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HENRY FORD

GENIUS IN INDUSTRY

BY WM. L. STIDGER

HE Civil War storm had broken.

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on;

Black clouds were overhead; the tempest was

and in those ominous days Henry Ford was living his boyhood days in a little country town named Greenfield, Michigan.

July 30th, 1863 was the date of birth which means that Henry Ford is still in his intellectual prime; still the master-mind, still the genius of industry; still the conquering King of gigantic enterprises; and not an old man, as some think him to be.

Indeed, due to the fact that he has always been a careful liver; and due to the fact that he has never habitually overeaten, and indulged in the luxurious living that he could so well afford, and that rich men often fall into; Henry Ford is physically, one of the fittest men I have ever had personal contact with.

A broken watch started it all. When he was just a boy a neighbor brought him a watch to fix and he

liked to tinker with its innards. Mr. Ford was always interested in mechanics even as a boy. He fixed the watch so well that other neighbors brought theirs and he had all of the work that he wished to do, just fixing watches. In fact he did this with more enthusiasm than he attended to his studies in the Grammar School.

Two episodes stand out in his early boyhood which mark the way the wind was blowing for this boy wonder: the first being the watch episode, and the second being a trip to Detroit with his father one day, when they ran across a great road-engine chugging along the highway. This engine that propelled itself on wheels frightened his father's horses. They stopped the buggy and Henry begged to be allowed to examine that road-engine. His father stopped and the man who was running the engine let the boy climb up and manipulate the gears, and the lever. This was a high moment in young Henry Ford's life. He never forgot that day and he never forgot the feel of that lever in his long, slender hands; hands of a violinist rather than hands of a mechanic.

On April 11th, 1888, Henry Ford married Clara J. Bryant, of Greenfield, one of the village girls whom he had known from childhood, and whom he had secretely admired; and later whom he had courted like any other country boy. Mr. Ford still loves to get in an old fashioned sleigh and take Clara Bryant Ford

for a ride on a cold winter evening. He is oldfashioned enough for that.

Only this past winter Mr. Ford took his wife up to a little Michigan town where one of his old fiddling friends lives and they had an old time Round Dance until mid-night. Mr. Ford danced with his wife and the other women of the party to the music of that old time fiddler and when they were through the dance they all bundled into an old time sled, with sleigh bells ringing merrily and rode over the snow for two hours with the weather at zero. That is the kind of play that Henry Ford likes.

It is a common custom for Mr. Ford to invite a few of his old Dearborn neighbors in for a taffy pulling party. The Fords do not pay any attention at all to so-called social events and one may live in Detroit to the end of his days and never see the Ford name mentioned in the Society columns of the Sunday papers. They simply do not go in for that particular type of pleasure. Neither Mr. nor Mrs. Ford care for what is commonly called "society." They are just oldfashioned Americans who love the old friends, and the old ways, and the old, simple things of American life.

Mr. Ford likes to take this same Clara Bryant Ford out on the little pond that they have in the Dearborn home and skate of an evening. Mr. Ford told me one day that Mrs. Ford was not what you might call a

perfect skater; that she had not learned to push herself forward as a good skater ought to know how to do; but that he enjoyed skating with her on the pond at home.

There is, in Dearborn an institution that few people know anything about which is another illustration of the fine Americanism of Henry Ford and that is what he calls his "Smithsonian Institute." Here is a Museum of Americanism.

This, to me, is the most characteristic institution that Mr. Ford owns. It is more representative of him than any other one thing.

In this museum you will find everything that he has collected has some marked American slant. There is nothing European in that museum although there must be ten thousand exhibits. He has a hobby for old things; old American things. He sends all over the world for things; but they must be American things. Not that he does not buy some things of the past which are not distinctly American. He does. But his chief interest lies in saving these historical American relics for posterity.

His purchase of the Wayside Inn at Sudbury, Mass., is characteristic of this spirit of Americanism in his soul. During the past year he has purchased and rehabilitated the Wayside Inn for the simple reason that he likes to preserve everything that is distinctly

American. He has had the Wayside Inn made over so that it is exactly as it was when Longfellow wrote "The Psalm of Life."

And incidentally it was his boyhood reading of "The Psalm of Life" that interested Henry Ford in the Wayside Inn. He never forgot those beautiful lines and he has never ceased to love this great New England poet of the common emotions of the everyday people of America.

The same thing that he has done with the Wayside Inn he has also done with the home of his own mother and father near Dearborn. He has had that old home rehabilitated and refurnished so that it is exactly as he remembers it when a boy. He sent all over America to get precisely the same kind of furnishing, the same kind of curtains, the same kind of a stove, and atmosphere that centered about that beloved home when he was a boy.

He even went so far as to have workmen dig up around the house to a depth of six feet to unearth the old spoons, cooking utensils, and other mementoes of his boyhood days and of his beloved parents and his old home. To me, this is one of the most pleasing things about the great automobile manufacturer; that overwhelming desire he has to keep alive the memories of the beautiful past.

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