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ΒΆ During 1931 about 60,000 mi. of new road were surfaced at a cost of $2,250,000,000, brought the total U. S. mileage to over 760,000. Well aware of this expanding territory, and of the replacement figures beckoning the industry, Alfred Pritchard Sloan Jr., General Motors president, had courage to prophesy guardedly: "We know we have the first lien on the purchaser's budget; that the motor car is the last thing that the individual gives up. . . . The new offerings this year unquestionably represent greater .value than ever before. . . . My own belief ... is that we will enjoy a somewhat better year than in 1931."
* Painted by California-born Artist Albert Sheldon Pennoyer. In the central foreground is the slender figure of young Henry Ford in blue overalls and shirt sleeves. Single-handed he is pushing something that looks like a buggy without shafts. A number on the red shed in the central background fixes the scene at No. 56 Bagley Street, now the site of 14-story Michigan Theatre building, then on the fringe of Detroit's residential district, two blocks west of Grand Circus Park. A bronze tablet at the theatre's entrance preserves the record of what happened there. The Fords then lived at 58 Bagley Street and the. shed which "went with the house" was Henry Ford's workshop. In 1893 Governor John J. Bagley's mansion stood across the street a block and a half to the east. Today the Statler Hotel stands there; across the street from the shed's site is now a transcontinental bus station.