In its heyday -- and a long heyday it was -- Chevrolet was the face of the world's largest industrial company.

"When I started, you didn't say you were from General Motors. You said you were from Chevrolet," recalls former GM President Lloyd Reuss, who came up through the division's engineering ranks in the late 1950s.

Chevy set its own pace back then.

"There was a strong sense of urgency there," Reuss says. "The escalators even ran faster at Chevrolet than in other parts of the company. Visitors always noticed that."

John K. Teahen Jr., who covered the Big 3 in those days for Automotive News, says: "Chevy was so strong it could have existed on its own. Buick and Pontiac could not have."

The division was very much vertically integrated.

"We had trucks, we had our own engines and our own manual and automatic transmissions and axles," Reuss says. "Chevrolet had the capability to design, develop, engineer and fabricate all of those components."

But Chevy's strength and independence also presented a few problems. Being virtually autonomous, it was a natural target for U.S. trust-busters who disapproved of GM's 50 percent market share in the 1950s.

Reuss says: "When I hired in, one of the questions myself and others had was: 'Is Chevy going to be spun off? And if so, what happens then?'"

In 1962, Chevy surpassed 30 percent of the U.S. market for the first time since 1934. Antitrust fears haunted GM senior management and the company's lawyers. But there were other concerns, too. GM's divisions could sometimes be loose cannons.

Thus GM began integrating Chevrolet with the rest of the corporation. What followed was a 25-year period in which Chevy's independence gradually disappeared and its brand appeal was diluted.

The process started in 1962, when GM began to combine Chevy's manufacturing operations with those of Buick, Oldsmobile, GMC and Pontiac to form the General Motors Assembly Division.

In the 1970s, product development authority was decentralized, and in a radical corporate revamp in 1984, GM was split into two groups -- one for Buick, Oldsmobile and Cadillac and another for Chevrolet, Pontiac and GM of Canada.

A team led by Roger Smith, GM's chairman from 1981 to 1990, reconfigured GM on the advice of consulting firm McKinsey and Co. -- adopting a model that reflected the trend in corporate America.

'Tremendous advantage'

For Chevy it was the end of an era. When Reuss was working on transmission programs as a young man, GM engineering and Chevy engineering were one and the same.

"That was a tremendous advantage," he says. "The Chevy engineering center was really the hub of product development. We could make every component except tire and glass."

Indeed, Ed Cole, Chevy's general manager from 1956 to 1961, even got the division involved in tires.

"He put in the tire group to set specifications -- to decide what was important about a Chevy tire," Reuss says. "That was a bold move in the '60s, when tires were thought to just soften the ride. People didn't know what tires could do."

Chevy was where engineering advances got their mass-market tryout. Disc brakes had been standard on the Corvette but were used in high volume for the first time on the Impala in 1965. Bose stereo systems also had been on the Corvette but were added to the Caprice in the mid-1960s.

Chevy styling also had an edge over the other divisions.

"Chevy got favored treatment in Harley Earl's and Bill Mitchell's design studios compared to the other brands," Teahen says.

By the late 1960s, antitrust concerns had begun to disappear as GM's market share declined. But senior management continued to knit the brands together. In J. Patrick Wright's On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors, John DeLorean recalled that while running Chevrolet in the early 1970s he and sales manager Bob Lund stood up against a plan hatched by top GM management to build a version of the Chevy Nova for Pontiac under the name Ventura.

Before the meeting, DeLorean said, he and Lund were warned by top executives not to oppose the move. They did anyway, arguing that Chevy dealers could not get enough Novas as it was.

He and Lund lost that battle. And it was the kind of thing that Chevy executives would complain about for the next several years.

In August 1981, at the height of a recession, an official at a competing automaker told The Detroit News that "Chevy's been given the short end of the stick lately. GM is doing everything it can to protect Buick, Oldsmobile and Pontiac. That's part of Chevrolet's problem."

Earlier that year, Pontiac had introduced its T1000, a version of the Chevette. GM wanted to give Pontiac protection from imports, but Chevy dealers argued that many Pontiac dealers already had dual franchises with import brands. It was a typical debate between Chevy and headquarters.

Fifty years ago, GM managers rarely bounced from one division to another. To be a "Chevy man" was a point of pride. Lund, a flamboyant executive who later became Chevy's general manager, was a classic example. He spent his entire career in the division before being named head of Cadillac in 1973.

"When I first came to Cadillac I was so imbued with Chevrolet that I had problems pronouncing the name," Lund once told Automotive News. "Invariably it could come out "Chevrolac." Having grown up in Chevrolet, I thought I knew everything there was to know about the automobile business."

The Chevy world was insulated. When Reuss became Buick's chief engineer in 1975 after spending most of his career at Chevrolet, he was surprised when he looked around. "I think I only knew about three people at Buick," he said.

Some 14th floor honchos even seemed to resent Chevy's special status in the corporation. For instance, Lund would appear on Saturday afternoon college football telecasts in the late 1960s. He presented the award to the "Chevrolet player of the game" until a senior GM executive ordered DeLorean, then-Chevy's general manager, to yank Lund off the air.

