April was a momentous month for Ford, with three dates circled. Moving backward chronologically: April 22 was the official opening day of the World’s Fair. April 17 was the official first day the Mustang would go on sale at dealerships around the country. And April 13 was the day Lee Iacocca came to New York to introduce the Mustang to the nation’s press. In the middle of all that, the Ford Division chief had scored a public relations coup beyond the greatest expectations of the image-makers at Ford and J. Walter Thompson: he appeared on the cover of both Time and Newsweek, his portrait alongside pictures of Rangoon red Mustangs, his notoriety now surpassing that of his boss, HF2, whose own appearance at the World’s Fair with Walt Disney and Robert Moses would garner far less notice. “Iacocca. Rhymes with Try a Coca,” wrote Time. The article called him the hottest young man in Detroit and captured him test-driving a different Mustang every morning, racing around Detroit and its suburbs with his “impassive, hawk like face,” tapping Ignacio Haya Gold Label cigars into the car’s ashtray.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to one of the proudest moments of our lives,” Iacocca said at his April 13 press conference at the Ford Wonder Rotunda. More than two hundred reporters were in attendance, many of whom had already written extensively about the car-in-the-making since its T-5 mystery days. “We appreciate your coming here to share this moment with us. And we are particularly pleased to have this beautiful setting for one of the most important occasions in Ford Division history.” It was so important, Iacocca said, that they arranged to have similar unveilings simultaneously in eleven European capitals in front of a total of two thousand reporters and photographers. The excitement about the Mustang was contagious, he said. People from every state and as far away as Australia had written Ford asking for more information. A high school boy from Louisiana wrote that he was starting a Mustang fan club and predicted the car would be “bigger than Elvis or the Beatles.”
Iacocca rolled through the highlights of the car. A completely new series, the fifth in the Ford Division in addition to Ford, Fairlane, Falcon, and Thunderbird. Two-door hardtop and convertible models. Two front bucket seats, bench rear seat. What they claimed was “the longest list of options and accessories ever offered on a new line of cars.” And a price so low they would let the world know the basic sticker price down to the last dollar, proclaiming it in all of the advertising: $2,368.
And then there was the marketing campaign devised in conjunction with J. Walter Thompson. The cover stories were part of it, but they came free, along with major stories in all of the auto trade magazines. Consumer Reports noted how clean the workmanship was on a car built at such a hurried pace. Jim Wright, technical editor of Motor Trend, who had been among a select group of auto writers who test-drove early models of the Mustang, reported that he had no doubt “that this latest personal sporty car from Ford will sell like proverbial hotcakes,” though he did feel compelled to point out its Falcon infrastructure. Beyond the free media, Ford became the main sponsor on half-hour shows on all three networks from 9:30 to 10 on Thursday night, April 16, the eve of the first sales, running three-minute commercials simultaneously on Hazel, its regularly sponsored show on NBC, and also on Perry Mason on CBS and Jimmy Dean on ABC. A network monopoly in prime time. The estimate was that 29 million viewers would see it.
That was just the start. Full-color advertisements in Life, Look, the Saturday Evening Post, and Reader’s Digest. “Presenting the Unexpected . . . New Ford Mustang! The Mustang has the look, the fire, the flavor of one of the great European road cars. Yet is as American as its name.” And there was the price: “$2,368 fob in Detroit . . . and we’re not fooling!” And to the left: “Mustang was designed to be designed by you!” Performance. Price. Style. And more blanketing the market: ads in 2,400 newspapers that later studies showed had been noticed by 95 percent of male readers. To saturate the youth market, two hundred of the nation’s leading radio disk jockeys were brought to the Dearborn Proving Grounds to test-drive the Mustang and paid to translate their experience into radio commercials, with a bonus on the back end of getting a loaner Mustang when they returned home. Forty-four college newspaper editors were also given Mustang loaners on the condition that they write about the on-campus reaction. In keeping with the Ford dealers merchandise fair held at Cobo Hall the weekend of Buhlie’s wedding, dealers across the country received a forty-eight-page confidential plan from J. Walter Thompson showing them how they could tie in with the national advertising and promote the car to the growing youth market on and off campus.
