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 Saturday at his home in Tallahassee, Fla.
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,” 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.”
Schreckengost 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.
In the early 1930s, he was hired by American Limoges to design what is widely believed to be the first modern mass-produced dinnerware.
In addition to the National Medal of Arts, Schreckengost earned the highest honor of the American Institute of Architects.
