Business & Finance: Race of Three

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Henry Ford will be 72 next July. A lean, lonely figure roaming through his museum or fiddling with his old music boxes, he has lived five years of Depression without apparent change. He is trying to decentralize the vastest concentration of industry the world has ever seen by establishing small accessory plants in rural districts where workers can live on the land. He and his lady are seen more frequently at Detroit social functions. His spat with the Administration over his stubborn refusal to sign the Automobile Code is forgiven & forgotten.

But when Henry Ford steps to a drawing board or tinkers with a Ford part the years drop away from his thin shoulders, and he seems a different person from the aging man who has an earthy platitude for every interviewer. Ruralist and antiquarian though he has become, the Henry Ford who in 1934 laid out $20,000,000 for plant expansion when Big Business was shivering for reassurances or who boldly announced that he would spend nearly $500,000,000 for wages and materials in 1955, is the Henry Ford who motorized the U. S.

Last month in Manhattan in answer to the uneasy rumbling voiced by businessmen at a Congress of American Industry, Donald Richberg taunted: "Unless the businessmen of America have been shell-shocked into nervous impotence, there must come a time when they will respond to the fighting spirit of that old admiral who signaled, 'Damn the torpedoes. Go ahead!' "

Henry Ford damned the torpedoes two months ago and has been going ahead ever since.