Word: edseleers
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Whalebone tough as he is, Henry Ford had never expected (until recently) to outlive his only son. All his life Edsel was the pupil, his father the teacher, empire management the subject. As a baby, Edsel watched his father tinker with his first horseless carriage, rode proudly on a special little seat when it first sputtered along Detroit's dusty Bagley Avenue...
...rapidly did this mechanical wonder beget thousands of other mechanical wonders sputtering over the land that young Edsel had no time for college. He pulled on greasy overalls, went into the shop at 19. The lessons were hard, the hours long, the examinations unexpected. His keen blue eyes sparkling, Henry loped through the shop tangling routine, creating problems, leaving them for young Edsel to solve...
...until the years of World War I that Edsel first learned what it was going to mean to live within the Ford legend. Deeply opposed to war, Henry insisted that Edsel be deferred from the draft as one of the company's key men. Edsel was condemned as a "slacker" and "coward." Silently, Edsel shouldered his share of managing the company, knowing that the bitter storm was puffed up by Republican politicians. The deferment was justified. But this was Edsel's first experience in the storms which swirled about his father. The next williwaw came in 1919, when...
Good-by to Model T. In later years Edsel's job was to keep the company up to date. It was Edsel who finally persuaded Henry to junk the obsolete Model T and bring out the gearshift Model A. It was Edsel who argued for snappier designs, brighter colors, a complete line of low-priced cars. And when it became plain that the U.S. might be drawn into World War II, it was Edsel who counteracted his father's bone-deep hatred...
...Edsel was always in the background. When Henry Ford confidently stated that he could build 1,000 planes a day, it was up to Edsel to prove that the company could at least build 500 planes a month at Willow Run (he lived to see the goal in sight). The teacher still created problems for the pupil to solve...