My Forty Years with Ford

6. I, Charles Sorensen

C H A P T E R 6 I, Charles Sorensen J. OFTEN wonder where I would be today had my father missed the boat to America over seventy years ago. I was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, September 7, 1881. A short distance away at the time was the i8-month-old son of Customs Inspector Knudsen. Our paths didn't cross until thirty years later, and I had the good fortune to beat Bill Knudsen to the United States by fifteen years. The name "Sorensen" is as common in Denmark as "Smith" is here, and the figure of "Herr Sorensen," an old man wearing a nightcap, is the Danish Uncle Sam. Soren Sorensen, my father, was a modele sneger, a modelmaker who worked in wood. For more than two centuries his people had been parish clerks and farmers whose descent through an old Danish noble family named Hoeg, meaning "banner," could be traced back to the Middle Ages. My mother, who was Eva Christine Abrahamsen, came from a long line of farmers. Orphaned at an early age, she was adopted by an uncle, a construction engineer, who took her to Sweden, where he helped build the railroad between Stockholm and Oslo. As the work progressed, they moved from one location to another. My mother described this town-to59 60 MY FORTY YEARS WITH FORD town migration so vividly that long years later when I made my first trip from Oslo to Stockholm I easily recognized places and spots along the way that she had told me about. After the road was built, my mother returned with her foster fatheruncle to Denmark and Copenhagen. Here she met and married my father. My father, as a boy, lived on a farm close by the king's farm and summer home. He knew King Christian I, who, like most members of the Danish royal house, had no false sense of dignity and freely mingled with commoners. On entering young manhood my father went to Copenhagen and apprenticeship in a woodworking plant. He took drafting lessons which speeded promotion to modelmaking and the fashioning of models of interiors, stairways, and wooden household furnishings. After work my father followed track and field sports and helped in the training of several athlete friends. His particular idol was not a relation, "Little Sorensen," then Denmark's greatest professional distance runner. Shortly after I was born, Little Sorensen went with a manager to the United States to compete against top American milers. He met with great success. "This is a great country," he wrote my father, reporting his triumphs. "Come on over." Nothing could stop my father from following Little Sorensen to the States. He went on his own, leaving my mother and two of us children—I was then about thirty months old —to follow when he could afford it. A year and a half later, when I was four years old, he sent for us. I have recollections of preparations for the trip and of boarding the ship in which we shared steerage quarters with several other families. There were many youngsters on board, and I had a fight with one who delighted in roughing up other children. I think I must have licked him; at any rate, I threw his cap overboard, and my mother had to replace it. I, CHARLES SORENSEN 61 We landed in New York and went through the immigrant station at old Castle Garden down on the Battery. The steamship people put us on a train for Erie, Pennsylvania, where my father was working at Black and Germer Stove Works. He had become an accomplished draftsman and could lay out a complete stove—all views, top, bottom, and four sides, each in different ink—in one drawing. Meanwhile, Little Sorensen, the human magnet who had drawn my father to America, was flitting about the country, running distance races and winning acclaim in sports news columns. Not quite two years after we had joined my father in Erie, Little Sorensen settled down in Buffalo, apparently for good. Although he was only ninety miles away, my father had to follow his fleet-footed idol to Buffalo. The move was impulsive, yet its outcome was fortunate, for there was a better opening for him at Jewett Stove Works, one of the oldest and best in the country. My father did very well during his eleven years at Jewett. He rose from...