By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Viktor Schreckengost, 101, a celebrated industrial designer whose products included mass-produced dinnerware, riding lawn mowers, bicycles and coffins, and who revolutionized trucking by putting the cab over the engine, died Jan. 26 at his condominium in Tallahassee. He had respiratory arrest.
Mr. Schreckengost was one of the world's most prolific artists of commercial goods, and his impact on the economy once was calculated at more than $200 billion.
He spent decades as an independent contractor for such companies as American Limoges, Harris-Seybold and Sears & Roebuck. During World War II, he worked on a top-secret radar recognition project for the Navy.
His 1932 cab-over-engine truck for the White Motor Co. was a huge boon to laborers during the Depression, who were paid by the freight they could carry. The extra cargo space would allow the truckers to pay off their vehicle in a year.
He also influenced many generations of artists and industrial designers who passed through the industrial design department he founded in 1931 at what became the Cleveland Institute of Art. His students included Joe Oros, chief designer of the Ford Mustang.
"It's function. That's what I was always attracted to," Mr. Schreckengost said in 2006. "You get to the basic form first and then the color and texture and all the other stuff added to it so it becomes very complicated, even though it appears simple."
Mr. Schreckengost -- whose name means "frightening guest" in German -- was born June 23, 1906, in Sebring, Ohio. He learned clay sculpting from his father, a commercial potter, and said his parents expected their children to make their own toys.
One concoction of Mr. Schreckengost's was a plywood plane built from piano crates that had a 10-foot wingspan. He used a wound-up inner tube to power the propeller and showed perhaps greater ingenuity by having a friend test-fly it -- from an elementary-school fire escape three stories off the ground. The plane did not work, but the friend survived.
As a young man, Mr. Schreckengost's interest was cartooning, but he became interested in ceramics while studying at the Cleveland School of Art. After his graduation, in 1929, he went to Austria to continue his artistic studies. He became a proficient jazz saxophonist in Vienna.
Upon his return, he created for Cowan Pottery of Rocky River, Ohio, possibly his most famous work: an art deco punchbowl featuring images of New York nightlife.
Unknown to him at the time, it was commissioned by future first lady Eleanor Roosevelt as a gift for her husband. In 2004, the "Jazz Bowl" sold at Sotheby's auction house for $254,400.
In the early 1930s, he was hired by American Limoges to design what is widely believed to be the first modern mass-produced dinnerware. Its patterns had a Manhattan theme and became ubiquitous in homes of that era.
Mr. Schreckengost went on to design more than 100 bikes for Sears, including the Spaceliner, Western Flyer and Campus Compact. He also was chief bicycle designer for Murray-Ohio, for whom he also designed the Pursuit Plane and other pedal cars.
He never had children but was known in his Cleveland Heights neighborhood for taking a keen interest in the playing habits of young people. At one point, he designed a little red wagon with a handle that bent to allow steering control by the person in the wagon.
During World War II, he was recruited by the Navy to address a problem with the emerging radar technology: The blips on the screen were hard to interpret, leading those manning the radar to wonder whether enemy aircraft or a flock of birds was approaching.
Radar operators send out beams of electromagnetic radiation and study the echoes that come back. Mr. Schreckengost was instrumental in showing operators how to tease out the detailed shapes of such objects as ships and planes from the radar beams that bounced off them.
He was also credited with using his sensitivity to shape and structure to show how radar echoes could define features in a landscape. During the Battle of the Bulge, he was flown to France on an emergency basis to show U.S. troops under combat conditions how their radars should be arranged to give the best results.
In addition to the National Medal of Arts, which he received in 2006, Mr. Schreckengost earned the highest honor of the American Institute of Architects.
He preferred anonymity but accepted that publicity was inevitable when he won high honors. Visited by reporters, he turned to a file of clippings he labeled with acid sarcasm: "Me, Me, Me, Me, Me."
He continued teaching into his 90s and enjoyed painting Mexican fish.
His first wife, Nadine Averill Schreckengost, died in 1975.
Survivors include his wife, Gene Nowacek Schreckengost, whom he married in 1991, of Cleveland Heights and Tallahassee; three stepchildren, Charles Nowacek of Cleveland Heights, Doug Nowacek of Tallahassee and David Nowacek of Milwaukee; and four grandsons.