Adventures of a Youth in Michigan


Net history resourcing is an interesting thing.  My father was alive and remembers Oct. 29, 1929 when the wheels really fell off the cart but he remembered them getting dicey a year or so before the bad day.

He had a job at Ford Motor in Dearborn, MI sorting the five lugg nuts that were used in all Ford  cars.  There was only a 16th of an inch difference one to another and barrels of these things were dumpted on a centeral sorting table with a bunch of guys counting and sorting them in to little trays for the assembly line.  I guess no one ever thought to sort them to begin with so my father made that suggestion.  He cut holes into a long piece of wood that was mounted on something like a coin sorter contraption and he just fed the bolts down  and they dropped into the right bin below.  It worked like crazy. So Ford management came over, gave him a citation and promptly fired the other 9 guys working with him.  He had armed guards take him off the premises at the end of the shift for his protection. and the death threats made it impossible for him to go backi to work.  So he took a railroad job that his dad got him on the run from Detroit to Grand Rapids just in time for the October 29 Black Tuesday, where he no doubt read this paper