People · Bill Mitchell · Chapter 1 of 6

Buick Blood

The 1910s and 1920s

William Leroy Mitchell is born July 2, 1912, into a household where cars are not a hobby but the family business — his father sells Buicks for a living, and the smell of a showroom is, for young Bill, simply the smell of home. It gives him none of Harley Earl's hands-on coachbuilding education, but it gives him something just as useful: total, unselfconscious comfort around automobiles as objects of desire, absorbed before he was old enough to question it.

What Mitchell has, that the trade itself didn't teach him, is a drawing hand. He starts out as a commercial advertising illustrator — competent, employable, unremarkable work — and finds his real footing as the official artist for the Automobile Racing Club of America, sketching the cars and the speed of America's early motor-racing scene for print. It is a narrow niche: part journalism, part art, entirely about capturing machines in motion on a flat page. Few people in Detroit are doing it, and fewer still are doing it well.

Mitchell's race-track sketches did what nothing on his résumé could: they put his work directly in front of the one man in Detroit who judged everyone by their draftsmanship.

Harley Earl's Art and Colour Section runs, in effect, an informal talent pipeline — Earl is constantly on the lookout for people who can draw a car the way he sees one: full of motion, full of intent, before an engineer ever touches it. Mitchell's racing illustrations reach him, and Earl likes what he sees enough to bring the young artist into the fold in 1935. Mitchell is twenty-two years old, and he has just walked into the studio that will define the rest of his life.