Tyler R. Perry
For the Advertiser
CASS CITY 
— One never knows where a childhood interest might lead them.
Cass City’s Richard Berweiler discovered that what started as a boyhood fascination with auto design developed into a lifelong hobby and career.
It all started in the 1940s when Berweiler was a child.
“I had an uncle who was interested in cars and he would take me around to car dealers,” Berweiler said. While perusing the latest selection of sedans and station wagons, Berweiler picked up brochures, which showcased the modern designs and conveniences of the current autos, and included glossy photographs within their pages.
“I’d cut them up for scrapbooks, not knowing what they were,” Berweiler says of the first automotive literature he acquired. All of that changed, however, in the early 1950s when his passion for cars began to take off.
“I had the interest in car design,” Berweiler said. “My uncle would take me to auto shows, and up and down Livernois Avenue on Sunday afternoons, looking at cars.”
When he wasn’t viewing cars in person, he was studying the sleek designs of the latest models in his ever-growing collection of automotive brochures.
It didn’t take long, however, for Berweiler’s appreciation for car design to develop into a career pathway. While a high schooler, young Berweiler sat in on a presentation given by a General Motors representative. His topic – engineering and auto design. “He recommended … the Art Center in Los Angeles,” Berweiler says of the representative’s advice for aspiring engineers and auto designers.
According to Berweiler, that piece of advice was very valuable. From 1954 to 1957, he attended the Art Center, learning to fine tune the natural artistic abilities he already possessed. His education at the institution proved to be a good launching pad for his career.
The year he left Art Center, Berweiler was hired by General Motors as a tech stylist. “Basically, [my job] goes back to the old fashioned 4-view line drawings of the cars,” he says. From there, he worked his way up through the ranks to become a studio engineer. It was from this position that Berweiler retired in 1987 – 30 years after joining the company.
As all retirees must, Berweiler had to make a decision about what he would do with his newly acquired spare time. It didn’t take him long to figure it out; he would continue pursuing his love of collecting automobile brochures.
In the early 1980s, Berweiler had joined the Automotive Literature Collectors’ Club. It was through this organization that he found other like-minded collectors throughout the country and globe. His interaction with fellow collectors increased dramatically in retirement, trading with people from New Zealand, Australia, Germany, England, and even as far away as Tahiti.
Berweiler’s collection of automotive literature has grown far beyond the scrapbooks he compiled as boy in the 1940s. Today, he has more than 38,200 automotive brochures from just about every American auto manufacturer, and several foreign makers. Of all 38,000-plus, he says his favorites are the Cadillacs, especially his 1928 brochure, as well as the Packard and Lincoln brochures of the 1950s and ‘60s.
Where does a person store that many brochures? In their basement, of course. Rows of neatly organized shelving units, built by Berweiler and organized according to the make of each car, house the thousands of pieces of literature.
Using a spreadsheet, Berweiler has meticulously catalogued each brochure on his home computer, noting the year, size of the document, number of pages, and other detailed data pertaining to the catalog.
After more than 65 years of collecting, Berweiler says he is beginning to wonder about the future of his hobby.
“We’re going into a period when car manufacturers are discontinuing printing literature … They’re going digital,” he says. “I feel this hobby could come to an end in the next few years, because they’re going to quit printing, and will [instead] put it all online.”
For now, though, Berweiler is going to continue collecting. He is routinely in contact with fellow collectors throughout the world and enjoys sharing his passion with others.