In July 2007, Gerry Mayr, talked with his father Otto concerning Otto's role in designing the Mod material. Gerry gave me permission to share a summary of that conversation: "I spoke to my father (he's 90 yrs old now) [recently] and showed him the photos from the [Mod Top Registry] website. He told me that his company only produced the "yellow-black" flower style for Plymouth. The other colors and styles were produced by another company. He said that if his company had produced the other styles he would have been directly involved with the design and production process. He worked for Stauffer until they closed their Plastics Division (it had then been previously relocated to Andersen, So. Carolina) back in May of 1981. Stauffer originally purchased the Plastics Division from the Toscany Company which was a privately owned company headquartered in New York City. Their specialty products were shower-curtains and vinyl table cloths. It was sold to Stauffer in the late 1960's when the owner retired. Stauffer's core business was in agri-business making fertilizer additives for the agricultural industry. In addition to the flower power design, my father also designed the "wood-grain" panels that were used by GM (Chevy, Pontiac, Buick & Olds, Cadillac Seville & Eldorado) station-wagons back in the mid to late 1970's. The auto industry wanted to get away from using actual wood due to its quick deterioration from the sun. My father assisted in the development of the production and design process that protected the "vinyl" wood grain from fading and streaking. If you ever see any of these wagons around today they still hold up very well and still have a glossy finish after over thirty years. It made him very proud because FORD's product was fading and streaking after a few years and also they were not interested in doing business with his company. He one time spent two years working with FORD on a wood-grain panel that was ultimately in the end rejected personally by, Lee Iacocca, because he "didn't like it." The ironic part is that the rejected pattern was eventually bought by NISSAN and FORD paid for all the product development. As a side note, the flower and wood-grain patterns are repetitive patterns. Meaning that if you look closely at the patterns, they repeat every three to four feet in length. To test this, just pick out one of the flowers and go along in a straight line to see where you see that exact same flower again! "

