Designer's 100th

A lawn chair, a pedal car, a ceramic figurine showing a Neroesque Mussolini with Hitler and Hirohito as cherubim: all are the work of Viktor Schreckengost, Cleveland designer and sculptor whose 100th birthday is being celebrated by more than 100 exhibitions across the U.S., at venues ranging from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to the Bicycle Museum of America. Schreckengost studied at the Cleveland Institute of Arts and then at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna. He returned home in 1930 and began teaching at the Institute of Arts--establishing its industrial design department in 1933--and working at the Cowan Pottery. There he was assigned to create a punchbowl with a New York theme. Having recently visited the Cotton Club, Radio City Music Hall and Times Square, he designed the Jazz Bowl, with nightlife images in black and electric blue. Only afterward did he learn that it was a commission from Eleanor Roosevelt; it became his most famous work.

Schreckengost also designed the first cab-over-engine truck (1932), for the White Motor Company, and at about the same time, what's considered to be the first modern mass-produced dinnerware, Americana, for American Limoges. He continued to make pottery, including politically themed pieces with the onset of World War II. He created public murals, painted watercolors, and designed streamlined bicycles, toy pedal cars in such forms as fire trucks and pursuit planes, a variety of lighting fixtures and a printing press, as well as a radar recognition system for the U.S. Navy. He retired from industrial design in 1972 but continued teaching and today is professor emeritus.