Donald Nelson Frey

Donald Nelson Frey (23 March 1923 – 5 March 2010) was widely known as the Ford Motor Company product manager who, with Lee Iacocca and others, turned the Ford Mustang into a viable product. He ultimately supervised the car’s development over a total of eighteen months.

Sometimes besieged by autograph seekers because of his role in the Mustang, Frey was a third-generation engineer and “one of the few automotive executives with experience in all three major areas of the industry: design, manufacturing and sales”. Yet he was proudest of helping Ford introduce safety improvements across its range, including disc brakes and radial tyres. In 1967, TIME called him “Detroit’s wittiest man”.

Frey enjoyed a successful career as an innovator in manufacturing and information systems and as chairman and chief executive of Bell & Howell. In 1990, he received the National Medal of Technology at a White House ceremony.

He was born in St Louis, Missouri, to Edward Muir Luken and Margaret Bryden Frey, née Nelson. His probable grandfather, Abraham Frey, was born in Leipzig, Germany. He grew up with his younger brother Stuart M., who later followed him as Ford Motor Company’s chief engineer, in Waterloo, Iowa, where their father worked for Deere & Company. His father, a metallurgist, developed the John Deere Model D tractor in 1923 and later worked for Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company. As children, the brothers once made gunpowder from scratch.

Frey graduated from Bethel High School and entered engineering school at Michigan State College in 1940. During the Second World War, he worked for Packard Motors on the Packard V-1650 version of the Rolls-Royce Merlin engine, intended for shipment to England for installation in Hurricanes and Spitfires. He then served as a US Army officer from 1942 to 1946.

After the war, he resumed his education at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. At its engineering college, he earned a bachelor’s degree in metallurgy in 1947, a master’s in engineering systems in 1949 and a doctorate in metallurgy in 1951. While working on his doctorate, he held an associate teaching position.

Frey married four times: Margaret, the mother of his six children; Mary Cameron; Arvelyn Gore; and Kay Everly, his last wife, from whom death separated him. He died on 5 March 2010 in Evanston, Illinois, aged eighty-six, leaving three daughters, Margaret Walton, Catherine McNair and Elizabeth Sullivan, and two sons, Christopher and Donald Jr.

He spoke Russian, English and French and was passionate about opera and archaeology. While at Ford, he read “the London Times Literary Supplement as avidly as Ward’s automotive reports”. At his death, he owned and drove a 1964½ Mustang in two-tone Merlot and white.

Frey joined Ford in 1950 as head of its metallurgy department and became vice-president and chief engineer in 1964. Besides introducing many industrial innovations, he supervised the Mustang prototype and its subsequent development. He kept fighting for the Mustang after Henry Ford II rejected the idea four times, partly because of the spectacular failure of the Ford Edsel. Without formal approval, Ford secretly met Lee Iacocca and other engineers and designers to continue developing the car.

Speaking to USA Today in 2004, Frey said: “The whole project was underground; there was no official approval for it. We had to work with scarce resources.” Henry Ford II eventually approved the project, put Frey in charge and said he would fire him if the Mustang failed. Fortunately, the Mustang was hugely successful, despite being developed for one-tenth of the 1965 Ford Galaxie’s budget.

In his 2009 book “Mustang: An American Classic”, Mike Mueller quoted Frey as the principal inspiration for the Mustang’s development strategy, from a pilot project drawing on the Corvair’s gradual improvement. “I suppose, in desperation, they put bucket seats in the car, called it the Monza (Ford Monza), and it started to sell.”