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At first, the Mustang wasn’t supposed to be a passenger car. Instead, its designers were dreaming up a racecar.

Jerry Malinowski was one of those dreamers. In 1961, he graduated at the top of his class from the Cleveland Institute of Art and joined the team at Ford Motor Co.’s Design Styling Center in Dearborn, Mich., a suburb of Detroit.

“Detroit was a ‘happening,’ ” Malinowski told La Louisiane, using a term that was hip in the ’60s.

Soul music was spinning out of the Motor City, where Ford made cars and Motown made stars like Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder and The Supremes.

While the singers crooned and shimmied, business managers at Ford began to panic over the company’s declining sales.

In 1958, they had pinned their hopes of overtaking Buick and Oldsmobile with the Edsel, a car that was such a fiasco that its very name became synonymous with “epic fail.” The Edsel cost the company an estimated $250 million — the equivalent of more than $2 billion today. By ’61, Ford was pushing the Falcon, an affordable family car. It was a no-frills, no-thrills ride. But the sedan was too sedate. Sales were taking a dive.

America would soon be caught up in the zeitgeist of the ’60s. The space race was under way. The United States’ military presence in Vietnam was starting to grow. On the domestic front, the dashing young president, John F. Kennedy, symbolized a new generation. Change was in the wind and Bob Dylan was singing about it.

Ford’s designers, including the 22-year-old Malinowski, were about to help the company change gears.

While the suits fretted about sales, the company’s owner, Henry Ford II — the grandson of its founder — lusted after Italian sports cars.

“He was obsessed with them,” Malinowski recalled in a recent interview. “He had a Maserati and a Ferrari in his stable. And when he came by the Styling Center, he was often driving one of them.”

Multiple layers of managers all got the message and passed it on to the designers. “They kept saying, ‘Make it more Italian.’ That’s because when it came to design, Henry had the final say.”

The Design Styling Center where Malinowski worked was both a crucible of creativity and a grueling workplace.

“There was an attitude. It was a fast life. You worked 12-hour days and left at 9 o’clock at night. You worked eight hours on Saturdays and did even more work in your free time. As for a personal life, you didn’t have much of one. It was a crazy business.”

Think real-life Mad Men.

“There was definitely a hierarchy in management — and plenty of chiefs. If you were a high chief, you had a sterling silver water pitcher on your desk. If you were a really high chief, you had a crystal water pitcher.”

Malinowski and his fellow designers didn’t have water pitchers — or desks. They worked at drafting tables, churning out drawings and illustrations.

“It was the guys in the trenches who designed the cars,” he observed.

They pinned their designs to the wall and waited for the brass to approve or reject them. Those that got a green light were passed on to a team of modelers, who created full-scale versions in clay.

“Henry Ford, along with Gene Bordinat, vice president of Ford design, and his entourage of chiefs and little chiefs, would come to the studio to review the drawings and clay models. They wanted ‘newness’ —  and it had to sell.”

Malinowski’s first assignment was in the Thunderbird Preproduction Studio.

“In a preproduction studio, designers are still trying out ideas,” he explained. Once a car was destined for the assembly line, its designers were more influenced by the dictates of physics and the practicality of the manufacturing process.

It takes about two to three years for a vehicle to evolve from the design phase, or ideation, to production. So, in 1961, Malinowski was helping redesign the car that would become the 1964 T-Bird.

“The problem was that the car had become too weighed down, in terms of design,” he said.

When it was introduced in 1955, the Thunderbird was a two-seater. In ’58, it became a four-passenger car. By 1960, the T-Bird resembled a tank. “Sitting in the back seat of that car made you feel claustrophobic.”

Malinowski told his boss, studio chief Joe Oros, “I’m going to go back to the 1955 model.”

The lines of the Thunderbird and its profile, which featured a long hood and short trunk, suggested movement and velocity. Malinowski imitated those lines and explored new possibilities.

“I loved to experiment. I didn’t want my drawings to look like everybody else’s,” he said.

He completed some of his early images using gouache, an opaque watercolor paint. “I liked the freedom of it and the effect that came from using a brush. Part of the experience of using different media is that sometimes something wonderful — and completely accidental — happens. The way the water moves the pigment across the paper may reveal the beginning of a form, which gives you something to work with, something to explore, and it can take you in an unexpected direction.

“That doesn’t happen on a computer. Even a pencil, just a regular pencil, can reveal something surprising.”

Malinowski’s “ideations” for the 1964 Thunderbird  included a new feature: scooped-out side panels. Even though the cars had air conditioning, he wanted to capture the feeling of streaming down the highway in an open cockpit, or at least driving with the windows down. In designer-speak, those scoops were a celebration of the open road.

“The original intent was to celebrate ventilation to the claustrophobic rear,” he said. “I wanted to give the impression of air flowing into the back seat.”

To sell decision makers on the idea, he drew a series of illustrations, including a version with stainless steel side scoops.

“Many times, I would exaggerate parts of my drawings and illustrations to draw attention to certain areas,” he recalled. “Lighting and highlighting details you wanted them to focus on played a big part in getting your ideas chosen, then put into clay and into production.”

