could not have kept in a drawer. He had a reserved parking space. He belonged to a country club he did not particularly enjoy. He earned $18,700 a year, which was more money than his father could comfortably imagine and slightly less than Margaret had already found uses for.

They had recently bought a brick house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a finished basement and an attached garage. Margaret wanted a swimming pool. Their older daughter wanted a horse. Their younger daughter needed braces. Warren privately believed that the horse and the braces could probably be combined somehow, but he had learned that certain management theories successful at General Motors were poorly received at home.

He was doing well.

Everybody back in Fort Stockton knew he was doing well.

That last part mattered.

His mother told people Warren was “an executive with General Motors,” which in Fort Stockton had gradually evolved into a widespread belief that Warren personally approved every Chevrolet before it left Detroit. His old high-school classmates assumed he knew Alfred Sloan. His cousin Earl told people Warren could get him a Cadillac at cost, although Warren had repeatedly explained that he could not. At Christmas he returned to Texas wearing expensive suits and answering questions about Detroit, and every year the distance between the boy who had unloaded feed sacks and the man he had become grew a little more comfortable.

Then Warren saw the Chryslers.

He stood beside two Buick men and someone from Oldsmobile at the fence and studied a Plymouth perhaps seven feet away. Nobody said anything for several seconds.

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Finally one of the Buick men spoke.

“Well.”

That was all.

There are moments when the English language has already provided the necessary word and further discussion only damages it.

Warren drove back to the Technical Center without turning on the radio. He knew enough about automobiles to understand what he had seen, but he knew even more about corporations. There would be meetings. There would be memoranda. There would be committees created to determine why previous committees had failed to anticipate the problem. Men would begin asking who had known what and when they had known it. Organizational charts would be studied with the concentration normally reserved for enemy troop movements.

Eventually somebody might notice that a man whose title was Assistant Director of Product Planning Coordination sounded suspiciously like somebody who ought to have coordinated some product planning.

Warren occupied the most dangerous altitude in American business.

Middle management.

He was high enough to be blamed and not high enough to be indispensable.

That evening Margaret found him sitting at the kitchen table with a drink. He had loosened his tie and was staring at nothing.

“Bad day?”

“Chrysler.”

Margaret put down her purse. She had been married to Warren long enough to know that automobile companies could apparently ruin evenings from hundreds of miles away.

“What about Chrysler?”

“They’ve got fins.”

She waited for the rest of the sentence.

There wasn’t any.

“So?”

Warren looked at her with the exhausted expression of a physician whose patient had just asked whether the pancreas was really necessary.

“You don’t understand.”

“Apparently not.”

“They’ve got fins.”

Margaret went upstairs.

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The next morning General Motors discovered urgency.

The 1958 models were already too far along to rescue. Tooling, engineering and production schedules had turned styling decisions into commitments involving millions of dollars, thousands of workers and acres of machinery. Whatever anybody now thought of those cars, America was going to get them.

The 1959s were different.

Those could still be changed.

And so, with the quiet dignity for which enormous corporations are famous, General Motors panicked.

Design proposals that had seemed handsome a week earlier suddenly looked ancient. Clay models that had been described as “substantial” became “heavy.” Roofs became too thick. Bumpers became too massive. Chrome that had represented prosperity on Monday represented plumbing by Thursday. Men who had spent months explaining why tailfins were becoming passé began explaining that properly executed tailfins were essential to the American motoring experience.

Nobody mentioned the previous months.

Bill Mitchell pushed for alternate 1959 programs while Harley Earl was away in Europe. Designers began sketching. Clay modelers carved away months of work and started over. Draftsmen stayed late. Engineers received new proposals and responded with language not generally included in corporate memoranda. Lights burned in the studios long after wives had put dinners into refrigerators and children had gone to bed.

That was the part automobile histories rarely showed.

They showed the clay models.

They showed the styling studios.

They showed Harley Earl standing beside dream cars and Bill Mitchell looking like a man who had been born wearing a tailored suit.

They did not show Margaret Treadwell sitting alone at 9:30 with Warren’s dinner covered by a plate.

They did not show a Chevrolet designer telling his son he would miss another Little League game.

They did not show the Buick clay modeler calculating what the overtime would do for Christmas and what the hours were doing to his marriage.

They did not show middle managers wondering whether the next organizational announcement would contain the phrase effective immediately.

Corporations did not fear unemployment.

Men did.

A corporation did not have a mortgage.

Warren Treadwell did.

Within weeks Margaret stopped mentioning the swimming pool. Warren stopped teasing his daughter about the horse. He began arriving home after ten, eating whatever had been left for him and falling asleep with design reports beside the bed.

One night Margaret found him sitting in the dark garage.

She opened the kitchen door and saw his outline beside their Oldsmobile.

“Warren?”

“Yes.”

“What are you doing?”

“Thinking.”

