Look Both Ways

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I grew up surrounded by car imagery.

Back in the 1950s and early ’60s, if you were to flip through the pages of Life or Look or the Saturday Evening Post and looked at the automobile ads, or if you picked up a brochure from your local Ford dealer, you might have noticed that all the pictures of these cars were illustrations, not photographs.

These beautiful, airbrushed renderings weren’t always one hundred percent accurate. These cars were longer and sleeker than the real ones. The wheelbases were extended. They sat lower to the ground than the actual cars did, appeared to have a wider stance. The chrome sparkled. The glass glistened.

My dad drew those cars.

Dad — his name was Everett — spent much of his life in the advertising world as a commercial artist. He wasn’t one of the execs knocking back scotches in fancy offices like those guys in Mad Men. He was in the trenches, hunched over his drafting table, airbrushing a fin, blending a reflected tree into the car’s graceful sheet metal, executing the outline of a perfectly round hubcap, freehand. (A sample of his work graces the title pages of this book.)

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