Pair of statues to honor David Dunbar Buick | Hemmings Blog ...

Photo courtesy Larry Gustin.

Even though his namesake car has one of the automobile industry?s deepest histories, David Dunbar Buick exists today as one of the early automotive world?s tragic tales. Buick came to Detroit at age two, persevered to create great cars with his sidekick, master machinist Walter Marr, and took on the young Billy Durant to help market his cars. History makes clear that Durant had other ideas. He turned Buick into the United States? top-selling car, but forced its creator from the firm just before he founded General Motors in 1910. Buick, the man, was nearly forgotten by the time he died in Detroit at age 74 in 1929. His fortune had been wiped out by bad investments in California oilfields and Florida real estate.

We recently heard from Lawrence R. Gustin, the longtime Buick PR chief turned automotive historian (and author of a definitive Durant biography), who described a unique unfolding effort to honor Buick appropriately. He is going to be memorialized with two life-size bronze statues: One in Flint, Michigan, the founding home of Buick cars, and the other in his seaside hometown of Arbroath, Scotland. The Flint statue is expected to be unveiled this December. Larry sent us the above photo of Joe Rundell working on his likeness of Buick. Joe is a retired machine repairman at the Chevrolet engine plant in Flint who made a reputation doing custom engraving work on firearms before turning his talents to sculpture. The Buick project is led by Al Hatch, who chairs the Back to the Bricks car show in downtown Flint since retiring from Rockwell Automation. The group he heads is considering locating a new statue of Durant near that of Buick and an existing one of Louis Chevrolet in Flint. That would be second statue of Durant in town; the first has stood for 24 years outside the onetime headquarters of the Durant-Dort Carriage Company. As Larry tells us, Al?s idea is to eventually turn Flint into something of a sculpture garden honoring locally prominent automotive pioneers such as Walter P. Chrysler, Charlie Nash, Albert Champion, Charles Kettering and the Reuther brothers, among others.

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Source: http://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2012/10/18/pair-of-statues-to-honor-david-dunbar-buick/

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