The final Just a Little Bit Cranky post

  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: 

And here's Dorothy's father, Bion or "Bennie." Again, this could be the same day:

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:

 I took a tour a few years ago, and the assembly area is all automated today, with the workforce reduced to just a few individuals here and there doing rote tasks.                                                                                               

Photo from Wikipedia under "Ford  River Rouge Complex."

This is the Piquette Avenue plant (now a museum), which Ford operated from 1904 to 1911, and where the Model T was first built. It has three stories, maple floors and lots of natural light, and seems "welcoming" in a way that many modern industrial plants do not. Cars were built here in stations or bays along the sides, before the development of the assembly line, and when finished they were wheeled out to a large elevator to the ground floor, where they were shipped out on trains. Henry Ford had a kind of "security room" here, where he and select personnel would meet to brainstorm, in private, new vehicles they weren't ready to announce. Ford himself is described as open to input in those sessions. 

Ford autos in this early era were in some ways assemblages of parts made by outside companies. For example, the Dodge brothers supplied Ford with drive trains for years, before they began to make their own cars. Visiting the Piquette plant, and reading other sources, one has the feeling that cooperation and curiosity made the early auto pioneers more congenial and less secretive than one might think.

The Piquette plant was later occupied by Olds Motor Works, later Oldsmobile. And, Fisher Body, which made car bodies, also had a large presence in the neighborhood, which today is littered with hulking plants, all of them empty.     

This 14-minute video tells the interesting history of the Piquette plant: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiwcmVlORWQ

Ford's major Detroit-area plants have been -- more or less in order -- Mack Avenue, Piquette, Highland Park (above, being demolished) and the Rouge. Their operations often overlapped. The shed where Henry Ford built his landmark "Quadricycle," in 1896, is now downtown Detroit, where the Michigan Building stands. The company's increasing need for space has driven it farther and farther from the city center with each succeeding plant. (And today, of course, it builds cars all over the world.) 

Henry Ford's Quadricycle, which had a two-cylinder, ethanol-powered motor.

Ford Motor Company image from https://corporate.ford.com/articles/history/henry-fords-greatest-innovation-the-quadricycle.html

Automotive pioneers, such as Ford, the Fisher brothers, Walter Briggs (a car-body maker), not to mention the founders and early investors in General Motors and Chrysler, accumulated astonishing wealth and lived very well. 

Ford and his wife Clara lived most of their lives at Fair Lane in Dearborn, a sprawling, 56-room stone mansion on a 350-acre site beautified with meadows, gardens and forests. (See pictures and maps at https://www.henryfordfairlane.org.)

Many other auto titans and other prominent citizens were residents of the Boston-Edison neighborhood. The Briggs and Fisher mansions are especially notable, and business people and famous cultural figures  -- Berry Gordy Jr. of Motown Records, for example -- also had expansive homes there.