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V5: So, you would do a review of it?
HJ: You had a twenty-one page report you had to fill out, but you got the benefit of driving that car. There were three of us, it was a two week period, so you had it for quite a few days. You would get a real nice car over the weekend!
It was fun, because you never knew what you were going to get. Sometimes you would get a corvette, in fact, one of Mitchell’s corvettes had been tweaked, (laughs) and it would move! I remember they gave us a corvair with the turbo on it and I think Ernie and myself took the rear off it, but we couldn’t get that thing to spin.
V5: I can just see that in the report you had to send in …
HJ: It didn’t tip (laughs) We had said it was safe at any speed and meant it !
V5: They have a real following…
HJ: You know they do. The thing is if you modify it and put a leaf spring going all the way across in the suspension the way it is now, it takes the bounce out of the vehicle. Which would have been an easy fix, but it never got to that point.
V5: So, Yamaha had sponsored a project.
HJ: Yes, they sponsored a project, we had the students work on it and did the sketches. We set up a sixteen-week program and Yamaha would come in about every third or fourth week and evaluate it and that’s when we would have our showings. At the very end for our final presentations we had, full size, air brushed on black paper or prints, to show exactly what the motorcycles would look like. What they did was thirty-five millimeter everything and took it off. That was it.
V5: That was it?
HJ: Yes.
V5: Did you get into models?
HJ: No, we didn’t. We didn’t have the facilities or the time to get into a full prototype model. When we started doing interiors on projects for Ford Motor Company, Keith Teter, who was head of our department at the time, worked with us on the projects. We developed a whole seating package for either a two or four passenger vehicle and you could slide the seats back and forth, check and get the dimensions for the steering wheel, let the students see where the head line is, because this is very critical so that you can get out of the vehicle.
V5: So, you talked about working at Ford Motor Company, how did your education lead up to working there?
HJ: Well, starting with college. Three years of pre-med. at UCLA. All the books were in German. We had to learn German and I am not a linguist, I can follow it, but cannot speak it and basically have a deaf ear to different languages. That’s just the way it is. So I went through UCLA those three years. One summer, one of my fraternity brothers wanted to build a car. I said “Sure!” So, Don Smith and myself got together, he had Vince’s Garage over in North Hollywood with his buddy and we’ll go there and build a car.
He had an old forty-nine Ford chassis there and we had an old Ford engine that we had rebuilt. So I designed this car !
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