Senior designer Frank Hershey had been working on the rear fender design
idea that had first come to him before the war, when Harley Earl led
the field trip to Selfridge air base to see the P-38 fighter. Looking at
the plane’s twin tail rudders that day, Hershey immediately thought of
fins on sea creatures—slicing through the water’s surface as a shark
moved in on its prey, flashing silver-blue in the sun when a sailfish
rose out of the ocean in full flight, waving a languid goodbye just
before a whale disappeared into the deep—heart-stopping images long
embedded in his imagination. It struck him that fins were wondrous
creations of nature—beautiful, sleek, and shiny, streamlined and
symmetrical, the embodiment of power, speed, maneuverability, and
stability, everything that a modern automobile should be. And yet no one
had designed them into the body of a car, until now.
In the basement of Hershey’s farmhouse, two designers, three modelers, and a sculptor began turning
Hershey’s sketches
into three dimensions on a quarter-size clay model. “We would lay out
ideas on the board, and Harley would come out and we’d make changes,”
Hershey said. “He came out all the time.” When the GM plant employees
strike ended in March 1946—with the union agreeing to an 18.5-percent
pay increase—the work was transferred to the Styling studios, where
Harley, Hershey, and Bill Mitchell agreed that Cadillac, the company’s
traditional style leader, should get the first fins treatment.
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