Uncle John's Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader (29 page)

It had been years since any of the major American auto companies bothered to make
any
kind of a two-seater, let alone a sports car, and this was undoubtedly one of the things that crossed Earl’s mind. How can consumers be expected to buy many roadsters if there aren’t any on the market? Remember, the auto industry was a lot different in the 1950s: Together, GM’s five automobile divisions (Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Buick, and Cadillac) manufactured roughly half of all the automobiles sold in the United States each year. Ford, Chrysler, and a handful of other small U.S.
companies sold nearly all the rest. Few Americans had ever owned a foreign-made car or would have considered making such a purchase—the image and perceived superiority of the American automakers was that dominant in those days. But with no domestic sports cars available, customers who wanted to buy one had to get it from a foreign automaker or go without.

Earl didn’t know if sports cars would ever be a major segment of the U.S. auto industry, but he did understand that they had a great deal of appeal with young people. GM was a big company and made big profits year after year. Why not spend a tiny fraction of that money on an
American
sports car that would appeal to the kids who bought MGs and Triumphs? Once they were in the GM fold, Earl figured, when the time came for them to trade up to a four-seater, they’d be much more likely to buy it from GM.

Harley Earl’s innovative design work played a major role in GM’s postwar dominance, and the company’s other executives knew it. So when he hired a young engineer named Bob McLean, paired him with another young stylist named Duane Bohnstedt, and hid the two of them on the third floor of an obscure old GM building with instructions to work on something called “Project Opel,” few executives had the gall to ask what Project Opel was all about.

What it was all about, of course, was a two-seater convertible sports car. Working from Earl’s rough outline, McLean and Bohnstedt came up with a design for the car’s body that appears to have been inspired by an Italian roadster called the Cisitalia 202. In those days, most sports cars had long engine compartments that narrowed almost to a point at the front end of the car, with broad, flowing fenders that were a separate and quite distinct element of the car’s design. Not so with the new GM roadster: Like the Cisitalia 202, it was a low, flat, wide, almost square box with fenders that were integrated into the rest of the body. Today the integrated-fender look is standard—it’s so common that it’s difficult to even remember what cars looked like when their fenders were separate from the rest of the engine compartment. But to see that look on a roadster in the 1950s was not only novel, it was stunning.

When McLean and Bohnstedt were finished with their design, they made a full-size model out of clay, and then Earl invited executives from GM’s five different divisions to take a look at it and see if they wanted it for their division. Cadillac passed. So did Buick and Oldsmobile. Pontiac wasn’t interested, either.

The story might have ended right there, were it not for the fact that Chevrolet, GM’s high-volume, low-cost, no-frills division, was having a bad year. As recently as 1950, it had sold more cars than Ford, but its sales had slipped considerably since then. Tom Keating, Chevrolet’s general manager, and Ed Cole, its chief engineer, were looking for ways to freshen up the division’s dowdy image. A V-8 engine was in the works to replace Chevy’s lackluster six-cylinder motor, but it was still a couple of years off. Harley Earl’s secret roadster seemed like just the ticket to excite interest in Chevrolet right away. Even if the car didn’t sell in great numbers, its sporty image would give the entire division a lift. And who knows? Maybe people who came to Chevy dealers to gawk at the roadster might stick around to buy a car.

But what should the roadster be called? Chevrolet executives got together with the company’s advertising agency and mulled over a list of more than 300 names, none of which seemed to really fit the car. It wasn’t until after the meeting that an assistant advertising manager named Myron Scott—whose other claim to fame is founding the American Soap Box Derby—suggested naming it after a class of small, highly maneuverable warships that had been used on coastal patrols and to escort convoys of merchant ships across the North Atlantic during World War II.

In a sense, then, credit for giving the roadster its name can be indirectly attributed to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. For when a British naval designer named William Reed drew up plans for this new class of small warships in the late 1930s, it was Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, who suggested naming them after a type of small sailing ship that had served a similar purpose during the Age of Sail. The name:
Corvette
.

