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In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /330792t (VII. LOVE AND GASOLINE ) Tom y Darling Yallr life I wish one long long Slimmer's Day From YOllr own true love Henry - extract from letter, 1891. As 1883 and '84 went by, Henry was the repairman for Westinghouse road engines; and then on December 1, 1884, he took another step in his own program of education. He entered a business school, Goldsmith's Bryant & Stratton Business University, located in Mechanics Hall (a name, no doubt, of notable attraction for him) at 143-153 Griswold Street, near the City Hall. He had decided he needed a business background . 42. Mechanics Hall tchere he studied mechanical drawing, bookkeeping and business practice, and this is the only flash of business education he ever had. Perhaps also it incidentally equipped him to understand the business-office jests of the 1880's. In those days the office jokes centered about bookkeepers and office boys, the way they focus on girl secretaries today. One sample: Boy: "The bookkeeper kicked me, sir." Boss: "Well, I don't have time to attend to all these details myself." The instructors must have spoken firmly to him about his handwriting, for it was quite legible, even a touch fancy, for most of the next ten years. Then the Goldsmith influence wore off, and his handwriting lapsed into an illegibility that almost rises to grandeur, a magnificent nonpenmanship in which each simple-looking word can be construed in ten different ways. Many years later Ford said, in an unusual 37 bragging mood: "At the time I didn't know why I took that [bookkeeping] course, but now I know. I can understand in a minute what our financial men are discussing. I know offhand how much material, labor and money we have -in the terms of an expert accountant." One can only gape in wonder, for the teachers at Goldsmith's must have been miracle men: Henry attended there only a few months in all. And yet he did become an extraordinary, a supreme, businessman; he did know what the financial men were discussing. He was never outwitted in a business deal in his life, and this was not mere Yankee shrewdness; in moments of great financial crisis he threaded his way through the intricacies of high finance with the nimble foot of a Rothschild. In the early years of the Ford Motor Company everyone gave credit for the successful management to James Couzens, and then Ford fired Couzens in 1915 and went on to a long series of dazzling business strokes. For years he continued to fire every man with a business head. So we are driven back to reconsider the merits of McGuffey-and of Goldsmith's Bryant & Stratton. Ford must have learned somewhere, and those were the only schools he ever attended. A big year in Henry Ford's life was 1884. One good source has it that when on July 30 he became twenty-one years old, his father, now fiftyeight and still anxious to establish him on the farm, gave Henry forty acres. Other sources say the gift came later, but no one is sure. The gift was supposedly on the condition that Henry would quit the Dry Dock Company and definitely return to the farm. Henry wrote later: "I agreed in a provisional way...." Certainly he did not return to the Dry Docks. As he said: "I was then on the farm to which I had returned, more because I wanted to experiment than because I wanted to farm, and now being an all-around machinist I had a first-class workshop to replace the toy shop of earlier days." We must remember again the great differences between the 1880's and our times: in those days there was a very hard separation between summer and winter. When the snow came you stayed put until spring opened the roads. Today , over much of the United States, a snowfall is only a matter of irritation for a few hours; In order to view this proof accurately, the Overprint Preview Option must be checked in Acrobat Professional or Adobe Reader. Please contact your Customer Service Representative if you have questions about ἀnding the option. Job Name: -- /330792t the trains and buses and planes are a little late. But in...

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