Race of Three

(See front cover)

Ford Motor Co. is a Delaware corporation. Its main plant—the most magnificent aggregation of industrial equipment in the modern world—is at River Rouge, Mich. At the start of last year it had assets of $639,000,000, over one-half of which was in cash or liquid paper. During the past 30 years it has sold more than 22,000,000 automobiles, approximately the total number on the road today. Its principal stockholder once turned down an offer of a billion dollars for the company as a going concern. Since it was founded in 1903 with $28,000 of paid-in capital, it has grossed a few hundred millions in excess of $11,000,000,000, retained as net gain nearly $800,000,000. No man in all history has made so much money so quickly or so cleanly as Henry Ford.

Mr. Ford is not an officer of Ford Motor Co. His only connection with the corporation is his ownership of 58% of the stock and a seat on the board of directors. With him on the board sits his son, President Edsel Bryant Ford, who owns the rest of the stock, and Vice President Peter E. Martin, one of the few survivors of the countless upheavals in Ford management. There is a secretary and assistant treasurer, and an assistant secretary of the corporation, but no other title within the whole Ford organization. Henry Ford does not believe in titles.

It takes an efficient executive staff to run a business whose payroll at one plant alone has been as high as 104,000 persons, whose purchases have run as high as $40,000,000 per month and whose operations include coal mines, glass factories, steel mills and a fleet of 37 ships. Yet the Ford staff is small. All the key men in the company can sit down together at a lunch table in a maple-paneled corner room at the Engineering Laboratory where the elder

Ford makes his headquarters. There for counsel and advice go untitled Fordlings like William Cowling (sales), Albert M. Wibel (purchasing) and Charles Sorensen, hard-boiled superintendent of the mighty Rouge works.* Also high in Ford councils are William J. Cameron, Mr. Ford's official spokesman, and Harry H. Bennett, who handles personnel and directs Ford Motor's notoriously efficient police. But the one & only boss of Ford Motor Co. is Henry Ford.

Last week the spare, stooped grey-haired dean of the premier U. S. industry launched a 1935 edition of the Ford V8, Model 48. And for the first time in his life he launched a model at the New York Automobile Show, No. 1 of the great fairs where the men from the motormaking provinces of the Midwest each year exhibit their newest and finest transportation wares (see p. 62).

Mr. Ford used to exhibit only Lincolns at the Automobile Shows because Lincoln was a member of the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce (now the Automobile Manufacturers Association) which sponsored the exhibits. But Ford, characteristically, never joined the industry's trade association. This year the show was staged not by the manufacturers but by their local dealers. Hence Mr. Ford exhibited. He sent cross-section displays, a team of two mechanics who could pull down a V-8 motor in six minutes, assemble it in ten, a cutaway car on a traveling belt which, when big blocks were tossed under its wheels, demonstrated what Ford calls "Center-Poise," balanced riding quality. And he also sent a modern car.