Remembering Raymond Loewy:

Today is the 120th birthday of the famous French industrial designer Raymond Loewy, whose creations (with his design team) included the Coke bottle, Coldspot refrigerator, locomotives for the Pennsylvania RR (and others), some well-known corporate logos (including Exxon) and some iconic cars for Studebaker, including the beautiful 1953 Starliner and the Avanti.

You may have seen today's "doodle" on Google, which paid tribute to the great man. But I had an interesting encounter just this past Sunday morning in Atlanta.

One of the cars at the monthly Caffeine & Octane show was a 1975 Avanti II, a car that is fairly rare but not really highly valuable - except this one! I was stunned to see the bill of sale on the window - this had been the personal car of Mr. Loewy himself, and the current owner is his son-in-law, David Hagerman, who lives here in Atlanta.

Mr. Hagerman is in the process of setting up the Raymond Loewy Museum of Industrial Design in or near Irvine, CA, which should be open in a few years, and which will have examples of many creations of Mr. Loewy and his associates, including cars and perhaps one of the Pennsylvania RR's iconic GG-1 electric locomotives. The website for the museum is The Raymond Loewy Museum of Industrial Design, and I, for one, fully intend to visit when it is up and running.
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Wikipedia's writeup on Loewy is a pretty good one:

Raymond Loewy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

then of course there are these........
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Even Raymond Loewy could have a bad day....

 

One website author even says Loewy had something to do with designing a Ferrari in’54--the Europa--but I have yet to research that. The same source claims the
principal designer on that car was John Cuccio, working with Orval Selders under the overall direction of Mr. Loewy. The one-off body was to be built by Boano.
the source, which I failed to make note of, says Pinin Farina heard about it and complained so Ferrari withdrew the order and the body, which was already built, was adapted to the XK140 which subsequently burned while being painted at Barris' shop when it was already owned by a famous boxer.

I can't envision this jag body on a Ferrari but the political intrigues of the story are interesting...any comments out there?

 

I know Orval from his days at GM.
Contact him on Facebook for more info.

 

Raymond Loewy is one of my (few) heroes; thanks for the news about the museum - an addition to my bucket list.

 

Big Loewy fan myself - the number of corporate logos attributed to him is fascinating and incredible.

 

Love the PRR T1. Too bad they were all scrapped.
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That plus later in life, they had many of the panels removed to simplify maintenence.

This is one of my favorite threads.

As a kid I thought the Studebakers were fantastic... Starlight coupe, Golden Hawk, Avanti.

 

it's in the Petersen. I guess it really belongs to the Natural History Museum . Did he do that hoping BMW would put it into production? Is it really a one-owner car (if you don't count the Museum). is it a significant enough car that, now that 507 cars are worth a million, some future owner could make out financially by ditching the Loewy design?

 

"Daunting" doesn't come close to the adjective for this project, but a group has been formed with the goal of building a new T1. A link to their website is below. You do know that UP is resurrecting Big Boy 4014? Imagine a double header of 4014 and Challenger 3985! (Sorry for the high jack.)

https://prrt1steamlocomotivetrust.org/

 

Farmall tractors were a Loewy design, as was the International Harvester logo.

http://www.hemmings.com/magazine/hmn/2006/12/1939-53-Farmall-H/1382452.html