Gale Halderman, the man whose sketch birthed the Ford Mustang, dies

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Gale Halderman, the farm boy who rose through the ranks at Ford and whose sketch is credited for birthing the iconic Ford Mustang still sold 56 years later, has died. The Tipp City, Ohio, native passed away Wednesday at a local hospital after a battle with liver cancer. He was 87.

Halderman spent the entirety of his roughly 40-year career at Ford, having been hired on initially in the Lincoln-Mercury studio but quickly transferred to Ford’s production studio. It was there, during a design competition for a new 2+2 sports car, that he came up with the sketch, reportedly drawn as one of several at home on his porch, that became the legendary Mustang.

“He was so revered throughout the Mustang community,” Jimmy Dinsmore, the family spokesman and author of ‘Mustang by Design: Gale Halderman and the Creation of Ford’s Iconic Pony Car,” told the Dayton Daily News. “When Lee Iacocca passed away last year, Gale was the last of the Mustang legends still with us. In some regards, this is the end of the golden era of the Mustang’s beginnings.”

Halderman is credited as the originator of the signature side scoop that featured on the original Mustang and still defines the car today. They were originally intended to be functional, ducting air to cool the brakes. But that would have reportedly added $5 to the cost of every car — the equivalent of about $42 today — so they became purely decorative instead.

In an interview with Consumer Guide, Halderman talked about how the Mustang project had its genesis in “a little electric-car proposal” that involved two designers each doing their own riffs on one side of a clay model that then became separate clay models and, eventually, fiberglass versions. They attracted the interest of Iacocca, then the Ford Division general manager, and engineer and special product advisor Hal Sperlich, who encouraged them to reopen the design process for a sports car that would become the Mustang. Halderman said he was eventually ordered to produce some sketches, despite being busy working on a full-size production 1965 Ford, and created five or six at home. One of them would be picked for a full-size clay model.