Bill Mitchell began his design career in the art department at Colliers while attending the Art Students League of New York. In 1935, he was hired at General Motors working on a number of makes, and in 1936 was assigned the Cadillac studio. After serving in the Navy during WWII, Mitchell returned to GM as director of Styling and Harley Earl’s assistant. In 1958, when Earl retired, Mitchell was named vice-president of Design, a role he filled until he retired in 1977. Mitchell played a key role in designing the Cadillac Coupe deVille, DeVille, and Seville; Buick Riveria; Corvette Stingray; and Chevrolet Camero. Mitchell begins his oral history discussing Harley Earl and his impact on automotive design. He moves on to discuss his early career at GM in the very early stages of Art and Color. He goes on to talk about how Earl split the department into studios, discussing who ran the studios, and projects they were working on. Throughout his oral history he discusses Earl’s total control over design and his power at GM, something Mitchell also strived for when he moved into the executive level. He discusses many of the cars he worked on including the Motorama show cars, Riviera, Stingray, Corvette, and Firebird. Mitchell discusses the challenges he faced replacing Earl and the designers and executives he worked with in a number of stories covering his career. He wraps up discussing his design philosophy and dislike of modern car design.

Collection contains 1 .25" tape, 4 cassettes, 3 compact discs, 4 WAV files, 8 MP3 files, 1 diskette, 1 bound transcript, 1 Word transcript, and 1 PDF transcript. Uploaded July 26, 2021.