Tag Archives: Pete Kalinski

New Podcast: GM’s “Google Years” with Ken Pickering, former Director of Engineering

By | | , ,
Comments Off on New Podcast: GM’s “Google Years” with Ken Pickering, former Director of Engineering

Ken Pickering, GM’s retired Executive Director, Engineering and Design Services, joins Digging Detroit’s Kevin Walsh and Pete Kalinski to discuss his career in the exciting years of design in the 1950s and beyond.

  • Moving from western Pennsylvania to WWII to GM
  • Hard work combined with some great breaks
  • Harley Earl & Bill Mitchell
  • How long a car takes from design to production
  • Women in design via Harley Earl
  • The Corvette SR2 created in 5 weeks for Earl’s son
  • Henry Ford, Willow Run and the Arsenal of Democracy
  • Motorama—Harley Earl’s Manhattan Runway
  • Man’s love-affair with cars
  • David Temple’s new book Motorama:  GM’s Legendary Show & Concept Cars (below)

MRead More… →

New (and Old) Frontiers: Above Detroit with Aerial Photographer Alex MacLean

By | | , , , ,
Comments Off on New (and Old) Frontiers: Above Detroit with Aerial Photographer Alex MacLean

Alex MacLean has seen Detroit from the sky at various stages since 1980.  The large green-spaces below, for example, were once crowded neighborhoods and business districts in a city’s footprint that is large enough to fit Houston, Boston and Manhattan.  These grassy fields seen from Google Maps might be mistaken for parks.

Similar green spaces a few miles north of town generally have bunkers and greens fees.

A trained architect, pilot, author and photographer, MacLean lives in Massachusetts but has seen Detroit from above as Ronald Reagan received the Republican presidential nomination, for the 1998 demolition of the landmark Hudson Building and last autumn at  a request from the New York Times.  Each visit is like dropping into a different chapter of the city’s history–urban farms were previously dangerous abandoned homes and lots.

From the sky, many travelers … Read More… →

New Podcast: Digging Detroit – Dodge, Detroit & Women in Industry

By | | , , ,
Comments Off on New Podcast: Digging Detroit – Dodge, Detroit & Women in Industry

Digging Detroit’s Tom Reed and Pete Kalinski discuss the early days of Detroit’s automotive history with historians Bailey Sisoy Isgro and Madelyn Rzadkowolski.

Topics include:

  • Advertising’s current portrayal of the Dodge Brothers
  • Dodge’s famous dependability—and fix-it-yourself car kits
  • General Patton and the Dodge military contract
  • Women and Detroit’s cigar industry as a vehicle for entry into the workforce (and why Detroit was a cigar center)
  • Using campaigns of conscience to get women into the workforce during WWI
  • Detroit’s African American 600% population boom between 1910-1920
  • Detroit as the “Paris of the Midwest”
  • More campaigns of conscience to force women out of the workplace after WWII
  • Dodge’s role in the arsenal of democracy
  • Fear of women earning too much–and gaining political clout)
  • Promoting the myth … Read More… →