MENDING A WATCH
This first memorable event of Henry Ford's childhood occurred on a
Sunday in the spring of his eleventh year.
In that well-regulated household Sunday, as a matter of course, was a
day of stiffly starched, dressed-up propriety for the children, and of
custom-enforced idleness for the elders. In the morning the fat driving
horses, brushed till their glossy coats shone in the sun, were hitched
to the two-seated carriage, and the family drove to church. William and
Mary Ford were Episcopalians, and Henry was reared in that faith,
although both then and later he showed little enthusiasm for
church-going.
Sitting through the long service in the stuffy little church,
uncomfortably conscious of his Sunday-best garments, sternly forbidden
to "fidget," while outside were all the sights and sounds of a country
spring must have seemed a wanton waste of time to small Henry. To this
day he has not greatly changed that opinion.
"Religion, like everything else, is a thing that should be kept
working," he says. "I see no use in spending a great deal of time
learning about heaven and hell. In my opinion, a man makes his own
heaven and hell and carries it around with him. Both of them are states
of mind."
On this particular Sunday morning Henry was more than usually
rebellious. It was the first week he had been allowed to leave off his
shoes and stockings for the summer, and Henry had all a country boy's
ardor for "going barefoot." To cramp his joyously liberated toes again
into stuffy, leather shoes seemed to him an outrage. He resented his
white collar, too, and the immaculate little suit his mother cautioned
him to keep clean. He was not sullen about it. He merely remarked
frankly that he hated their old Sunday, anyhow, and wished never to see
another.
Mother and father and the four children set out for church as usual. At
the hitching posts, where William Ford tied the horses before going in
to the church, they met their neighbors, the Bennetts. Will Bennett, a
youngster about Henry's age, hailed him from the other carriage.
"Hi, Hen! C'm'ere! I got something you ain't got!"
Henry scrambled out over the wheel and hurried to see what it might be.
It was a watch, a real watch, as large and shiny as his father's. Henry
looked at it with awed admiration, and then with envy. It was Will's own
watch; his grandfather had given it to him.
On a strict, cross-your-heart promise to give it back, Henry was allowed
to take it in his hands. Then he cheered up somewhat.
"That ain't much!" he scornfully remarked. "It ain't runnin'!" At the
same moment a dazzling idea occurred to him. He had always wanted to see
the insides of a watch.
"I bet I c'n fix it for you," he declared.
A few minutes later, when Mary Ford looked for Henry, he was nowhere to
be found. Will was also missing. When, after services, they had not
appeared, the parents became worried. They searched. Inquiries and
explorations failed to reveal the boys.
They were in the Bennetts' farm "shop," busy with the watch. Having no
screw-driver small enough, Henry made one by filing a shingle nail. Then
he set to work and took out every screw in the mechanism.
The works came out of the case, to the accompaniment of an agonized
protest from Will; the cogs fell apart, the springs unwound. Altogether
it was a beautiful disorder, enough to delight any small boy.
"Now look what you've went and done!" cried Will, torn between natural
emotion over the disaster to his watch and admiration of Henry's daring.
"Well, you SAID you was goin' ta put it together," he reminded that
experimenter many times in the next few hours.
Dinner time came, and Will, recalling the fried chicken, dumplings,
puddings, cakes, of the Sunday dinner, grew more than restless, but
Henry held him there by the sheer force of his enthusiasm. The afternoon
wore along, and he was still investigating those fascinating gears and
springs.
When at last outraged parental authority descended upon the boys,
Henry's Sunday clothes were a wreck, his hands and face were grimy, but
he had correctly replaced most of the screws, and he passionately
declared that if they would only leave him alone he would have the watch
running in no time.
Family discipline was strict in those days. Undoubtedly Henry was
punished, but he does not recall that now. What he does remember vividly
is the passion for investigating clocks and watches that followed. In a
few months he had taken apart and put together every timepiece on the
place, excepting only his father's watch.
"Every clock in the house shuddered when it saw me coming," he says. But
the knowledge he acquired was more than useful to him later, when at
sixteen he faced the problem of making his own living in Detroit.
In those days farm life had no great appeal for him. There were plenty
of chores to be done by an active boy of 12 on that farm, where every
bit of energy was put to some useful purpose. He drove up the cows at
night, kept the kitchen wood-box filled, helped to hitch and unhitch the
horses, learned to milk and chop kindling. He recalls that his principal
objection to such work was that it was always interrupting some
interesting occupation he had discovered for himself in the shop. He
liked to handle tools, to make something. The chores were an endless
repetition of the same task, with no concrete object created.
In the winter he went to the district school, walking two miles and back
every day through the snow, and enjoying it. He did not care for school
especially, although he got fair marks in his studies, and was given to
helping other boys "get their problems." Arithmetic was easy for him.
His mind was already developing its mechanical trend.
"I always stood well with the teacher," he says with a twinkle. "I found
things ran more smoothly that way." He was not the boy to create
unnecessary friction in his human relations, finding it as wasteful of
energy there as it would have been in any of the mechanical contrivances
he made. He "got along pretty well" with every one, until the time came
to fight, and then he fought, hard and quick.
Under his leadership, for he was popular with the other boys, the
Greenfield school saw strange things done. Henry liked to play as well
as any boy, but somehow in his thrifty ancestry there had been developed
a strong desire to have something to show for time spent. Swimming,
skating and the like were all very well until he had thoroughly learned
them, but why keep on after that? Henry wanted to do something else
then. And as for spending a whole afternoon batting a ball around, that
seemed to him a foolish occupation.
Accordingly, he constructed a working forge in the schoolyard, and he
and his crowd spent every recess and noon during one autumn working at
it. There, with the aid of a blow-pipe, they melted every bottle and bit
of broken glass they could find and recast them into strange shapes. It
was Henry, too, who devised the plan of damming the creek that ran near
the schoolhouse, and by organizing the other boys into regular gangs,
with a subforeman for each, accomplished the task so thoroughly and
quickly that he had flooded two acres of potatoes before an outraged
farmer knew what was happening.
But these occupations, absorbing enough for the time being, did not fill
his imagination. Henry already dreamed of bigger things. He meant, some
day, to be a locomotive engineer. When he saw the big, black engines
roaring across the Michigan farm lands, under their plumes of smoke, and
when he caught a glimpse of the sooty man in overalls at the throttle,
he felt an ambitious longing. Some day----!
It was on the whole a busy, happy childhood, spent for the most part out
of doors. Henry grew freckled, sunburned the skin from his nose and neck
in the swimming pool, scratched his bare legs on blackberry briars. He
learned how to drive horses, how to handle a hay fork or a hoe, how to
sharpen and repair the farm tools. The "shop" was the most interesting
part of the farm to him; it was there he invented and manufactured a
device for opening and closing the farm gates without getting down from
the wagon.
Then, when he was 14, an event occurred which undoubtedly changed the
course of his life. Mary Ford died.