Going young was the key. “This is the car we have designed with young America in mind—for, frankly, we are very much interested in serving young America,” Iacocca told the press gathered at the Ford Wonder Rotunda, later adding, “Fortunately, our society is affluent enough to enable young Americans to buy immediately many of the items that it took their parents years to acquire. With the Mustang, we expect to make it easier for them to have the kind of car that will suit their needs, wants, and tastes.” Iacocca concluded like the born salesman he was, like Try a Coca, like Ed Sullivan introducing the Beatles, or a circus ringmaster presenting the Flying Wallendas. “Ladies and gentlemen—the Mustang!”
And there it was, with the galloping horse insignia. After the presentation, the romancing of the press corps continued with a luncheon at Westchester Country Club and an invitation for writers and photographers to join in a road rally of Mustangs all the way back to Detroit, some 643 miles. It could have been a disaster with breakdowns or accidents along the way, but in keeping with Mustang luck, there were no mishaps.
From that day to the end of April, more than fifty thousand orders were placed with Ford dealers, but that was not enough to meet demand. Most dealers were given original allotments of thirty-five cars but had already sold more than one hundred. Promoted as a car you could design yourself, most buyers were going for the sexiest options. The more powerful V-8 engine was outselling the six-cylinder four to one. Customers wanted the best radios and whitewall tires. A consumer contagion had taken hold. Frank Sinatra ordered one, and so did Debbie Reynolds. Hughson Ford in San Francisco had not seen crowds like this since the introduction of new Fords after the war; people were lining up outside waiting for the doors to open. It was the same all over the country. J. Walter Thompson commissioned a market study that found that Lee Iacocca had hit the sweet spot with the Mustang, marking a complete transformation from the days when Ford sold mostly to older people who lived in rural America. Sixty percent of the buyers had gone to college; 75 percent of them were under forty-five; 70 percent came from homes with more than one car. About 50 percent lived in suburbs and another 25 percent in big cities. And what drew them to the Mustang? Twenty percent said it was price; a similar number said performance. But 80 percent of Mustang buyers said they were taken by its looks.
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Two parallel tracks on the Magic Skyway curled around the Ford Wonder Rotunda for 2,300 feet. Ford had prepared sixty cars for each track. After coming off the line in Dearborn, the models had been modified at Carron and Company, a custom plant in nearby Inkster, where they were stripped of engines, transmissions, and radiators, along with fuel tanks and brakes, and fitted with a steering pin that descended from the front chassis and connected to the conveyor belt built into the tracks. Tape players were installed in the trunks, operated by push buttons on the dash, with narration of the Magic Skyway tour provided in several languages. Among the Fairlanes and Thunderbirds and Mercurys, twelve new Mustangs were placed into the Skyway fleet. They were selected from among the 150 Mustangs that had been manufactured months before the official Job One production date. Three were Raven black, three Wimbledon white, three Guardsman blue, and three Rangoon red. It was easy to pick them out from the rest. Ray Chatelin recalled the first time he spotted a Mustang coming around on the track: “I thought it was the most futuristic car I’d ever seen in my life.”
In the weeks before the official opening, Ch
atelin and the other young Wonder Rotunda hosts and hostesses were trained at the site, learning how to monitor and control crowds gliding up the moving ramp to the Magic Skyway entrance on the second level and how to safely usher people into the conveyor cars. Thirty seconds to get everyone in. They were shown panic buttons on the conveyor belt that could be pushed in case of emergency, usually meaning the ride had started while someone was still trying to clamber aboard. They were outfitted in uniforms, the women in white and yellow dresses, the men in black slacks, white shirts, dark ties, and bright yellow blazers. “We looked like giant canaries,” Chatelin said.
