The Corvette Story — Styling by Earl, McLean and Renner

It took Harley Earl to envision the idea of a GM-built sports car, Bob McLean to create a European-style package for it and Carl Renner to fashion the sleek and appealing lines that created the Corvette’s unique character.

He was a big man, six-feet-four and slope-shouldered, slow, deliberate and imprecise in elocution but lightning-fast in intuition. Rough-voiced and prone to malapropisms—“cloisterphobia” was a typical Earlism—Harley Earl took no prisoners.

He was a real war horse,” said race engineer Smokey Yunick, who saw Earl in action at Daytona Beach. “He was big, rough, tough and talented.” “Harley Earl was a tough guy,” seconded designer Chuck Jordan. “He could fire someone if he didn’t like them or if the guy didn’t do what he said. He was a real dictator. Even Bill Mitchell had a little fear of Harley Earl.” Mitchell summed up his boss’s design philosophy: “Earl had a great saying, ‘If you go by a schoolyard and the kids don’t whistle, back to the drawing board.’”

Although Earl headed GM’s Styling Staff for three decades until his retirement in December 1958, he manifestly did not personally design the thousands of auto models for which he was responsible. But some were pet projects, cars that embodied Harley Earl’s own ideas and enthusiasms. Among these were the first post-war “dream cars”, two of the greatest ever.