16 June 2003

Centennial

It is a cool gray morning of indeterminate size. I cannot tell how deep the heavens will be this day. Not yet. The light is still soft and the air cool, though moist. Those who follow the air currents opine that we will return to the mid-seventies in temperature. The peculiar nature of this Spring continues. It is Monday, but there is less dread this morning because the Boss is waking in Chicago this morning. He will address the American Medical Association later today. He will outline the important initiatives in bio-terror readiness for which he has been personally responsible.

I am too close to it all to make any judgement on his success. I think the system is too vast, too disparate in its components to change quickly enough to matter. I often wonder how we might attempt to deal with a true mass casualty situation in a healthcare industry designed to make profits through elimination of duplication. When I was in the Navy I used to think that duplication in combat systems was no vice, but I know that doesn't work in business.

And business is a focus this morning. It is the hundredth anniversary of the Ford Motor Company. I am overcome by memory. Ford was where my Dad started when he went to Detroit in 1948, Ford's was hiring was the word and it spread all the way to New York. They used to say the company name like that, with an apostrophe. It was personal. All the Ford stuff in Detroit was part of the fixture of our lives. My ex's family had one percent of it, derived from the original book-keeper a century ago. Think about spending one percent of the Ford Motor Company. I can introduce you to some people who did.

It is still human scale. William Clay Ford, Grandson of Henry, had the locker right next to my Dad at Otsego Ski Club. Rich as Creossus or not, he is still a guiy who skiis and enjoys the winter air.

The Ford Rotunda, and Fairlane, the Ford mansion. And the Rouge Plan, the vast complex Downriver that is so big it has it's own eight-lane fly-over, There are vast halls and smelters and rail tracks and chemical holding tanks and when I was a kid you could take a tour and watch iron ore from the Upper Peninsula get dumped into one end of the Rouge Plant and finish up by watching them drive brand new Mustangs out the other end.

They won World War Two from here, and places like it. Not that courage and sacrifice by the kids who used the weapons they built wasn't required. But it was having the weapons and the creativity to employ them that was the key.

The fact that this place existed was the key. Henry Ford invented a process as much as he perfected the automobile. You can think of it like Oscar Meyer not being a lunch-meat concern as much as it is a packaging concern.

When I worked in Detroit I had a couple accounts that were downtown, in the area just inside where the Riots had killed the city. I would sometimes ignore the interstate and drive down broad Woodward Avenue. I knew Woodward best out where I grew up, fifteen miles from the Detroit River as Woodward ran diagonally into Oakland County. When I worked in the City I would start the drive just inside Eight Mile, the western border of the City proper and now known better to Eminem than to the city I knew. It was gritty then, too, some of the wounds still oozing from the insurrection. But Baker's Keyboard Lounge was just north of Woodward on Eight Mile, and there were still signs that this had once been a vabrant city.

When you passed south of Six Mile there was the independent enclave of Highland Park. Just to the north of Woodward was the Highland Park Assembly Plant, and that is where it all began. It was closed when I knew it, multi-story and inefficient in lay-out by today's standards. But when it was new it was The Next Big Thing, a revolution so big that it makes the words about Iran's Islamic Bomb laughable.

This brick building changed the world so porfoundly that we cannot even imagine the world before. It radiated from here across the years and across time. Woodward Avenue right here was the first concrete-paved highway in American, a symbol of how those cars spread out form the factory and began to change the entire fabric of this country and then the world. And of course it wasn't just the concrete part. It was the idea of a fair living wage and workers that could dream and buy the products they made.

Right there in Highland Park. So if there was an American Century, here is exactly where it started.

One hundred years ago. Today.