The World’s Fair seemed to them both the center of the world and a giant 646-acre playground. Ford’s pavilion was a corner near Grand Central Parkway, between the New Amsterdam Gate and the Peter Stuyvesant Gate. The General Motors exhibit loomed as competition on the other end of the Avenue of Automation. The giant Unisphere globe could be seen in the middle distance across the parkway. There was the Rheingold beer garden and Thai food and Disney fantasy rides. The incessant sound of “It’s a Small World” at the Pepsi-Cola pavilion. An animatronic Abe Lincoln at the Illinois pavilion. The world’s largest wheel of cheese at the Wisconsin pavilion. Hula dancers in the Hawaii pavilion. Steel bands in the Caribbean pavilion. Flamenco and Gypsy dancers in Spain. Dick Button and his Ice-travaganza. Pavilions for Billy Graham and Christian Scientists and Mormons and the Russian Orthodox Church; for the Boy Scouts and Hollywood and American Indians and Les Poupées de Paris, with hundreds of three-foot-high costumed puppets; for Sudan and Mexico and Berlin and Hong Kong; for Hertz and Avis and Chunky Candy and Parker Pen. The fair was promoted with the theme “Peace Through Understanding,” but its essence was corporate salesmanship, and in this realm J. Walter Thompson was at the center of the action, representing not only Ford but ten other corporate pavilions and the World’s Fair organization.
It was cold and rainy, the sky a dismal gray, when the gates opened at nine on the morning of April 22, letting in the first of 92,646 opening-day visitors, including President Johnson, who arrived by helicopter and delivered a noonday speech inside the Singer Bowl, filled with a capacity crowd of ten thousand. LBJ spoke of predictions that had been made at the World’s Fair in New York a quarter century earlier, in 1939. It was forecast then that people would be able to cross the country by air in less than a day and that American roads would be traversed by 39 million cars. Bold prophecies, he said, but “the reality has far outstripped the vision.” Then he made a few bold prophecies of his own: “Peace is not only possible in our generation, I predict that it is coming much earlier.” At the next World’s Fair, people “will see an America in which no man must be poor,” an America “in which no man is handicapped by the color of his skin or the nature of his beliefs,” an America “unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction.” As it turned out, Johnson was just warming up for another speech he was to deliver exactly one month later, after arriving in Detroit and taking another helicopter to another, much larger stadium.
Among the tens of thousands of visitors that day were many hundreds who did not believe America had come close to reaching that vision of a place where no man was handicapped by the color of his skin. Race had been an issue for this World’s Fair from its inception, when Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the Harlem congressman, and other black leaders expressed displeasure over the lack of African Americans on the executive staff and a dearth of blacks in the craft unions that constructed the pavilions. Sponsors of the fair had tried in various ways to respond to those concerns, at least superficially, and succeeded to the extent that the New York Times at one point ran the headline “Fair a Showcase for Civil Rights.” The story pointed out that there were “outgoing, multilingual Negro college students” working at almost all the pavilions (including Ford, where twenty-six of two hundred workers were black). This represented a “conscious effort” to “project an enlightened corporate image to fairgoers.”
The presence of black workers at many pavilions did not deter the Congress of Racial Equality, the civil rights group that took the lead in organizing protests in and around opening day. The integration of the fair itself was far less important to CORE than the integration of the institutions represented at the fair. Led by James Farmer, CORE had dedicated itself in 1964 to the idea that the message of the southern revolt against racial inequality was equally important to the North. And there was no larger target to make that case than the World’s Fair, which was expected to draw anywhere from 60 to 100 million visitors over its two-year run. Some of the tactics fizzled; some succeeded. The most publicized was a plan to have a few thousand cars driven by civil rights activists purposely stall and block all roads leading to the fair, an idea hatched by the Brooklyn wing of CORE, the most militant in the region. Many mainstream black leaders opposed the “stall-in,” adding their voices to those of LBJ and Robert Wagner, New York’s mayor, and other white leaders who were still pushing civil rights legislation in Congress. Martin Luther King wrote a long, equivocating letter explaining both his understanding of the anger that fueled the Brooklyn wing and his assessment that the stall-in would be a “tactical error.” Farmer himself concluded that it was a mistake and concentrated on other acts of protest and civil disobedience within the fairgrounds.
With the bad weather, the lack of widespread support, and beefed-up squads of patrol cars and tow trucks, the stall-in was poorly executed and barely noticed. But the protests inside were impossible to miss. Chants of “Jim Crow must go!” echoed across the fairgrounds. Farmer and Bayard Rustin, leading a group of a few hundred protesters, white and black, many of them college students, were arrested outside the New York State Pavilion, where they had set up a human barricade. Another group surrounded the Florida pavilion and had a minor scuffle with police. The Louisiana pavilion was another target, but when Farmer and his protesters reached it they discovered that it was not yet open.