She stepped into the garage.

“About Chrysler?”

“No.”

That worried her.

“What, then?”

“Fort Stockton.”

Margaret leaned against the doorframe.

Warren had spent fifteen years building a life whose most important feature, although he rarely admitted it, was that it was not in Fort Stockton. He loved his parents. He liked many of the people. He even missed West Texas occasionally, usually in February and never in August. But Fort Stockton represented the person he had been before he became Warren P. Treadwell of General Motors.

If GM lost enough market share, somebody would pay. It would not be Harley Earl. It would not be the chairman. It would not be any man whose portrait hung in a lobby.

It would be somebody whose office could be emptied before lunch.

Somebody like Warren.

“If I lose this job,” he said, “we can’t keep the house.”

“You’d find another job.”

“Where?”

“Ford.”

“They’re looking through fences too.”

“American Motors?”

Warren turned toward her.

“I’m worried, Margaret. I’m not desperate.”

She almost smiled, but didn’t.

“What about Texas?”

There it was.

Warren could see Dickinson Boulevard immediately. He could see the dust. He could see the courthouse. He could see men who had spent fifteen years hearing about Warren’s important career in Detroit watching him unload a moving van in front of his mother’s house.

His cousin Earl had written recently that the Dairy Twin was looking for a dependable assistant manager.

Warren closed his eyes.

He could see himself behind the counter.

Forty-one years old.

Former Assistant Director of Product Planning Coordination, General Motors Corporation.

Paper hat.

White apron.

“Would you like fries with that?”

Warren stood.

Margaret watched him walk toward the kitchen.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to work.”

“It’s almost eleven.”

“I’m not serving hamburgers.”

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Across Detroit, versions of that conversation were occurring in houses Warren would never see. The details differed. One man worried about tuition. Another had just bought a Cadillac he could barely afford. Another had promised his wife they were finally moving out of their apartment. Another was waiting for a promotion that suddenly seemed less likely.

That was what Chrysler had really parked behind the fence.

Not Plymouths.

Consequences.

Harley Earl, meanwhile, was in Europe.

Earl had effectively created automotive styling as an organized corporate discipline. He had taught Detroit that automobiles could become obsolete emotionally long before they wore out mechanically. Under his leadership General Motors had embraced color, chrome, wraparound windshields, dream cars, Motoramas and the increasingly theatrical idea that next year’s automobile should make this year’s owner feel faintly embarrassed.

He had also been right for a very long time.

That can be dangerous.

Some younger designers believed Earl’s instincts had hardened into doctrine. The heavy roofs, massive bumpers and accumulated ornamentation that had once made GM cars look rich were beginning to make them look ponderous. But Harley Earl remained Harley Earl, and men who disagreed with him tended to discover that the organization contained interesting opportunities elsewhere.

With Earl away, Mitchell moved.

Nobody called it a revolt. General Motors did not have revolts.

It had programs.

The alternate 1959 program gathered speed. Chevrolet changed. Pontiac changed. Oldsmobile changed. Buick changed. Cadillac changed. The entire corporation began moving toward automobiles lower, wider and dramatically more flamboyant than anything previously planned.

Warren attended meetings where men discussed fractions of inches as though national security depended upon them. Rooflines dropped. Windshields expanded. Rear decks stretched. Fins appeared, disappeared and reappeared larger. Somebody would suggest restraint, and twelve other men would stare at him as though he had proposed surrendering to Chrysler unconditionally.

Warren learned that the safest sentence in General Motors in late 1956 was, “I think we should push it farther.”

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Nobody ever asked farther toward what.

Just farther.

One afternoon he walked through a studio and stopped beside an experimental rear quarter whose fin seemed approximately tall enough to receive television broadcasts from Toledo.

A designer looked at him.

“What do you think?”

Warren studied it.

He imagined the Dairy Twin.

He imagined his cousin Earl sliding a basket of onion rings toward him.

“Not enough.”

The designer added clay.

It is impossible to prove that Warren P. Treadwell was personally responsible for the 1959 Cadillac.

It is equally impossible to prove that he wasn’t.

When Harley Earl returned from Europe, he discovered that the styling organization had been extremely busy in his absence. Mitchell and the younger designers had created an alternative direction for 1959, and it bore little resemblance to the path GM had been following when Earl left.

The atmosphere inside Styling became careful.

Earl walked around the models.

Men watched him.

Mitchell watched him.

Jordan watched him.

Warren, who had no legitimate reason to be anywhere near this particular moment but had developed the survival instinct of a prairie dog, observed from a safe distance.

Earl studied the cars.

Then he left.

For two days Warren heard nothing.

Those were the longest two days of his career.

Then the word filtered down.

The new direction would proceed.

General Motors exhaled.

Warren called Margaret from his office.

“We’re staying in Michigan.”

There was a pause.

Then Margaret said, “Can I have the swimming pool?”