Although higher-ups didn’t entirely buy into Malinowski’s ideas, some of his suggestions were applied to the 1964 Thunderbird model. It didn’t have side scoops, but compared to the 1960 T-Bird, it looked like a car that flowed with the wind, instead of one that was continually pulled down by gravity.

In late January 1962, after only seven months in the preproduction studio, Malinowski was transferred to the Advanced Design studio, where he would work on Henry Ford II’s pet project: a racecar. Ford was determined to debut the car in the U.S. Grand Prix in October.

“We had to have a car designed, built and ready to show to the public, so time was not on our side. But that made it even more exciting.” The short turnaround gave the designers more freedom than usual, he explained. “Because decisions had to be made quickly, the details of the car didn’t get bogged down in management committees.

“Initially, there was no body design. There were no engineering constraints. It didn’t even have a name, but we knew it was going to have a horse on it.”

That’s because Henry Ford II wanted to shake a fist at Enzo Ferrari, the owner of the Italian car company, Scuderia Ferrari.

Ferrari’s logo, a black horse prancing on a field of yellow, originated with Francesco Baracca, Italy’s most decorated World War I fighter pilot. Baracca, who served in the cavalry division, had a similar horse painted on his plane. “The story goes that Baracca’s mother asked Ferrari to use the cavallino rampante on his racecars to honor her son after he was killed in battle,” said Malinowski.

In the studio, the young designer applied concepts he had been developing for the Thunderbird.

“In most cases, we would start a concept drawing as a side view. And I was still working out the relationship of the front end to the side scoop.” The design quickly evolved into a mid-engine car. Instead of putting the engine in front, under the hood, the designers positioned it behind the driver. Having the weight of the engine closer to the center of the car could give it an advantage on the track, especially in turns.

The side scoops Malinowski had suggested to “celebrate ventilation” now became functional. They would draw in air to cool the racecar’s engine.

In one of his drawings for the project, Malinowski experimented with racing stripes.

Most often, racing stripes run along the centerline of a car, parallel to the ground, to create the illusion of forward motion. Malinowski mixed things up. He used vertical stripes “in red, white and blue to emphasize that it was an American car.”

After Ford management dubbed it the “Mustang,” studio chief Bob Maguire asked Malinowski and another designer, Phil Clark, to come up with an emblem for the racecar. “We had a lot of fun with it,” Malinowski recalled.

Eventually, one of Clark’s horses and Malinowski’s stripes were combined to create the enduring Mustang logo.

A custom fabrication company built the car in 100 days, just in time for the Grand Prix. Ford hired Dan Gurney, the nation’s top racecar driver, to show off its new machine, the Mustang I, on the track in Watkins Glen, N.Y.

The sleek racecar turned heads and generated publicity. Bolstered by public reaction, company executives placed their bets on a passenger car that captured the wild Mustang spirit.

Another team of designers helped the sports car evolve into a concept car called the Mustang II, which led to commercial production of the Mustang.

With a fresh design, the company transformed the fuddy-duddy Falcon, the affordable car that was losing money. “Henry wanted a car with Ferrari flair and a Falcon price tag and that’s what we achieved,” said Malinowski.

Ford Motor Co. designed and built a car that weighed less than 2,500 pounds and cost less than $2,500. The weight limit helped control the cost of materials and, ultimately, the sticker price. The production model of the Mustang also used the Falcon platform, all its mechanical parts, and in some cases, interior parts as well. “Today, that approach is called sustainable design.”

On April 17, 1964, at the New York World’s Fair, Ford introduced something new: “Henry’s” affordable car with European styling. The Mustang was a sports car and a family car with a base price of just $2,368.

Buyers could select a hardtop or a convertible and could choose from 15 colors, which included Chantilly Beige and Pagoda Green, Rangoon Red and Wimbledon White.

America succumbed to Mustang madness. On that first day, buyers placed 22,000 orders.

“Good design sells,” said Malinowski. Within two years, Ford had sold more than a million Mustangs and changed forever the way Americans looked at cars.

By then, Malinowski had moved on, first to Philco, a Ford subsidiary that manufactured home products. There he designed refrigerators, cooking ranges, radios and televisions.

In 1964, he went to Japan, where he designed electronics for Panasonic Corp. In ’67, he moved to Syracuse University, where he ultimately designed a bobsled for the 1988 U.S. Olympic team and helped America come within striking distance of a medal. The bobsledders finished fourth, beaten by the Soviets by just 2/100ths of a second. In 1992, Malinowski tried a new design, which was tested by Boeing Corp. and deemed the most aerodynamic bobsled ever.

In 1999, after retiring from Syracuse, he made his way to Lafayette to help establish the University’s new industrial design program.

“How could I resist a place with alligators on campus? I had to see that for myself!”

Since then, he’s connected with the culture — he goes out Cajun dancing at least twice a week — and with UL Lafayette students.

Over the years, they have benefitted from lessons about timeless design from someone who helped create a car that, 50 years later, is still an object of desire.