Kornmiller at his workbench. His passion these days is restoring model cars.
Eye On Design
Words: Roger Meiners
Allan Kornmiller still loves Chrysler twenty-two years after retiring as an exterior designer. He worked in the Highland Park studios. “Work” may be the wrong word, in his case. “I never worked a day in my life,” He says. “The studio was a tremendous play space for me. I enjoyed every minute of my career.”
When Kornmiller arrived at Chrysler in November 1956, Elwood Engel was there and Virgil Exner (of the “Forward Look”) was gone. Engel was a very intimidating character, according to Kornmiller. “Elwood, the ‘Big Scare,’ would come up behind you, stand there for a while, and then mark your drawing with his brown crayon, saying ‘Move this line down here.’ And he was right, of course.”
Click photos to enlarge.
Photos: Roger Meiners / Drawings: Allan Kornmiller
Engel thought the studio was a bit too bland, so one day he told the designers to “Jazz this place up,” according to Kornmiller. “So we put up 4' by 8' FoamCore all around the perimeter with Batman TV Show quotes such as ‘KAPOW!’ “
There was a window in the studio facing the employee parking lot on an upper floor. I was looking out one day and saw a person from the neighborhood stealing hubcaps. “We got on the phone with the police and directed them to the scene—then talked them through the aisles directly to the thief, who was hiding under one of the cars.”
Chrysler had many talented young designers on staff, according to Allan. “Those 18-20-year-olds could design more cars in a month than the corporation could build in a lifetime. Together they worked on some successful designs, including the 1965–1966 Chryslers. “They were very successful designs, he said. The last car he worked on was the 1978 Charger/Cordoba. The two-door model “had the longest door in the industry,” he says. Kornmiller studied design at The Cleveland Institute of Art and started at Ford Design. After 1 ½ years he moved to AMC (Nash-Kelvinator then). He was there for three and a half years. Ed Anderson was the chief designer then. George Romney came in and led the move to the compact Rambler that made his reputation. “It was forced on us by the bankers,” says Kornmiller. “We had a line of big cars already designed and we scrapped them.”
Today, with Chrysler on the edge financially, he doesn’t like the way the Detroit automakers are characterized. “I’d hate to see the company go away. I’m encouraged that they closed all the plants for a month over the holidays,” he says. “We can make a profit on reduced production.”
Today, Kornmiller is very much into restoring old model cars. He bangs out the metal bodies and repaints them—even manufacturing his own parts when needed. He casts and finishes wheels and hubcaps for the cars, rather than buying rare replacements for high prices. He’s still at it with cars—on a smaller scale, but no less satisfying, from the look of his massive car model collection.
Kornmiller showed us a stack of drawings he did during his career and allowed us to photograph a few of them for publication in Mopar Magazine. This is the first time these will appear in print, he says. We are grateful. Sit back and enjoy seeing these interesting drawings from an earlier era in automotive design—when American style was unique.
