The Dallas Ford plant

My father was an east Dallas guy. He was born there and attended Mt. Auburn Elementary School, Long Junior High School and Woodrow Wilson High School. He played hundreds of rounds at Tenison Golf Course and bowled just as often at Jupiter Lanes. He parked cars at the Cotton Bowl and thus got in free to dozens of college and pro football games. Most of all, he worked for 20 years at the Ford Assembly Plant at 5200 East Grand Boulevard. Dad started at the bottom, on the assembly line, and later got an office job that consisted of spending many hours on the telephone with auto parts suppliers.

The Ford Motor Company first came to Dallas in 1909 in the form of a two-man dealership. A car factory opened five years later at the intersection of Canton and Williams streets. Then, in 1925, the aforesaid plant on East Grand was christened. It operated for 55 years, finally closing on February 20, 1970. During that time, more than 2 million cars and trucks were made—Model T’s, Model A’s, World War II-era Jeeps, Fairlanes, Edsels, F-100s, Galaxies, Mercurys, Thunderbirds, Lincoln-Continentals and/or station wagons.

I remember taking a Cub Scout tour of the plant and being more than a little awed by the industrial might on display. The building, the steel, the noise, and the overalls-clad men who made the cars dazzled me. Large posters were hung high on the walls that emphasized safety and quality. Employees sometimes had after-hours square dances with a fiddler and a caller, right there on the factory floor. Every vehicle that rolled off the line at the Dallas Ford plant got a sticker on the back window that said, “Built in Texas by Texans,” encircled by a lariat rope. Corny? Perhaps, but I was proud to say my father worked there.

He brought home a weekly newsletter that chronicled the various happenings at the plant. From those I saw, I only remember three things: (1) more reminders about safety and quality, (2) summaries of how the plant’s bowling or softball teams had done and (3) admiring articles about men who had donated ungodly amounts of blood. One guy had given a pint a week for 25 years or so, enough to fill a backyard swimming pool.

People who worked there were given discounts to buy new Fords—probably about 5% off. And there was pressure to stay “in house.” Driving anything but a FoMoCo product was frowned upon. One of Dad’s colleagues, named Earl, must have been an independent sort. He drove a Pontiac. My brother and I could not understand why he would do that. We even had conversations among ourselves about why that disloyal Earl did not drive a Ford.

One thing I always did with the World Almanac was to check American car sales. I had to find out how Ford was doing versus Chevrolet. The results were consistent, however: More Chevys were sold than Fords. Yet another example of my boyhood love of the Ford brand pertained to auto racing. If the winner of the Daytona 500 was in a Ford, you can bet that made me happy. If the winner of the Indianapolis 500 had a Ford engine—again, cause for celebration. The Ford GT (metallic blue with a bold white racing stripe down the middle) won the 24 Hours of Le Mans from 1966 to 1969, when I was still very impressionable. What was the ultimate muscle car? The Cobra, a Ford product.

The Dallas plant became obsolete over the years, and in 1963 Interstate 30 was built nearby which had the unintended effect of bisecting a stable, middle-class neighborhood. The decline was already underway when Ford headquarters in Detroit announced that the plant would be closed. I will never forget the shell-shocked look on my father’s face when he told us about it. The 3,000 employees and the $17 million payroll left quickly.

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This piece would be incomplete if I did not say a word or two about the company’s founder, Henry Ford. As one of America’s greatest industrial titans, he has been the subject of numerous biographies. I surely admire Ford for his intelligence and willingness to work hard, achieve a dream and so forth. Ford Motor Company, with annual revenue of $140 billion, is one of the biggest commercial entities in the world, and it can be traced to this son of a farmer who decided he liked inventing better than following behind a mule. In his later years, he was—to put it kindly—unbalanced. He sponsored a brutal paramilitary force to dissuade his employees from unionizing, he befriended numerous Nazis (he received the Grand Cross of the German Eagle in 1938), and he was responsible for some brazenly anti-Semitic writings. Entrepreneur, folk hero, reformer, figurehead and bigot—he was all these things and more. Ford died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1947.