At the Ford Wonder Rotunda, the morning hours proceeded without disruption until shortly before noon, when a squad of CORE picketers from the downtown Manhattan branch circled the rear of the building. Within an hour they were inside, staging a sit-down protest in front of the moving ramps leading up to the Magic Skyway. Faced with a variety of choices, none pleasant, Ford officials decided to defuse the confrontation by closing the exhibit altogether at 1 p.m., hoping the protesters eventually would grow bored and leave. Their numbers dwindled to about twenty late in the afternoon but gained strength again after the dinner hour, and by eight that night there were some 120 young men and women participating in the sit-down protest, chanting, “Ford bias must go!” Their stated goals were to force Ford to hire black executives and to divest from South Africa.
The closing of the exhibit infuriated some tourists who spent hours waiting in vain for the Magic Skyway to reopen. By the next day, letters were being sent directly to Henry Ford II at the Glass House in Dearborn. An attorney from Grand Rapids called it a “spineless and disgraceful surrender to lawlessness” and told HF2 that his new 1964 Thunderbird convertible would be his last Ford purchase. A bank executive from Chicago said of the protesters that “it was obvious that the general public resented their presence” and that Ford never should have relented. Eleanor Schilling of Hyde Park, New York, wrote, “Yesterday I viewed the most astonishing situation I have ever witnessed in my life. I saw Ford representatives weak and helpless in the face of a lawless civil rights demonstration at their exhibit at the New York World’s Fair.” She waited for several hours for the protesters to be ejected, but instead was told that Ford “didn’t want to make any trouble.” In so doing, “Ford allowed the interests of the general public to be subordinated to this group of unkempt malcontents and their ‘angry young men’ brothers of the beatnik type. I should like to assure you that Ford’s public image suffered considerably in the eyes of virtually all observers.” And so the cultural crosscurrents of the sixties whipped around the Ford Wonder Rotunda, with youth �
�being served” in the name of the Mustang, a market-designed symbol of a certain concept of freedom and individuality, and youth also being disparaged in reaction to a certain style of civic idealism, confrontation, and dissent.
As the Ford vice president for public relations back in Dearborn, Theodore H. Mecke Jr. had his name on the company’s letters of response, saying he was writing on behalf of Henry Ford II. He apologized to Mrs. Schilling for having to wait so long at the exhibit without being able to enter. “I should like you to know, however, that the welfare of our visitors was our primary concern. As reluctant as we were to inconvenience guests by closing the exhibit, we thought it better to do so than to subject them to the risk of violence and possible physical harm that might have resulted if we had sought to have the demonstrators removed.” It was a one-day protest, not to be repeated, Mecke said, and fair organizers in any case promised more security in the future.
Through that first week and beyond, Ford had to deal with more mundane eruptions of discontent at the Magic Skyway. The lines were too long. The cars were too small. The technology was too iffy. Robert Ferguson of Woodmere, New York, complained in a letter to Ford, “After an interminable, uncomfortable wait on line, a hustling gang of overeager juveniles literally pushed my wife, my 18-year-old daughter and myself into the rear seat of a small convertible. My ankle was badly twisted in the melee and the car ride was by all odds the most uncomfortable I ever had.” To make matters worse, the push-button narration got stuck on the German version and “none of the occupants understood a word. . . . I can’t understand what kind of idiot decided that the commentary should be in German instead of English.” Mecke responded as best he could, inviting the Ferguson family back for a free ride and explaining the push-button narration options. Gene Fernett from Cocoa Beach, Florida, wrote that the exhibit was better than GM’s but too slow because “the convertibles did not handle enough people and made it crowded and slow. . . . I saw dozens of persons turn away in anger when they saw how few persons could move through the ride at a time.” Ralph T. Schrenkeisen from Garden City, New York, informed Ford that he and his wife “spent a lovely day at the Fair . . . marred only by our visit to Ford. It took us two hours standing in line before we could get in a car, at which time we didn’t care what kind it was, and were too tired to fully appreciate the splendid exhibit.” Again Mecke tried to explain the problem. The ride was designed to handle 3,600 people an hour, but they “were not reaching that figure because some families refused to ride with strangers.” He welcomed any and all suggestions on how to shorten the wait.
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