Known by enthusiasts as “The Father of the Corvette” Harley Earl made his mark earl on in life when it came to automobiles. His father was a custom coach designer in the early 1900s and a young Harley would make clay models to show customer what their future vehicles would look like.
A little later in his life Earl became good friends with Lawrence Fischer. When Fischer became the president of Cadillac in 1925 he asked his long time friend Earl for help on designing the new LaSalle. The design caught the eye of then GM chief Alfred Sloan and Earl was quickly snatched up by GM.
In 1927 earl moved to Michigan and went to work making GM a true mainstay in the automotive industry. Some of his innovations were cutting edge for his time and he is credited with the first designs of a car with a wrap around windshield and also a car without running boards.
Through it all though Earl never lost his passion for speed and racing and one of his favorite past times was going to places like Watkins Glen and watching Jaguars and MGs dominate the road courses. This inspired Earl with a new vision and he set out to make a two-seater sports car that would be inexpensive for GM and had the executives agree with him.
Originally the Corvette birth was named “Project Opel” and Earl kept much of the project under wraps. Besides a handful of his own chosen people that worked with him in a special studio, no one knew what Earl was up to and the project remained much a mystery.
Earl was not sure which division of GM he wanted to go to with the idea of the “Project Opel” Corvette but he had a good camaraderie with Ed Cole at Chevy and gave first crack of the new sports car to the bowtie division of GM. One look at the prototype was all the Cole needed and he was instantly sold. Cole knew that the Corvette was exactly what Chevy needed to launch itself into the elite status that it had been lacking.
In January of 1953 the Corvette made its debut at the Motorama auto show in New York. The car created so much buzz among the media and the public that it was decided that it would go into production that same year and six months later the Corvette was rolling off the assembly line. The rest as they say is history.
Earl designed many wonderful cars while he was with GM. Among his more notable designs were the Eldorado Brougham by Cadillac, the Nomad by Chevy, and the entire collection of early 1950s Buicks. But it cannot be argued that his greatest accomplishment was the Corvette. In 2013 the Corvette will celebrate its 60th Anniversary and to think it all started with the visions of one man.
Earl passed away in 1969 but his influences are still seen in the Corvette of today as well as many other GM models. In 1998 he was inducted into the Corvette Hall of Fame where he will forever be remembered by Corvette fans everywhere.