Thinking small

Reuss says the process of centralizing authority began in earnest after the first oil crisis in the early 1970s as GM scrambled to make its cars smaller.

The company started to change the way it developed vehicles. In racing to remake the lineup, it set up project centers that crossed divisional boundaries for vehicle programs.

"With the downsizing movement we broke down the system," Reuss says. "We said, 'Buick, you do this,' and 'Chevrolet, you do that.' We physically moved engineers with related responsibilities into the same buildings."

The first vehicles engineered this way were the Chevy Caprice and similar-sized cars for the other brands that began appearing in 1977. Next came the A-cars, including the Chevrolet Celebrity.

The similarities were soon noticed. The cover of Fortune magazine on Aug. 22, 1983, carried an image that symbolized the change. Lined up were GM's new mid-sized cars, the Celebrity, Pontiac 6000, Buick Century and Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera. It was hard to tell the look-alike cars apart.

"That cover really stung," the late Chuck Jordan, GM's chief designer from 1986 to 1992, once said. "It was kind of unfair, but it made things really clear."

Look-alike cars were among the problems the 1984 reorganization sought to address. Fisher Body, which had provided bodies to all the divisions, was phased out. But the giant restructuring also took collaboration among divisions to a new level.

Two supergroups were formed: the Buick-Oldsmobile-Cadillac Group for big cars and the Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada Group for small cars.

Lumping together the various GM brands was a sign of the times. In the 1960s, big U.S. companies were renamed "conglomerates" as they amassed hordes of unrelated businesses on the theory that size was everything. But the theory was turned on its head in the 1980s. "Synergy" became the buzzword among America's organizational philosophers and corporate leaders -- notably Roger Smith.

"I'm not sure if the reorganization hurt or helped Chevrolet more than any other division," says Don Runkle, who moved from Buick in 1984 to be Chevy's chief engineer.

He says all of GM's divisions were weakened in the process.

"The divisions went from being almost complete business units, with manufacturing, engineering and sales, to a significantly different structure," Runkle says. "A considerable amount of time was spent on reorganization topics: who reported to whom and so on. For a couple of years our eyes were taken off the product."

Synergy made sense on paper. But inefficient methods can yield productive results.

"When Chevrolet was a complete car company, the divisions would compete against each other," Runkle says. "We all had our 350-cc V-8 engines. It looked like a lot of redundancy, but the structure had served the company well. The competition between the divisions made the company pretty strong against Ford and Toyota. But top executives saw it as a management problem."

Reuss, the first head of the Chevrolet-Pontiac-Canada Group, says the 1984 reorganization was intended to improve GM's speed to market as well as raise quality, reduce cost and increase customer satisfaction. But there were snags.

"The division general managers were still very powerful, but they no longer decided which cars to make in their plants," Reuss says. "The execution was massive. In hindsight there was a lot of effort at collaboration; in my opinion, probably too much."

Still, the reorganizing seemed rational. "You could make a list of things we did that sounded dumb," Runkle says. "Why did we have three 350-cubic-inch small-block engines? But the focus was too much on the problems of management independence and not enough on the strength of the brand and the strength of the divisions. It looked like the divisions were fighting too much, but it made each of them strong."

Chevy was always trying to get into Pontiac's territory and vice versa, he says.

"There were smart guys like John DeLorean and John Beltz [of Oldsmobile] who would always push the edge," Runkle says. "But the company lost a bit of powerful leadership in dealing with these tough characters. It would have been better to stare them down and let them remain independent. But the top management was not strong enough."

Studying the brand

GM ultimately pulled the plug on B-O-C and C-P-C in 1992, replacing them with a structure based on platforms, such as mid-sized cars.

Some say brand management came into vogue at GM in the 1990s because the diluted brands now required special marketing attention. After Runkle was named Chevrolet's chief engineer in 1984, he began to read every book he could lay his hands on about the history of Chevy -- dating back to 1911 -- in an effort to distill the essence of the brand.

It may have been the first time a Chevy executive -- especially a chief engineer -- ever did such a thing. Before that time Chevy was just Chevy -- no explanation needed. It represented the wide bottom in the pyramid of GM brands established by Alfred Sloan.

But in the Roger Smith era, Chevy suddenly had an identity crisis.

"I became a brand fanatic, trying to figure out what does Chevy mean?" Runkle says. Chevy General Manager Bob Burger "and I had endless discussions about what was at the nub of it. I spent a lot of time giving speeches. I would say that in every Chevy there was a little bit of Cadillac: four headlights when that was relatively new, overhead valves, independent rear suspension."

Many at Chevy continued the good fight for Chevy's independence, men like Jim Perkins, a Chevy general manager in the 1990s who is credited with preserving the Corvette when some wanted to kill it.

Reuss, who remembers the Chevrolet of a half-century ago, says GM's tumult of the past three years has led to a rediscovery of the brand. He says the new Chevy has even come to resemble the old one.

"Chevy's about to come full circle," Reuss says. "Now Chevy is 70 percent of GM volume and is a real global brand. We're seeing the same kind of pride come back."