Legends: Chuck Jordan

As only the fourth man in 78 years to run General Motors’ massive design studio, Chuck Jordan is a legend. Bill Mitchell shared his desk once. So did Harley Earl. “It was an awesome responsibility,” Jordan said. And it seemed to be one he was destined for from the time a six-year-old boy from Whittier, Calif., began sketching cars at his bedside table. By the time he had graduated from high school with honors, enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in engineering and design, he was already thinking ahead. In his sophomore year at MIT, Jordan, with the encouragement of an understanding and patient mother, entered the GM Fisher Body Craftsman’s Guild model-car competition. He won. That led to a $4,000 scholarship — not small change in the late 1940s — and the attention of Earl, GM’s legendary design guru.

By 1949, at 22, Jordan had a job as a junior designer with GM where he remade the automaker’s truck designs. He was interesting, charismatic and a little quirky, which was good for a designer in the 1950s when things were changing quickly in car world. Within four years, Earl appointed him chief designer of GM’s special product studio and four years after that he was named chief designer for Cadillac. He was 30. “I never tried to do what Harley Earl wanted. I tried to do what I thought was right,” he said. What wasn’t to like? In the 1950s he helped pen the first-ever concept for a minivan as well as the 1959 Cadillac Eldorado. In 1962, with the idea for the Opel GT already brewing in his head and on the occasional sketch pad, Jordan was named to Life magazine’s “100 most important young men and women in the United States.” But he was bound for Europe where Jordan worked in Opel’s design studios and created the GT, a two-seat sports car that would sell more units in North America than in Europe.

After three years in Germany as design director for Opel, he returned to the United States in the late 1960s and served as the Number Two man in the organization until 1986 when he took the top spot as vice president of design until mandatory retirement in 1992. As the top GM designer, he influenced the Camaro/Firebird, the 1992 Cadillac STS and Eldorado and Oldsmobile Aurora. It was 43 years at GM with an unmistakable impression. “It’s the best life you can have. Does anything really beat it?”