GM designers were serious in their pursuit of provocative
styling to woo war-weary customers. To diminish the visual bulk of Cadillac’s
pre-war designs, Earl insisted that both the front and rear fenders be
separated from the main body to mimic the muscularity of a crouching animal.
(Earl, a talker and hand waver, never placed pen to paper.) To finish the 1948
Cadillac’s long flowing side sweeps, Hershey topped rear fenders with fillips
containing taillamps. Inevitably, they were nicknamed tailfins.
Earl later told a newspaper reporter, “When I saw the P-38 rudders sticking up, it gave me an idea for use after the war. But when we introduced fins, we almost started a war within the corporation.”
Earl later told a newspaper reporter, “When I saw the P-38 rudders sticking up, it gave me an idea for use after the war. But when we introduced fins, we almost started a war within the corporation.”
In fact, Earl, along with other GM heads, had mixed
emotions about the fins and he instructed Hershey to pare them off the clay
models. But when GM president Charles Wilson, Cadillac chief engineer Ed Cole,
general manager John Gordon, and design chief Bill Mitchell all voiced support,
Earl reluctantly joined the yea team. When they finally reached the street,
fins were deemed a stroke of genius and accessory shops all over the country
invented ways to add Cadillac’s tail blips to Chevies and Oldsmobiles.
In 1955, with the jet age soaring, Cadillac seized the
moment with new razor-edged rear stabilizers for the Eldorado Special
Convertible. By 1957, the lean fin motif had spread from Cadillac’s base models
up to its hand-crafted Eldorado Brougham.
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