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Like father, like son
Photo provided Virgil Exner Jr. poses inside the Studebaker National Museum in South Bend. The designer, known mostly for his work with Studebaker and Ford, is the featured designer at Saturday's Concours in St. Joseph.Krasl Concours puts spotlight on Exner family
By JEREMY D. BONFIGLIO - H-P Features Writer
Published: Thursday, August 11, 2011 1:07 PM EDT
ST. JOSEPH - Virgil Exner Jr. was a young designer with the Studebaker-Packard Corporation when he was asked by Duncan McCrae to help design what would become the 1959 Lark.
"He put me in charge of the back, and he was working on the front end," Exner says by telephone from his home in South Bend. "He was struggling a bit by the time I went home for Christmas."
Home at that time was just outside of Detroit, where his father, Virgil Exner Sr., just happened to be Chrysler's first vice president of design.
"My dad took me in and showed me what would become the Plymouth Valiant," Exner says. "I took it all in and told Duncan the basic design of the Valiant's front end. I guess he took the cue because when those cars came out those front ends came out relatively similar. It was my little spy job. My dad didn't mind. He thought it was a great credit to him."
The Lark may have been one of the first cars the younger Exner helped shape, but it certainly wasn't the last. That's why he is being honored Saturday as the featured designer for the Krasl Art Center Concours on the Bluff. The seventh edition of the annual car show will feature more than 80 classic automobiles, commercial vehicles and motorcycles built between 1900 and 1976, including several cars in honor of Chevrolet's 100th anniversary. What is expected to be the highlight of the event, however, is the inclusion of a number of cars that were designed by the late Virgil Exner Sr. or his son Virgil Exner Jr.
"The Exners are a classic example of a son following in his father's footsteps," Concours founder Dar Davis says. "Both had long and distinguished careers working as automobile designers, and both were responsible for some of the auto industry's most classic designs."
There's also a strong local connection to the Exner name. Virgil Exner Sr. was born in Ann Arbor but adopted as a baby by George and Iva Exner of Buchanan.
"Soon after he was adopted, my grandfather built a house in Buchanan," Exner Jr. says. "My grandfather was a machinist and was handy with tools. My grandmother's influence was from an artistic standpoint. They even took in a boarder who just happened to be the art teacher at Buchanan High School, so he was getting it from all sides."
The elder Exner studied for two years in the University of Notre Dame's art department before getting a job in 1928 with Advertising Artists in South Bend, which handled the Studebaker account. He met and married Mildred Marie Eshleman, who also worked for the studio, and in 1933 Virgil Exner Jr. was born.
Exner Sr. was hired by General
Motors design chief Harley Earl a year later, and by 1936 he was the chief designer of the Pontiac brand. In 1938, he joined Raymond Loewy's industrial design firm Loewy and Associates, where he worked on World War II military vehicles and cars, notably Studebaker's 1939-40 models, and advance plans for its revolutionary post-war cars. In 1944 he was hired directly by Studebaker and returned to South Bend.
Exner was the designer of the acclaimed 1947 Studebaker Starlight coupe, and in 1949 he started working in Chrysler's Advanced Styling Group, where he partnered with Cliff Voss and Maury Baldwin. It was here where Exner developed his "Forward Look" design on the 1955-1963 Chrysler products, highlighted by his fondness of fins on cars for both aesthetic and aerodynamic reasons.
"The rest is history," Exner says of his father's industry-wide influence. "So naturally it influenced me tremendously. I was brought up with my father making little racecar sketches for me and murmuring racecar sounds in my ears. I wanted to do what my daddy did, so I did."
Exner says his "big break" came in 1946 when he entered and won the Fisher Body Craftsman's Guild model car design contest, which came with a $4,000 college scholarship. After graduating from the Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Exner followed in his father's footsteps by studying art and design at Notre Dame.
His first effort was the Simca Special, his graduate thesis project that took the chassis of a 1950 Simca and designed a new body for the car.
"For a very long time I was the only student allowed to have a car at Notre Dame," the 78-year-old Exner says, laughing. "That's been a special car through the years."
It was so successful that Simca, which was part of Fiat, asked if they could display it at the 1959 Paris Auto Show. He eventually sold the car, which, he adds, recently was sold again to someone in Hershey, Pa., for $500,000.
After graduating from Notre Dame in 1956, Exner worked at Studebaker-Packard and the 1959 Lark before entering the U.S. Air Force. He spent a year in Korea and two more at Travis Air Force Base in California, but he had a little design job on the side.
"I contracted with Ghia, the Italian company, where I would help design cars by mail," Exner says.
Among those vehicles were the first Karmann-Ghia and Karmann-Ghia 1500, the P1800 Volvo, the Renault Caravelle/Floride, the Renault 4 and the Fiat 2300 Roadster.
He continued to contract with Ghia when he returned to Michigan in 1961, joining his father in running Virgil M. Exner Inc., a creative design studio in Birmingham, Mich., that the elder Exner had started following his retirement for Chrysler that year.
In 1967, Exner Jr. began his career at Ford, where he remained until his own retirement in 1988. Among the notable cars he helped design were the 1970 Ford Thunderbird, 1970 Ford Maverick, the exterior of 1971 Ford Pinto, the 1971 Mercury Marquis, the 1979 Ford Crown Victoria, 1979 Grand Marquis, 1980 Ford Thunderbird along with many other advanced car, and truck programs.
"It's been a long, rewarding automotive career," Exner says.
Since his retirement, he still has managed to keep his hand in automobile design. In 2005 he founded the League of Retired Automotive Designers, who put on an annual Studebaker design contest. The current effort from the group is on display at Studebaker National Museum in South Bend.
"We just have fun doing it," Exner says. "It's fun to meet people I competed against for years and years."
He also anticipates a fun weekend in St. Joseph, which kicks off Friday with a welcoming reception in his honor.
"I feel really appreciative of it," he says. "To be honored this way like my father has been many times is just terrific."
Just don't ask Exner to name his favorite car design.
"You know that's always a good question," he says. "Cars to me are like colors. And painters can't afford to have a favorite color because they're all good for one thing or another."
We've got to quit saying, 
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