Hollywood Citizen-News October 27, 1939 (If you want to read the articles below, just send us an email requesting so)

To this day, nobody has ever heard Harley’s untold side of the story on how an “Ace Auto Stylist” is just an acronym for “Contemporary Artist." Or, perhaps a better way of saying it would be, no scholars or art historians have yet to decipher exactly what Harley Earl meant when he wrote the following segment (in an Introduction) for an auto design correspondence course he started in the 1940s:

“During the first quarter of the Twentieth Century mass production activities were confined to the technical aspects. The manufacturers of mechanical contrivances found a ready market for all that they could produce. Their costumers were interested in the practicality of the article – not the appearance. People continued to think of art in terms of paintings, sculptures, and architectural designs. But this brief period was destined to be short lived. The novelty of the technological era soon wore off.”

Unlike all the other major automakers following Henry Ford’s more utilitarian maxim or ideology, Harley’s production cars spoke to you on a higher level. After all Ford, the man, might have been vastly rich and successful but everyone in Detroit knew he was totally inanimate…

Essentially, the Fisher brothers, Alfred P. Sloan and a small cadre of GM’s top leaders originally backed Earl’s advanced methodology of “engineering the car ahead of time” using his radical new California techniques of auto bodybuilding. The La Salle automobile was the test…and how it did, at its introduction in 1927 would decide whether or not Harley Earl would move to Detroit . La Salle was a big success, and the rest of the story is history.