Viktor Schreckengost turned 100 years old in 2006, receiving not only a National Medal for the Arts from President George W. Bush, but also a yearlong tribute that saw 130 exhibitions of the visionary industrial designer's work staged throughout the country. Virtually everyone has seen or used a product he's created or influenced, from toys and bicycles to lawn chairs and dinnerware. We asked industrial designers John Nottingham and John Spirk, who were once Schreckengost's students at the Cleveland Institute of Art and remained close friends with him until his 2008 death, to pick their favorites.
Schreckengost wasn't the first to create the child's pedal car, but before his design, such toys were prohibitively expensive for most families, says Nottingham. As Murray-Ohio's chief bicycle designer in the late 1930s, Schreckengost used scrap sheet metal and a simplified design to make a high-end toy accessible to generations of children. Nottingham and Spirk both have childhood photos of themselves riding Schreckengost-designed cars. "It empowered a child to go anywhere," says Spirk. "One day it was a pedal car, the next it was a rocket ship, the next a time machine. It was a vehicle to expand your imagination."
In 1932, delivery trucks were limited in length, but drivers were only paid for their cargo. As a designer for Cleveland's White Motor Co., Schreckengost created the first cab-over-engine truck design, which allowed Depression-era truck drivers to boost their incomes by allowing more room for cargo. "It's not just the design," says Nottingham. "It's the impact, the thinking behind the design. It created revenue for White Motor Co. and gave them a real advantage." He says it revolutionized the trucking industry, creating a model that's widely used today in buses, 18-wheel trucks and military vehicles.
It was a chair designed for bottoms, by bottoms. Schreckengost molded a prototype of this chair out of plastocene clay in the Murray-Ohio factory and asked each employee to sit in it. A day's worth of body warmth — Spirk estimates hundreds of people sat there — softened the clay into a seat custom-designed for comfort. The metal chair was stamped from the clay prototype and mounted on a single steel tube crafted into a frame. "You couldn't go in a backyard and not see a Viktor Schreckengost chair," says Spirk. "It was a fashion statement in addition to being a functional piece of goods."
