Clay-model maker in 50th year with Chrysler

Talking with Alastair Germonprez is like taking a tour of the Walter P. Chrysler Museum. From the Plymouth Valiant to the experimental turbine car, the K-car and the first minivan, he's had a hand in it all.

Germonprez is a straight-talking 76-year-old who recently celebrated his 50-year anniversary as a clay-model maker for Chrysler.

He's currently in the design department at the Chrysler Technology Center in Auburn Hills, Mich.

And his razor-sharp recollections of groundbreaking designs and famous names inside and outside the company are the stuff movies are made of.

He began his long career with Chrysler on May 12, 1958, joining UAW Local 412 the same day. Fifty years later, he's still on the job.

"I knew a girl in Richmond (Mich.) where I lived," he recalled about the spring of 1958, "and her dad was the head guy among clay model supervisors. One day he said to me, ‘Why don't you come down and take a test. I think we can use you.' "

So, he said, "I went down to Chrysler on Oakland Avenue in Highland Park (Mich.) and took the test, and then I got interviewed by clay model supervisors.

"I had no design education whatsoever. It wasn't like today," he said. "The way they did it in those days, you started out in the shop learning how to build the armatures [the car-shaped wood and wire frames or sculptures over which the clay is applied] and then they transferred you into the clay studios."

It wasn't long before Germonprez was working with the clay, slathering the material on the armatures and shaving it down perfectly and precisely to produce the classic design lines for which Chrysler is known.

"The big job when I first started here," he said, "was the (Plymouth) Valiant and Dodge Lancer, because they wanted to have a small or intermediate-size car."

He and co-workers started to give them what they wanted, and "they were so encouraged about that they even had a double shift – that was the first time we ever had an afternoon shift."

"We worked on the turbine car, too," he added of the experimental "jet engine" automobile Chrysler tried to perfect for a quarter-century beginning in the mid-1950s. The futuristic look and radical mechanical concept "was real Buck Rogers stuff."

"The most exciting times," Germonprez recalls, "were the early '60s, working on those NASCAR drag cars. In 1962 we had the 413 superstock, a ram induction car, then went to 426 in ‘63. And then [racing legend Richard] Petty adopted it and raced it at Daytona and blew everybody's drawers off. Those were exciting times, working on those cars."

Because he has literally had his hands on much of the history of modern Chrysler design, he sometimes takes issue with popular notions of who did what.

And he's not shy about it. "One misconception that everybody has is that Mr. Iacocca was the father of the minivan, but there's no truth to that," he said. "In 1974 we had the minivan done, but we had no money to bring it out, so we put it over in the corner of the studio and put a couple of covers on it, and it sat there for six years.

"Then in the late 1970s, when we were almost bankrupt and times were really bad, [product development executive] Hal Sperlich left Ford and came over to Chrysler. He came to the studio one day and pointed at the pile of covers in the corner and said, ‘What you got there?' We said, ‘Oh, that's a minivan,' and Sperlich said, ‘Well let's bring that out here and clean it up.' "

They made some adjustments, including changing the shape of the windows, and a couple of months later when Iacocca left Ford and transferred to Chrysler, he took a look and said, "Man, that's it! We're gonna make that."

You may think in this modern world of work, computer-aided design would have made the clay modeler's job obsolete. Not true, but things certainly have changed.

"Now we do the model and they digitize it afterward, take the [measurement] information off it and hand it over to CDD [computer design and drafting]," he said. "They run it through their computers and enhance it, trying different things to tune it up, so to speak. Then they put the information into milling machines."

Looking back, Germonprez said he's grateful to Chrysler and his union for a fascinating trade and a life that not many people manage to sustain for so many years.

"I've been a UAW member since the day I came in here," he said. "Without the UAW, we wouldn't have anything."

Bob Erickson

Erickson is a communications specialist and Webmaster at the UAW-Chrysler National Training Center in Detroit.