GoogObits:
Obituaries and essays augmented by Google seaches. There is a lot to learn from the dead.

Tuesday, December 3, 2002

Eugene Gregorie, Automobile Designer, Dies at 94 December 3, 2002 By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DETROIT, Dec. 2 — Eugene T. Gregorie, the first design chief of the Ford Motor Company and the creator of the Lincoln Continental, died on Sunday in St. Augustine, Fla., where he lived. He was 94. Mr. Gregorie, who was known as Bob, also designed what would become the 1949 Mercury, which was driven by James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause," and the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr, which the Museum of Modern Art in New York called "the first successfully streamlined car in America." After working for ship design companies in New York, Mr. Gregorie moved to Detroit in 1929 to work in the auto industry. He was immediately hired by General Motors but lost his job a few months later at the start of the Depression. Mr. Gregorie was 22 when he was hired in 1931 by Edsel B. Ford, president of Ford and son of the founder, Henry Ford. "Gregorie's primary attribute was he could translate what Edsel Ford wanted into three-dimensional designs," said Jim Farrell, a lawyer in Roseburg, Ore., who has written extensively about the history of Ford's automotive designs. "He could sit and sketch while Edsel talked in his office." In 1935, Edsel Ford made Mr. Gregorie the chief of Ford's new design department. "The difference between Gregorie and every other chief designer is that he himself did all the design work, as opposed to his staff," said Henry L. Dominguez, a General Motors engineer and the author of "Edsel Ford & E. T. Gregorie." His designs included the Lincoln Continental, which was introduced in 1939. Ford announced earlier this year that it would stop making the Continental as part of a companywide restructuring. Mr. Gregorie left the company soon after Edsel Ford's death in 1943. He returned in 1944 at the request of Henry Ford II, but left again two years later when he found himself frequently at odds with top management. At 38, Mr. Gregorie moved to St. Augustine and turned to sailing and designing yachts. Mr. Gregorie is survived by his wife, Evelyn, and three nieces. Copyright 2002 New York Times Company (Registration required) 9:37:29 PM    comment []

Philip B. Meggs, 60, Educator and Historian of Graphic Design, Dies December 1, 2002 By STEVEN HELLER Philip B. Meggs, a scholar of graphic and advertising design who wrote the first full history of the field, from the time of Gutenberg to the postmodern era, died on Nov. 24 in Richmond, Va. He was 60. The cause was leukemia, said his wife, Libby Phillips Meggs. Mr. Meggs, who began his career as a designer specializing in corporate identity and promotion, became the first educator both to teach graphic design and to write its history. Soon after joining the faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond in 1968, Mr. Meggs found that his layout and typography students lacked a fundamental knowledge of graphic design's past and its relationship to art, architecture, industrial design and popular culture. He believed that a student's ability to practice graphic design as more than a commercial service or craft would be limited by ignorance of historical context. He eventually developed the first academic curriculum to start with the invention of the printing press and movable type, continue through the modern era and conclude with the influence of the computer. His history classes also critically addressed formal, theoretical and aesthetic issues that were ignored by most programs. With the initial success of his courses, Mr. Meggs received a grant in the late 1970's from the National Endowment for the Arts for a series of traveling lectures for any college or university that asked for them. Becoming an itinerant design historian necessitated developing standardized syllabuses, and they later became the core of his 1983 book, "A History of Graphic Design." It is still required reading in courses around the country. Born on May 30, 1942, in Florence, S.C., Philip Baxter Meggs attended Virginia Commonwealth University, receiving a master of fine arts degree in 1964. He worked as a senior designer for Reynolds Aluminum and as art director of A. H. Robins Pharmaceuticals before starting his teaching career. From 1974 until 1987 he was chairman of Virginia Commonwealth's department of communication arts and design. In addition to preparing three revised editions of his textbook, Mr. Meggs wrote articles for Print magazine and wrote or edited a dozen other books, including "Typographic Design: Form and Communication," "Type and Image: The Language of Graphic Design" and "Revival of the Fittest: Digital Versions of Classic Typefaces." Mr. Meggs was not trained as a historian, but his original research on once-forgotten pioneers, movements and styles, as well as a series of essays on book design and contemporary practitioners, became the foundation for broader scholarship. "He was the first person I ever heard talk about design history in a way that seamlessly, warmly and elegantly connected past and present," said the designer Paula Scher. "He made me feel like I was part of a movement of my time, not an irrelevant practitioner grinding out trivial works for yet another bureaucratic corporation." This year Mr. Meggs was given the Educator Award of the hall of fame of the Art Directors Club of New York. In addition to his wife, Mr. Meggs is survived by his parents, Wallace and Elizabeth Pruitt Meggs of Florence; two brothers, William J. of Greenville, N.C., and Wally of Laurens, S.C.; a sister, Beth Meggs Lever of Lexington, S.C.; a son, Andrew, of Tustin, Calif.; and a daughter, Elizabeth, of Richmond.ml Copyright 2002 New York Times Company (Registration required) 1:19:25 AM    comment []