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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 in May 1896.
So 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.
But it was not 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 Henry Ford rowed bitterly with Ford stockholders, finally bought them out for $75,000,000 ($70,000,000 of which was borrowed from hated Wall Street) and installed Edsel as president. Henry Ford had learned that Edsel's great value was in soothing the rows his father raised.
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 of war.
But 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.
Edsel seldom made headlines, either in his stewardship or in private life. His houses in Detroit, Seal Harbor and Hobe Sound were lavish. He had three yachts. But his likes were extremely simple. In the evenings, he often sat around playing hearts, rummy or backgammon with his family. At his $3,000,000 Seal Harbor house, he loved to prowl along the rocky Maine coast with his wife, Eleanor Clay Ford (whom he had married in 1916), to find a cozy corner in the lee of a boulder and read to her in his soft, shy voice. He played tennis, avoided stuffy gatherings, kept himself in fine physical fettle. His main interest was art: he spent a summer trotting through Europe's galleries, later gave some $600,000 in objets d'art and contributions to Detroit's Institute of Arts.