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Arts & Entertainment

The Stylings of Roy Jaffe

Former senior automobile style designer for General Motors will speak at the Plainview-Old Bethpage Library on Thursday

As a boy, Roy Jaffe would draw sketches of different car designs. Anything that he could imagine came to life on the piece of paper in front of him.

Now, many years later, he looks back on his life working with General Motors as their Senior Automobile Style Designer and beyond.

On Thursday at 2 p.m., Jaffe will be making a presentation at the in which he will share some of his renderings as well as his experiences working as an automotive designer.

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At the tender age of 19, Jaffe sent a portfolio of his work to General Motors in Detroit. A short time later, he was asked to come work for the company as one of their designers. He was one of the few designers at GM without any art education.

Jaffe’s job function was styling automobiles, as well as specific parts of cars. This included the fenders, rear taillights, front headlights, embellishments, the chrome around the car and the interior design.

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“We did what we wanted, we were just given an assignment, ‘do a taillight.’ There were no restrictions whatsoever on the taillight,” Jaffe said. “We only had some restrictions in that bumpers had to be a certain height because it’s part of the federal code.”

Jaffe explained that while working on ideas for a car, the designers probably drew up around 50 different sketches per week, most of which weren’t used. Although the sketches weren’t utilized, the ideas stemming from the drawings often led to newer and more thought out designs.

According to Jaffe, the best thing he ever designed was the front end of the 1953 Oldsmobile Fiesta.

“It was a pioneering effort to eliminate the grill of a car,” he said. “The theme of the bumpers and the way they were built was the most dominant feature of the front end of the car. The bumper was the grill, in that essence.”

Besides working on designs, Jaffe is also an engineer but didn’t pursue making cars while at General Motors.

“Even though I was an engineer [while with GM], engineering was not the prime thing in my mind. I’m a style designer. I couldn’t really care less about how the thing was going to be made," Jaffe said. "I’m interested in establishing a theme for the car design. We had engineers who could figure out how to make it."

The engineers, according to Jaffe, would always manage to come up with innovative ways to make their designs feasible. After designing cars for General Motors for four years, Jaffe left the company. When asked what he thinks of the styles and designs of cars today, Jaffe is hardly impressed.

“Most of them are relatively the same size, and they’re pretty much identical,” he said. “It’s really hard for an individual to tell one car from the other. There is no two-tone, there’s no chrome, there’s no theme.”

Although his outlook on car designs today are rather bleak, Jaffe is happy to see American cars coming back to the forefront of the automotive industry.

“General Motors, and Chrysler, and Ford have learned how to make cars as efficiently as or even more efficiently than the Japanese,” Jaffe said. “There is no question that the American corporations have come a long way from the time when they were subservient to Japanese cars. American cars today are first-rate in every respect.”

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