Veteran stand-up comic Buddy Hackett once told film critic Roger Ebert one of the secrets of show business. “Buddy was a student of the science of comedy,” recalled Ebert. “His favorite Las Vegas stage was at the Sahara. ‘I was offered twice the dough to move to a certain hotel,’ he told me, ‘but nothing doing. Comics who work that room always flop. There’s a physical reason for that. The stage is above the eye lines of too much of the audience. At the Sahara, the seats are banked and most of the audience is looking down at the stage. Everybody in the business knows: Up for singers, down for comics. The people want to idealize a singer. They want to feel superior to a comic. You’re trying to make them laugh. They can’t laugh at someone they’re looking up to.’ ”

Also known as palookaville caps, Whoopee caps, clubhouse hats, and kingpins, these were worn by young men in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. Guys would take an old felt fedora, cut off the brim, turn up the edge to fit, and cut a zigzag crownlike pattern around the edge. Then they’d decorate the hat with pins, buttons, and bottle caps. The beanie was especially common among mechanics and factory workers, who wore them for mild protection. In the movies and on TV, a button beanie instantly characterized someone as a street tough (such as Leo Gorcey in the Bowery Boys films) or a harmless rube (Goober on
The Andy Griffith Show
). You might also recognize this 1940s relic as part of another 1940s relic: on the head of cheeseburger-loving Jughead in the Archie comics.

In late-1970s discos, it was common for DJs to string several songs together to create one long piece of music. Then a thumping beat was added to make it perfect for people to dance to. In 1980 Dutch music publisher Willem Van Kooten heard a bootleg of a medley of Beatles songs and Frankie Avalon’s “Venus” (for which he owned the copyright). That inspired him to create a legitimate version with studio musicians billed as Stars on 45. Because of copyright law, the names of all 10 of the songs he used had to be listed in the title, so it was called “Intro”/“Venus”/“Sugar, Sugar”/“No Reply”/“I’ll Be Back”/“Drive My Car”/“Do You Want to Know a Secret”/“We Can Work It Out”/“I Should Have Known Better” /“Nowhere Man”/ “You’re Going to Lose That Girl”/“Stars on 45.” Fueled by Beatles nostalgia after John Lennon’s death in 1980, the medley went to #1 in the U.S. and in Europe. Stars on 45 released dozens of other dance medleys featuring the songs of ABBA, the Rolling Stones, and Stevie Wonder. Between 1981 and 1983, more anonymous studio projects churned out medleys of Rod
Stewart, Bee Gees, and Beach Boys songs. Big-time musicians got in on the craze, too, as record labels rushed to craft medleys from
their
artists (the Hollies and the Supremes, for example). Even the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra’s Beethoven and Tchaikovsky-based “Hooked on Classics” was a Top-10 hit. By 1983 the concept had oversaturated pop music, and the need for nonstop disco dance medleys was fading, as disco itself had gone out of style.

In February 1991, Seattle-based Generra Sportswear introduced the Hypercolor T-shirt into stores across the United States. The shirts were very simple: a solid neon color, like red, yellow, purple, pink, or green, with “Hypercolor” written on the front. But the shirts were heat-sensitive; wherever you touched it, the fabric would change color for a few hours. A purple shirt could suddenly have a pink handprint, or a green shirt could have yellow spots. Even though they cost more than $20 each (a lot for a T-shirt in 1991), more than four million were sold in four months. They were
the
fashion fad of the year, more so after they were worn by characters on
the
teen show of the day,
Beverly Hills, 90210.
But like many fashion fads, this one was short-lived. By fall 1992, the shirts were passé, and Generra filed for bankruptcy.

Introduced by Coors in 1993, this clear, citrus-flavored malt beverage bridged the end of one beverage fad, fruity wine coolers of the 1980s, and the beginning of another—clear drinks, such as Crystal Pepsi and Clearly Canadian, of the mid-1990s. Zima (it means “winter” in several Eastern European languages) was malty like beer but sweet like soda pop. After a $50 million marketing campaign touting it as a beer alternative for women, Zima became wildly popular in 1994, with more than 80 million six-packs sold. Half of all American alcohol drinkers bought Zima at some point in 1994. The problem: They didn’t buy it
again.
Sales dropped year after year as comedians (David Letterman) and TV shows (
The Simpsons
and
Saturday Night Live)
frequently mocked the drink for being unmanly or for not tasting very good. The final blow: In 2000 Smirnoff introduced a clear/fruity/fizzy beer alternative called Ice, which sold well and forced Zima out of business.