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Many of the world's smartest manufacturing brains are concentrated in Detroit; so is much of the world's smartest machinery. Many a machine is no good for making anything but autos; that was why conversion was not the simple, button-pushing job that some people thought it should be. The great body and fender presses, half-embedded in concrete, are useless now; the great halls that held them are being walled off, spiders will spin webs on them until the war is over. The massive, complex, special-purpose machinery which was once Detroit's pride has been ripped out, carted to parking lots; there the machines stand now, coated with grease against the rains of nobody knows how many springs.
Genius in Shirt Sleeves. Detroit has more than machinery, more than the manufacturing brains of Henry Ford's generation. The industry's front line is manned by a little battalion of unknown men in battered felt hats, sitting shirt-sleeved in cubbyhole factory offices, darting out among the machines, spitting tobacco juice, profanity and ideas. These are Detroit's production men, fresh up from the ranks, a trace of grease still under their stubby fingernails. They know machines as only men can who have handled them. They are the men who play by ear, with near-perfect pitch. With dog-eared notebooks, pencil stubs and know-how they work out production problems that no textbook could solve.
Such a man is Bud Goodman, who quit the University of Illinois when his father died, got a job as a metal finisher, moved up so fast that now, at 37, he is manager of the Fisher Body plant at Flint. Thickset, horny-handed Bud Goodman is converting the plant 100% to tanks. He welds them by a new process that saves four-fifths of the machining time, bends them into shape on 480-ton presses, maneuvers them on 30-ton jigs like ducks on a spit. As the new assembly lines spring to life, Bud Goodman trots around them so swiftly he seems always to be jumping out from under his hat; he peers at his machinery like a farmer eyeing his land. He knows his men down to their latest babies, his machines to the last oil-point. When he has office visitors, he puts his coat on. He takes it off as soon as they leave.
Such a man too is Frank Morisette, 55, a fighting bantam who set up Chrysler's gun arsenal, cut the finishing time on anti-aircraft guns from 400 hours to 15 minutes. Morisette's standard approach to all problems is: "Let's go out and look at the goddamn thing." Such is Eddie Hunt, 50, of Chrysler's tank arsenal, who is built like an iron safe and never wore a white shirt until last year. Such is slim Roscoe Smith, the Willow Run manager, a veteran tool & diemaker, who at 50 looks 35.
These production men have the same tactile sensitivity to machinery as a surgeon has for muscle and nerve; they can make the machinery and blueprints come alive as a Toscanini brings notes off paper. They do not come readymade; they have to grow up with machines.
Henry Ford was such a man.
Great-Grand-Daddy. Henry Ford is 78 and a great-grandfather, but he is still lively, curious and productive. His shoulders are stooped by his years, his neat salt-&-pepper suits hang loosely on his spare limbs. But his body is still tough, his bright eyes dart restlessly as the fingers of a machine. The Ford Motor Co. is, as ever, a one-man show.