Mercury Paint
Colors & Charlie Strang's Comments

by DaytonaJohn
» Sun Jul 04, 2010 4:28 pm

From time to time
this site discusses Mercury paint colors and often the color - model paint schemes
suggested on the OldMercs site comes up. While doing my research for an article
I'm putting together for Antique Outboarder about the automatic transmission
outboards, I wrote Charlie Strang a letter about outboard colors and a few
other things. One question specifically was if the colors were Chrysler since
Kiekhaefer was racing the Chrysler 300s; if so, we could probably go to old
paint books at the auto paint place and get exact color chips.

Among the notable
things he wrote was that there was pretty much no pattern or set rules to the
Mercury painted outboard experiment that Mr. Strang was involved with from
start to finish. The color palates were not constant and the paint shop got new
orders almost daily, while Mercury got a new sales boss(es) (see below!)

Dear John:

As to the
multiple colors on many of the late 1950s Mercs, the sales department people
did not come up with this program. Instead, they hated it.

Carl Kiekhaefer
was an admirer of the automobile industry and paid close attention to all of
Detroit's moves. Sometime in the late 50s the car people went strongly to
two-tone paint jobs. Carl thought, reasonably, that it would be a great concept
for outboards. General Motors, not Chrysler, provided the impetus.

We painted up a
number of outboards with the color combinations being used on cars,
particularly some of the Chevy combinations. We used one of the colors from a
given car color combination on the cowls and the other color on the mid-section
and gearcase. The multi-colored outboards went into production immediately.
Some of the color combinations changed each time Carl bought a new car----which
was often!

The sales people
went nuts! There was no way they could forecast how many of each color
combination that people would buy. Some of the colors looked great on boats of
a given color. Others looked awful on any boat. Dealers were screaming that
they had to stock too many color combinations to satisfy customers. Somehow it
seemed that we always had the wrong color combinations in the warehouse and our
inventory costs went out of sight.

Our sales boss at
the time (we changed them often in those days) came up with a great
quip----"to sell motors we will leave no stern untoned"! Think
"stone unturned" to enjoy it.

All of which soon
led to the end of the Mercury multi-colored outboard experiment----to the
delight of the production, marketing and financial departments, as well as the
dealers.

We then went
heavily into white engines and later into black, the color which has persisted
to this day. The black color came about when we were having a tough time trying
to make the new 100 hp six look smaller. My late mother suggested we paint it
black instead of white because she said, "a large woman wears a black
dress to look smaller". We tried black on an engine----which appeared to
shrink tremendously. We showed it to Carl who took one look and said
"paint them all black!". Thus a color previously shunned in the
industry became a major factor in the marketing of outboard motors, even
leading to lawsuits between manufacturers as to who had the right to use it on
their products.

As for the names
of the paints on the multi-colored Mercs, they were chosen primarily by the
marketing people and the ad agency and sometimes were variations on names used
by Detroit for the car colors. For example, "Desert Sand"----which
may have been a GM color----became "Sand Tan" and so on. There was no
deliberate program to match colors to those on the Chrysler 300s which we
raced. In fact, we dropped out of car racing after the 1956 season ended.

In short, there
was no grand strategy behind the choice of color combinations or the names used
by Mercury. To put it mildly, the whole program was very flexible, often
changing from day to day!

And that is about
all there is to tell about our rainbow outboard program----with which I was
involved from start to finish.

All the best,

Charlie Strang