“Let’s not get reckless.”

The work continued.

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What eventually appeared in American showrooms for 1959 was one of the most extraordinary collections of automobiles Detroit ever produced.

Chevrolet went horizontal. Its enormous rear wings spread outward with cat-eye taillamps beneath them, giving an ordinary family sedan the rear view of something capable of atmospheric reentry.

Pontiac became lower and wider and established a visual identity that would help transform the division.

Oldsmobile stretched chrome and sheet metal across enough territory to require surveying equipment.

Buick produced enormous canted fins, diagonal headlights and a body composed largely of dramatic angles pointing toward other dramatic angles.

Cadillac simply abandoned diplomacy.

Its tailfins rose nearly four feet from the pavement, each carrying twin bullet-shaped taillights that looked capable of launching independently. The car became an instant symbol of American excess, optimism, confidence and complete unwillingness to leave well enough alone.

Depending upon whom you asked, the 1959 Cadillac represented either the summit of American automobile styling or compelling evidence that Detroit needed adult supervision.

Warren loved it.

He couldn’t afford one.

Instead, he bought a Chevrolet.

Margaret preferred the Buick, but Warren wanted the Chevrolet because every morning before work he could walk behind it and look at those enormous horizontal fins.

They reminded him of Chrysler.

They reminded him of the chain-link fence.

Mostly they reminded him that he was not wearing a paper hat.

General Motors survived.

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More than survived, in fact. The 1959 cars became icons of an era when Detroit seemed convinced that automobiles were only temporarily earthbound. Some were beautiful. Some were bizarre. Some managed to be both before breakfast.

Virgil Exner had forced the largest automobile corporation in the world to reconsider itself.

Chuck Jordan had happened to look through the fence.

Bill Mitchell had understood what he was seeing.

Harley Earl, whatever his initial feelings about the revolt occurring in his studios, ultimately allowed the organization to change direction.

And thousands of people whose names never appeared in automobile histories did the work.

Years later, after retiring from General Motors, Warren Treadwell returned to Fort Stockton for his mother’s funeral.

He and Margaret drove down Dickinson Boulevard in an air-conditioned Cadillac, because by then Warren could afford one and saw no reason to pretend otherwise. Fort Stockton looked smaller than he remembered. Most hometowns do after you’ve spent a lifetime somewhere else.

They passed the Dairy Twin.

Warren slowed.

A teenage boy stood behind the counter wearing a white apron and paper hat.

Margaret noticed Warren smiling.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“You’ve been staring at that hamburger place.”

Warren kept driving.

A block passed.

Then Margaret smiled too.

“The fins?”

Warren looked at her.

After more than thirty years of marriage, she finally understood.

“The fins.”

They drove on.

Automobile history tends to be written in the language of corporations. Chrysler introduced the Forward Look. General Motors responded. Mitchell succeeded Earl. Exner changed Detroit styling. The 1957 Chrysler products influenced the 1959 General Motors line.

All of that is true.

But corporations don’t look through fences.

People do.

Corporations don’t lie awake wondering whether the mortgage can be paid if sales fall twelve percent. They don’t miss Little League games. They don’t eat reheated dinners at ten-thirty. They don’t wonder whether the promotion is gone, whether the boss is looking for somebody to blame or whether fifteen years of climbing can disappear in one bad model year.

And corporations certainly don’t imagine returning to Fort Stockton at forty-one years old and asking somebody whether he wants mustard on his hamburger.

People do that.

That may be the more useful lesson of the summer of 1956.

General Motors had not become stupid. It had become comfortable, which is much easier to do and considerably harder to recognize. The company had spent so many years defining what Americans wanted that it had stopped seriously considering the possibility that somebody else might define it first.

Then a twenty-eight-year-old designer left the building during lunch.

He drove six miles.

He got out of his car.

He walked to a chain-link fence.

And he looked through it.

On the other side sat a row of automobiles that told the most powerful automobile company in the world something nobody inside the building had been willing to say.

You’re behind.

Three years later, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick and Cadillac arrived in showrooms wearing some of the wildest sheet metal ever stamped in Detroit. Fins rose. Roofs fell. Chrome migrated into places previously unknown to metallurgy. Entire rear ends seemed designed under the assumption that airports would eventually permit automobiles onto active runways.

And somewhere beneath all that steel, glass, chrome and corporate bravado was something considerably less glamorous.

Fear.

Fear of losing market share.

Fear of losing prestige.

Fear of losing the corner office.

Fear of telling your wife the swimming pool would have to wait.

Fear of going home.

Sometimes that’s what progress looks like before the advertising department gets hold of it.

And sometimes the future isn’t hidden in a laboratory or revealed at a Motorama beneath spotlights and orchestral music.

Sometimes it’s parked in a storage yard on the other side of a chain-link fence.

You just have to be worried enough to look.

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