The Wall Street Journal-20080202-Remembrances
Return to: The_Wall_Street_Journal-20080202
Remembrances
Full Text (1466 words)VIKTOR SCHRECKENGOST (1906-2008)
Career Produced an Elegant Design
For Myriad Household Products
Melding Bauhaus functionalism and an American sensibility, Viktor Schreckengost pioneered industrial design for products from toys to dinnerware.
Mr. Schreckengost lacked self-promotional drive, yet managed to make himself a presence in most households by the sheer quantity and variety of products he designed. Flashlights and riding mowers, bicycles and fire-engine pedal cars for children all flowed from his drafting table. He once told an interviewer, "If we sold 400,000 of something, I felt I was on the right track."
Mr. Schreckengost, who died Jan. 26 at age 101 while visiting family in Tallahassee, Fla., was a master of introducing design to areas that had previously lacked it. An ovoid dripless teacup he designed in 1955 garnered what he claimed was "the first patent that had been issued for a teacup in a hundred years." Golf-cart-style riding mowers with protected blades didn't exist before he invented them.
"Before Viktor, if you fell off your mower you were basically mincemeat," says Henry Adams, a professor of American art at Case Western University in Cleveland and author of two books on Mr. Schrekengost's life and art. "He's one of the most versatile artists of the 20th century."
Mr. Schreckengost grew up Sebring, Ohio, where his father was a potter at a local dinnerware factory. The children were encouraged to design their own toys. Mr. Schreckengost once took things too far, making an airplane out of plywood piano crates and shoving a grade- school pal out a third-story window aboard it. It was one of his few failures, though the child was unscathed in the bushes below.
After attending art school in Cleveland, he studied ceramics with Bauhaus masters in Vienna. Returning to the U.S. in the early 1930s, he began designing dinnerware for northern Ohio firms.
"He marks the start of distinctively American designs," says Jo Cunningham, an authority on ceramics history. "Prior to Schreckengost they hadn't used designers."
In the mid-1930s, Cleveland still supported a motor-vehicle industry. Mr. Schreckengost found a use for the scrap metal left behind from the Murray Ohio Co.'s bumper manufacturing: He made the metal into toys. Murray Ohio became the largest manufacturer of what The Wall Street Journal once called "miniature automobiles for moppets." His fire trucks still command a premium in the antique toy market.
Mr. Schreckengost's Murray Mercury bicycle was exhibited at the 1939 World's Fair in New York and was the first of the motorcycle- influenced bicycles with chrome elements and streamlined styling. Pee- Wee Herman would have loved it. Sears certainly did, as did customers of other department stores that used his bikes as their house brands. According to Antiques & Collecting magazine, more than a hundred million bikes and trikes were produced to Mr. Schreckengost's designs. Murray went from $1 million to $400 million in annual revenues during the three decades Mr. Schreckengost designed the company's products.
Another innovation he is credited with is putting the cab of a truck over the engine. Introduced by the White Motor Co. of Cleveland in the mid-1930s, the design gave semis an additional five feet of cargo space and, used in buses, made for a narrower turning radius. His inexpensive lawn chairs, made of two pieces of sheet metal and bent tubing and sold through Sears, still sit in many a backyard. He liked to tell how he designed the form-fitting seat: by cajoling hundreds of people to sit on a lump of clay which he then used as a mold.
Mr. Schreckengost was a professor for decades at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he founded the industrial design department in 1936. John Spirk, a former student and co-owner of a Cleveland design firm, credits his teacher with introducing playful "cartoon-like" elements into toy designs and elsewhere. Another student was Joe Oros, design chief of the original Ford Mustang, who says his goal in art school was "to be like Schreckengost."
When he wasn't teaching or designing, Mr. Schreckengost could often be found behind his easel or sculpting. His large-scale commissions dot the landscape around northern Ohio, including mammoths he created in bas-relief for the pachyderm building at the Cleveland Zoo. His "Jazz Bowl," cast for Eleanor Roosevelt in the early 1930s, recently sold at auction for a quarter-million dollars. "No, I don't have one," he groused to Antiques & Collectables in 2001.
