Bill Reddig- the fellow we called Dad- did his version of the electric car back in the mid-1950s as a stylist at American Motors. The thoughts about what were to come in this amazing world were around then, and AMC’s Chief of Design, Mr. Ed Anderson, had the idea that what was coming should look cool. Dad naturally obliged.

He was one of the young men who had been wrenched from ordinary lives into the ones in uniform. Unified against an implacable foe. When he was still a cadet in the Navy’s “aviation pipeline,” he took his unique skills to capture moments that are as alive now as they were when the subjects were not only alive but young.

When that War was over, Bill got his GI Bill and headed to Pratt Institute to learn the skills of an exciting trade. But he wanted to show the same sort of excitement that all the young people- men and women- had to meet the challenges of a New World in which literally anything was possible. Heck, they were even saying that people would walk on the surface of the Moon, the one that floated placidly above them in the Manhattan skies. Then marriage to that cute gal from Ohio, and suddenly a family to deal with in a place they called “The Paris of the Midwest,” a city we now know as Detroit. Here he is, showing the sleek lines of one of the clay models he crafted from his swooping designs that sculpted a rapidly moving future. That is the way he looked to me then, a tall young man with elegant hands and a vision that encompassed the ordinary and molded it into the World to Come.

That World arrived in the swirl of fossil-fueled efficiency and optimism. He and his wife Betty rode the tides of change with aplomb, and lived to almost ninety full turns around the sun and across the span of the American Century. This morning, I at pictures of the impending days of Departure for them both. Those times of adjustment from Building the Future to Looking at What Was is too poignant for this delightful morning. Instead, we will look at Future Past, and remember them for what they accomplished when life was still unfolding. Bill’s kids will always remember him for his art, for his joy in life, and that slim confident smile that said he was Going to Go Do Something. He did.

Copyright 2022 Vic Socotra
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