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V5: So, it was full sized?
HJ: Yeah, full sized! (laughs) We are doing it at the back of this guy’s
garage in North Hollywood; we had a little lean to. Doc, he was a promoter, although not a real worker (laughs) So I had just sculpted this vehicle, I tell you, you learn how to shape plaster of Paris very quickly, because as it’s setting up, there’s a certain way to work with it.
V5: I’m sure your medical training came in handy…
HJ: Yes (laughs) how to put on a cast! All of a sudden when you are into this and it gets to that right point before it starts to set, you can scrape it. So what I ended up doing was taking a cross cut saw, taking the handle off it and you could sculpture it. Then when you got the shape that you thought you liked, then you had to duplicate it to the other side. So, to duplicate it, I didn’t have a bridge or anything of that type, so I used a level, made points, reversed it and got my points on the other side straight to it. So that vehicle took the whole summer to build it.
V5: So, when you had the plaster shaped…
HJ: Yes, so the next step was to get it painted like the real car so you can see all the surfaces. Then you have to make a mold off of it. That was when Doc and I started our fiberglass company.
V5: (laughs) We need to start adding up all these companies…
HJ: Well, you have got to do what you have got to do. So we started doing fiberglass. That time the state of the art was…
V5: What year was this?
HJ: 1952 or 1953, right in there. To learn about fiberglass, Doc went over to Lockheed and got a job in the fiberglass department.
V5: (laughs) A spy…
HJ: (laughs) We got our mole in there. He came back and said, “Hugh, if we do it this way, we can do the mold”. There is a company called Allied Products, they were a big supplier of fiberglass. The biggest thing was to figure out how to get it to release. Some of them said to use wax, basically the old Johnson Wax, you put on it. Then there was a company that had a product called garolease, which was water soluble and it worked very nicely. What you do was spray it on, but prior to that, you had to get all your party lines, to figure out how many pieces you can out, because if it locks, you can’t get it out, so you plan all your party lines. Then you get all the flanges built, then play it up to get a very sharp edge.
Once you have it all set, the whole vehicle in an eight-piece mold, then you come in and use pipe and plywood, what you call a quick and dirty mold. You get it so you can turn it upside down with wheels, so you can roll it. Then you pull it all a part and see this big cavity, and go “My god, what do I do with that?” (laughs) It’s like a big bathtub or spa. Then you pull it all back together, nice and clean, make sure it’s all sanded out so you can see a few little ripples in it and then you lay up your first body. You pull it a part and you have a whole fiberglass car sitting there. There are no door or window cuts. The thing we had at that time was a surgical saw that you used for taking off casts. We didn’t have saber saws or little jig saws at that time, so you had to go down and cut the door with this thing and when you got to a corner, you had to drill it with holes and get in with that thin hacksaw and hopefully cut it out.
We built three hundred and seventy-five of the first body and that was when Shelby came out. They took one of the bodies that we had because we were manufacturing at that time.
V5: So, Shelby was racing with your car?
HJ: No, he didn’t race with it. He came out and looked at it. This other fellow went up there to Bonneville with it. He built a brown chysler blown hemmi. He took it up there and turned two hundred and one miles an hour with it. That was interesting because they called it the stream liner. The fastest stream liners up there were going just over two hundred miles an hour and here was this sports car that came up there and got over the two hundred mile mark. Shelby got in with Art Center and Ford and started the Cobra thing.
From building that first mock-up during the summer, I went back to UCLA, I had ROTC at that point, where you had to be signed up for something, whether it be Army, Navy or Air Force. I was in the Air Force, ROTC. I couldn’t get out of it so I had to stay.
Then a fraternity brother of mine, Bob Heints, had gone to Art Center during the summer and he came back and said “Hugh, you have to see this. It has cars, you would love it!” (laughs) So, what I did was went down on a Saturday and at that time Motor Trend magazine had done an article on Art Center. So I looked through it and saw Jim Thompsons’s photo and different instructors. So when I went down there, I said “Hello Mr. Thompson, I’m Hugh Jorgensen”. So I got to met and spend some time talking with them and seeing all these three-dimensional things being built and I just went “Wow”.
V5: That must have been a big “Wow”…
HJ: Yes, you go up and see all this presentation up front of these models and I said, “This is right up my alley!” So, I talked to one of the ladies up front in billing and asked how do you get to go to Art Center. She told me you have to present a portfolio! I thought Portfolio hmm. So, I said all right, I’ll present a portfolio. So, I went back to UCLA, I had to spend some time there. At that point they had an industrial "design" department at UCLA. So I switched over to that because I was locked into UCLA because of the Air Force. I spent another year and got to the point where I either became a jet jockey or I could get out. So I went back to Art Center with sketches in my portfolio, presented it to them. When I got back there was a phone call to come down to Art Center. I went down there and talked to them and they said I had a Ford scholarship, so they paid my way all the way through!
V5: Thank you Henry…
HJ: Yes, thank you Henry, you are wonderful. (laughs) So I did get out of the ROTC, but from there I got back into the draft situation. You had all these deferments that you could get as students, if you had a good grade average, yet if your number came up, you were gone. I went to Art Center and had a ball there. It was just great; you just ate it up, day and night.
V5: That has not changed…
HJ: I know that, and you tell that to students here and they just don’t understand.
V5: It’s really not the teachers making them do it, it’s a love for their work. I think the school sees it as an internship.
HJ: Yes, you are in the field and learning. What we used to do when we had a lot of students having problems doing fiberglass or clay models, we would bring them over to our shop and knock it out for them
We did this with about five students. (laughs)
V5: They were indebted for life…
HJ: (laughs) Yeah, right. We had the material there and the opportunity, that was it. They couldn’t work nighttime at the model shop at Art Center, just during the day.
V5: So, with the Ford scholarship, after Art Center, you went to Ford…
HJ: Yes, I went to Ford right after I graduated, spent two years before I got drafted.
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