A look back 60 years ago to how the first Corvette came to be.

I call the Corvette “The American Automotive Horatio Alger Story.” It’s the ultimate automotive rags-to-riches story. You could also call it an automotive Cinderella story. While the C6 has taken more flak than it deserves, it’s good to look back to the very beginning. Let’s get a really clear picture of how far the Corvette has come in 60 years.

We’re rolling into the C6’s final year and looking forward to the new 7th-generation Corvette. The next several installments of my VETTE Magazine monthly column look back at the “first” of each generation Corvette. So, let’s go back to the beginning. – Scott

PS – One of my Corvette history pet peeves is the errant assumption that the 1953-1962 C1 Corvettes were Parts Bin cars. Learn why this is totally incorrect. CLICK HERE.

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It all started at Watkins Glenn

In September 1951, Harley Earl took his Le Sabre dream car to Watkins Glen for a little GM-style show’n tell.  Earl was impressed with the “sports cars” he saw there. He went back to work with a new car concept for General Motors – an American sports car.

Post WW II saw the birth of plastics and glass-reinforced plastic, or “fiberglass” and Earl saw a new way to build prototypes and production cars. In February ‘52, Life Magazine presented the new space age material in a story titled “Plastic Bodies For Autos.” By March, GM was reviewing the Alembic I, a fiberglass-bodied Jeep. Impressed with the new material, Earl decided to start moving on with his sports car idea.

Engineer Robert McLean designed a chassis layout, and by April, a full-size plaster model was shown to GM’s management. The following month, Ed Cole was promoted to Chief of Engineering for Chevrolet and was on board with Earl’s project. Earl pitched his concept to GM’s president, Charles Wilson, and Chevrolet general manager, Thomas Keating, in June and got the approval to build a functional prototype for the GM Motorama in January 1953.

The car’s working name was… “the Opel Sports Car.”

Two bodies were built for the project (one finished and one test body), and two fiberglass full-size Chevy bodies for testing of the drive train layout. Chevrolet’s ad agency, Campbell-Ewald, came up with a name to replace the working “Opel” name. After 1,500 suggestions, ad man Myron Scott came up with “Corvette.”

By the end of October ‘52, the parts Fabrication Group completed the very first Corvette body that weighed 200 pounds less than a steel version. The following month, the full-size Chevy fiberglass-bodied car was tested and rolled with very little damage. Just before Christmas, the Motorama car was completed at a cost of between $55,000 and $60,000. A new ‘52 Chevy Bel Air cost $2,006! When the Corvette was shown to GM’s management before the Motorama, only two changes were requested – replace the American flag on the nose and horn badges with a Chevy bow tie and a fleur-de-lis.

That was IT! Four days later, on January 16, 1953, the press got its first look at the Corvette. The following day, the Motorama was opened to the public. The response was so overwhelming that the next day, GM’s president announced that Chevrolet would build 200 to 300 Corvettes by the end of June as a test run, followed by full production IF there was enough demand.

An American classic was born in an era of “more is better and bigger is best.”

To really appreciate the Corvette, one only has to look at the typical cars of 1953. Dream cars are easy and fun; it’s the implementation that can be a bear. A makeshift assembly facility was set up at the Customer Delivery Building on Van Slyke Avenue in Flint, Michigan, to build the first cars.

Quotes came in for 12,300 bodies – 300 for the ‘53 Corvettes and 100 per month for the ‘54 Corvettes from Fisher Body and from vendor Molded Fiber Glass. But management decided that neither company would be up to the challenge, so the St. Louis plant was told to prepare to start making STEEL Corvette bodies! But Molded Fiber Glass successfully argued its case and won the $4 million contract to build bodies. St. Louis was then informed that they would be the only Corvette plant.

The first Corvette rolls off the assembly line

Finally, on June 29, 1953, the first Corvette rolled off the Flint, Michigan assembly line with line worker Tony Kleiber receiving the honors of driving the very first production Corvette. What happened to cars 001 and 002 is not known, but 003 was tested on GM’s Belgian Block stress test and passed with only minor chassis damage. Cars 004, 005, and 006 were sold to Du Pont executives.

By the end of September, 50 Corvettes had been delivered, and in October, actor John Wayne got car 055. The chassis of the Motorama Corvette was ordered to be used to make the ‘54 Nomad show car, and the body was used for a burn test. Also, work had begun on installing the small-block Chevy V8 for the ‘55 Corvette. 1953 Corvette production ended on December 24 at the Flint plant, and on December 28, production of the ‘54 Corvettes began in St. Louis.

Zora Arkus-Duntov joined GM on May 1, 1953, specifically to work on the Corvette. The Corvette dream team was in place – Earl provided the beauty, Ed Cole was the car’s corporate guardian angel, and Zora Arkus-Duntov would make it all go fast. The Corvette project went from idea to show car in just 17 months and then to a real car in another five months. Now that’s a modern American automotive miracle.

 

Related:
Myron Scott’s Wiki page, HERE.

Vette Videos: The Life & Times of Harley Earl, HERE.

Happy Birthday, Harley Earl, HERE

Corvette Generational History

Our 1953–1962 C1 Corvette Review: Engineering, Styling, Sales, and Legacy Story is now available.

The 1962–1967 C2 Corvette Review: Engineering, Styling, Sales, and Legacy Story is now available.

Also, 1968–1982 C3 Corvette Review: Engineering, Styling, Sales, and Legacy Story is now available.

Click  for Corvette Model Cars, C1 to C8 Generations

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