Despite his ubiquity, Mr. Schreckengost somehow never got rich.
"I think he was the most influential designer of the 20th century," says his old student, Mr. Spirk. "Vik could have been extremely successful financially had he put himself first."
In 2005, as his centennial year approached, the Viktor Schreckengost Foundation helped organize an exhibit spotlighting his work. More than 100 places nationwide, from museums to the Pedal Car Cafe in Bakersfield, Calif., displayed his fine art, dinnerware, chairs and other objects. "We're looking at America as the gallery," said the foundation's head, Chip Nowacek.
---
BILL BELEW (1931-2008)
He Took the Crown of Costume King
When Elvis Put on His Jumpsuit
Before there was fat Elvis in a jumpsuit, there was svelte Elvis in a jumpsuit. The man who put him there -- creating perhaps the most iconic outfit in the history of rock 'n' roll -- was the veteran show- business costumer Bill Belew.
Mr. Belew, who died at age 76 on Jan. 7 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif., did costumes for Lena Horne, Gloria Swanson, the Osmonds, and Flip Wilson, whom he dolled up in drag as Geraldine.
But it was the King who was Mr. Belew's challenge and passion. "Bob Mackie had Cher, I had Elvis Presley," Mr. Belew was fond of saying. "I mean, it was a fabulous body to design for."
Mr. Belew first worked with Elvis for the 1968 comeback TV special that marked Presley's return to live performance after nearly a decade as a film star. Mr. Belew designed a now-legendary black leather suit patterned on denim togs for that show. Next came all-white suits, then two-piece costumes featuring long knotted belts based on karate uniforms that let Elvis shake his hips with maximum impact. Within a year or so these mutated into gabardine jumpsuits with Napoleon collars and "kick-pleat" bell bottoms, encased by gigantic gold- studded belts and ever-widening capes. The mature Elvis style was born.
The most distinctive jumpsuits came to be known by their own monikers: the Red Dragon, the Burning Flame of Love, and most spectacular of all, the Aloha Eagle, produced for the "Aloha from Hawaii" concert, telecast world-wide in 1973. A gaudy white suit was surmounted by a floor-length cape embroidered with an American eagle.
The original cape was so heavy that Elvis couldn't perform in it. "Elvis was lying on the floor, roaring with laughter," Mr. Belew told Salon in 1999. He later created several shorter eagle capes for the costume. Elvis liked to toss them into the crowd toward the end of a long show.
Rumor had it that Elvis was wearing a cape when he met President Nixon in the Oval Office in 1970, but that is disputed by Butch Polston, founder of B & K Enterprises Costume Co., a Charlestown, Ind., company that is the sole licensee of Mr. Belew's designs. The company makes Elvis suits for tribute artists around the globe. A scholar of Elvis costume history, Mr. Polston says the suit Elvis wore to the White House was a velveteen outfit Mr. Belew designed for shows in Las Vegas.
A Virginia native who served in Korea, Mr. Belew was discovered by Josephine Baker, who encouraged him to pursue costuming. He worked for several years in Chicago theater, and then with music acts. By the 1960s, he was finding regular television work.
When the Captain & Tennille headlined a prime-time variety show in the 1976-77 season, Mr. Belew became the show's costume designer.
"The gowns were done with beading and they weighed an absolute ton," recalls Toni Tennille, half of the singing duo. But she loved them, adding, "He designed all the Captain's hat colors. . . . He would design a hat that would match whatever I was wearing. Pink-polka-dot hats, plaid ones, all these wild colors that would match."
Mr. Polston says that Mr. Belew didn't go in much for fan shows and tribute artists, who often make their own costumes based on his originals. "It disturbed him that others were copying his work," Mr. Polston says.
In 1977, shortly before Elvis died, Mr. Belew was designing what he considered the ultimate jumpsuit, encrusted with diamonds and shooting lasers. In 2007, Graceland put on display 56 of the jumpsuits, which are said to be valued at as much as $100,000 apiece, though they seldom come to market.
-- Stephen Miller
---
email [email protected]
