This is Julie, Jon's wife. I found this draft on Jon's computer. Over the past few years, Jon had been exploring his family history in Detroit. Recently, when he was in the hospital and suffering from hospital dementia, he often thought he was in a large car factory in Detroit, rather than in a hospital. I took some comfort that he was mistaking all of the machinery attached to him for interesting automobile-building contraptions. I am going to try to attach a link to Jon's obituary to this post as well.
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/name/jon-olson-obituary?id=34925031
Olaf and Dorty
I think I may have posted this photo before. Can't get it out of my head. This is my grandfather, a farm boy from up north who came to the big city to seek his fortune, and my grandmother, in 1931, possibly on their wedding day in Detroit, or maybe in Richmond, Michigan, a little town a few miles north of Detroit. He was 29 and she was 23, and, if you can trust the dates, she was a couple months pregnant.
Family documents suggest they met at Ford Hospital, where he worked in the cafeteria and she was a nurse. Years later, Olaf became a line autoworker, which provided him financial stability for maybe the first time in his life.
And here's another one, same day, maybe leaving on their honeymoon, with what I guess is her father's spiffy roadster:
He has a puckish look, but he was forceful personality, a fan of grand opera and intolerant of incompetence or what he viewed as bad judgment, all of it backed up with an explosive temper. I don't think he went to college, but he got a law degree as a young man, attending night school and working days in the massive rail yard in Cincinnati, repairing seats and railcar interiors. He met his wife, Charlotte, there, and they moved slowly north, with Bion practicing law half-heartedly in Kentucky and Ohio before finally arriving in Detroit, where, around 1912, the auto business was exploding.
Bion worked for Ford, including some time in the early years of the massive Rouge River plant, and as an outside contractor, an "auto trimmer," putting his railroad experience to work by inventing clips, sideboards and other interior items that allowed an autoworker to snap a seat or contour piece into place in a moment rather than having to resort to bolts and screws, a more expensive and time-consuming process.
He collected dozens of patents, spent a lot of time in court defending them, and did very well for himself, accumulating two homes, a farm, a grain mill powered by a water wheel, a lake home, boats and beautiful cars for himself and Charlotte, including a Marmon (see below) built, not in Detroit, but in Indianapolis -- which maybe was a radical, even in-your-face choice, given his employer.
Bion and Charlotte had three kids, and, inspite of all their success, the family suffered heartbreak and tragedy in the late 1930s that marked the generations that followed.
So I went to Detroit and stayed at an Airbnb for a few days, visiting the places where they lived and worked. Here's a few pix:
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Marmon, like most automakers, made many models of different sizes and features. This is one from 1929:
Photo from Wikipedia under "Marmon Motor Car Company."
Here's the Rouge plant in 1927, then one of the largest factories in the world.
Ford was powerful enough to re-route the River Rouge to allow factory access to its steady flow of ships, bringing in iron ore, wood and other supplies. As the company developed, Henry Ford strove to build an fully integrated operation, supplying everything he needed himself -- cutting trees for wood-paneling, mining the ore, forging the steel, harvesting natural rubber -- rather than relying on outside providers. Today, to a layman's eye, the Rouge plant has a crowded, chaotic look, with towers and smoke filling the sky like something out of "Blade Runner."
Photo from Wikipedia under "Ford River Rouge Complex."
This is the Rouge interior in 1944:
