The pony car's first dream team

Stung by the failure of the Edsel, Henry Ford II stubbornly resisted Ford Division General Manager Lee Iacocca's overtures to build the Mustang. He eventually relented but agreed to spend just $75 million on the program. Of the final Mustang design, his only criticism was that he wanted more rear seat space. Ford, who fired Iacocca in 1978 after years of battles, died in 1987.

General manager of Ford Division and principal patron of the Mustang, Lee Iacocca was desperate to outdo the Chevrolet Corvair Monza and create an inexpensive, sporty car targeting America's young drivers. The Mustang's overnight success earned Iacocca one promotion after another, and he became president of Ford in December 1970. He was fired by Henry Ford II in 1978, joined rival Chrysler soon after as president and COO, and retired as CEO of Chrysler in 1992. He is 89 and lives in California.

Born in Toledo, Ohio, and raised in a Detroit suburb, Gene Bordinat studied art at Cranbrook School in Michigan and joined Ford in 1947 after a stint at General Motors. He was named general manager and vice president of the Ford design department in 1961. Because Bordinat was a dapper, smart dresser and a bit flamboyant, Iacocca reportedly referred to him as "the Frenchman." Henry Ford II is said to have once told Bordinat he was the biggest brown-noser Ford had ever met. Bordinat retired in 1980 and later often dismissed all the credit Iacocca received for creating the Mustang. "The model was totally completed by the time Lee saw it," Bordinat told Time magazine in 1985. "We conceived the car, and he pimped it after it was born." Bordinat was fond of driving a Clenet or Mangusta. He died in Detroit in August 1987 at age 67.

A special projects assistant to Donald Frey, Hal Sperlich was credited with keeping Mustang development costs low by using Ford's existing Falcon chassis. Some consider him the true father of the Mustang. An early advocate of efficiency and smaller car design, he was later fired by Lee Iacocca under orders from Henry Ford II, who found Sperlich too pushy and argumentative. Sperlich later joined Chrysler and teamed up with Iacocca again to create another hit vehicle — the minivan. He retired from Chrysler in 1988 and lives in the Detroit area and Florida. He is 84.

Ford chief engineer and assistant general manager for the Mustang, Donald Frey was a gifted engineer and co-originator of the sporty two-seat concept that became the Mustang experimental prototype. He and Lee Iacocca persuaded Henry Ford II after five attempts to approve the Mustang program. Frey later became general manager of Ford division and head of product development. He left Ford in 1968 to become CEO of General Cable and later became CEO of Bell & Howell, where he helped develop the first CD-ROM. He retired from Bell & Howell in 1988 and later taught at Northwestern University. He died in 2010 in Evanston, Ill., at age 87.

A child of Romanian parents, Joseph Oros grew up in Detroit in a poor family that had no car. An artist and sculptor at heart, Oros was chief designer of the Ford team that styled the original Mustang and is credited with giving the Mustang its Italian styling. "When Lee Iacocca saw our finished car, he just rolled his cigar in his mouth. I could see the gleam in his eye, and he was pleased as punch," Oros told Walter Murphy, Ford's public relations manager at the time of the Mustang's launch. Oros became director of exterior design for Ford and retired in 1981. He died in 2012 at age 96.

Gale Halderman attended the Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, Ohio, where he studied art with comedian Jonathan Winters – and was hired by Gene Bordinat in 1955 as a designer in the Lincoln-Mercury studio. He transferred soon after to the Ford Design Studio. He is credited with the exterior styling of the Mustang. "We were so busy doing Ford cars that the only design time that I had to work on it was at home," Halderman said in a 1985 interview with The Henry Ford museum. "So I went home, and I sketched on this project. And, actually, the car was clay modeled from a sketch I did on my porch." He said Ford broke 77 of the company's engineering rules at the time to manufacture the original Mustang. Halderman, now 81, lives in the same Tip City, Ohio, farmhouse where he was born in 1932. He has converted the farm's big barn into the Halderman Design Museum, which houses scores of design sketches and a few cars he has collected, including a 1966 Mustang convertible, a 1927 Model T, a 1931 Model A Cabriolet and a 2002 Thunderbird. Part of the museum's space is devoted to the vintage camera collection of his daughter, Karen Koenig.

Phil Clark once had design sketches of a horse-inspired sport cars rejected by Chrysler. He attended the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles and worked for General Motors, which also rejected his early "pony" sketches. He joined Ford in early 1962 as a consultant just as the company's two-seat sports car project was getting under way. He designed the Mustang's galloping horse emblem with vertical red, white and blue bars and is credited with some styling elements on the '62 Mustang concept. He was later released by Ford and died in February 1968 from kidney failure at age 32. "If Clark had lived, cars would be different now," former Ford design chief Jack Telnack once wrote in a letter to Clark's daughter, Holly. "His designs then were just way far ahead of his time."