Bunkie Knudsen Diary - The Corvette Diaries

Semon Emil Knudsen was born in 1912, in Buffalo, New York. His father, William, had come from Denmark in 1900 and worked his way up in a firm that supplied axle housings and crankcases to Ford Motor Company. When Ford acquired the firm in 1914, the family came to Detroit, and William became responsible for setting up Ford's branch factories. After four years, he was appointed production manager, earning $50,000 annually, and commissioned the great architect Albert Kahn to design the family's stately country place on an island in the Detroit River. Yet in 1921, he abruptly left Ford. Some say he never believed the massive Rouge complex was anything but a grandiosity. Evidence found in his own papers-which are part of the same archive as Bunkie's diaries-suggests Henry Ford's anti-Semitism created a profound disturbance.

Semon Emil acquired the nickname of Bunkie when his sister was born, and for a time, the young lad bunked in William's room. It could almost be said that from the beginning he was groomed to run General Motors. William, known informally as Big Bill, ran a steel company for a year after leaving Ford, but in 1922, he joined GM as vice president of operations at Chevrolet. He vowed Chevy would match Ford in sales; by 1927, when Ford lost production during the Model A changeover, Chevy surpassed them. Offering "A Six for the Price of a Four" two years later, gave Chevy a lead it rarely would surrender.

Big Bill took over as GM president in 1937, after Alfred P. Sloan moved exclusively into the chairmanship. At the outbreak of World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt summoned Big Bill to Washington, D.C., where he ran the war production effort, tapping manufacturers to build tanks and planes. He is said to have been the first foreign-born man to receive an officer's commission in the U.S. Army, and he retired as General Knudsen.

When Big Bill returned home, he was honored at lavish banquets and presided over the Golden Jubilee celebration in 1946. This channeled the jubilant postwar spirit into the celebration of the auto industry's fiftieth anniversary, a spectacle that still lingers in the memories of many Detroiters.

Meanwhile, Bunkie grew up tinkering with midget racing cars and fast boats. He went off to MIT and received a degree in engineering. True to his father's belief that every young man should learn the mechanic's trade, a dictum Big Bill repeated in speeches and newspaper interviews throughout the '30s, Bunkie worked on the Pontiac assembly line during summer vacations. His first jobs were as a draftsman in a machine shop, then as an inspector in a roller bearing company. In 1939, he went to work for Pontiac, and during a ten-year stint rose to chief inspector and master mechanic. Next, he became director of GM's Process Development Section, where quality control measures were perfected. In 1953, he transferred to the aircraft engine operations at the Allison Division-and started the diary that would be kept for the next forty-four years.

By 1956, Knudsen was ready for the big time. He was named Pontiac's general manager, becoming the youngest-ever leader of a GM automotive division. His engineering team included Pete Estes, who would one day succeed Knudsen as Chevy boss, and John DeLorean, who would succeed Estes. This team led Pontiac from number six to number three in sales, trailing only Chevy and Ford. The practices they perfected at Pontiac would translate nicely to Chevrolet: installing big engines, beefing up suspensions, and emphasizing performance. (Knudsen even used the same formula during his desultory, nineteen-month stint at Ford, where much to Iacocca's annoyance he pushed for the "Boss" Mustangs.)