October 25 - Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan

We hit the road early to get to the Henry Ford Museum as soon after 9 o’clock as possible—this is a super museum and we figured it just might take us all day. As it turned out, we only managed to cover 2/3 of the museum by the 5 p.m. closing bell. If you don’t like to hear about museums, you might just want to skip the rest of this day and the next. On the other hand, if you didn’t like to hear about museums I don’t expect you would have lasted this far into our journals, so you might as well keep on reading because this was a MUSEUM

Ah, but first for a Moment of nostalgia and exorcism of a ghost. After buying our tickets I had to go to the men’s room to the right of the actual entrance to the museum and, wouldn’t you know it, the bathrooms were exactly the same as they were about 20 years ago. What made me nostalgic? Don’t you get nostalgic when you feel like you are dying? Monika and I ate some out-of-date Vienna sausages when we visited 20 years ago and became so ill with food poisoning that we could barely move for 2 days. We sat on the wooden benches outside the bathroom (also the same as before) between gastrointestinal attacks while we sent our two boys off to explore the rest of the museum. So our sole memories of the Henry Ford Museum from that visit are the bathrooms, the benches, and the wonderful, excited tales our children were telling us about all the great things they found in the museum. Well, this time we avoided eating any Vienna sausages and finally got to see for ourselves most of the exhibits in the museum. It was worth the wait, but I still don’t expect I will ever be able to eat Vienna sausages again—at least I haven’t been able to for the last 20 years!

We started off looking at the museum’s amazing collection of vehicles. The story line of vehicle development was illustrated with many fine examples from wagons to bicycles, motorcycles, and automobiles. There are so many quaint, curious, and just plain beautiful machines on display with documentation that it took me hours to get thru this section. The bicycles fascinated me because everything is so plainly visible and understandable that you can clearly see the lines of technological development. The high-wheeled “ordinaries” gave way to the chain-driven “safety” bicycles and then to the more modern versions, sparking a revolution in women’s clothing—bloomers—along the way.

Altho it may seem trivial, please don’t underestimate the ultimate cultural influence of something as simple as a device that allowed a woman to provide herself with transportation. My mother was raised in the horse-and-buggy era and she pointed out that most women of that period were not strong enough to control the large farm horses. Therefore women depended on men to harness up teams and provide them with transportation. The bicycle allowed everyone including women independent transportation, and ultimately encouraged the development of roads, which in turn facilitated the development of the automobile. Certainly a case of unintended consequences linking developments over time as Burke documented in his “Connections” book and TV series.

The motorcycles intrigued me because I grew up driving motorcycles and even now have a couple sitting out in the shed waiting for me to have time to repair and drive them. The beautifully-restored examples of early major brands like Harley-Davidson and Indian were complemented by those like Thor that were manufactured for a time in my old home town of Aurora, altho that production stopped long before I lived there. The very earliest example, a German motorcycle from the 1880s, had horizontal cylinders arranged longitudinally in the frame. I had to look at that one for at least 5 minutes to figure it out and really believe what I was seeing because I have never seen another engine arranged like that either before or since.

I supposed I’m one of the few folks still around that has owned both a Harley-Davidson and an Indian motorcycle, but I have to admit they were both very poor examples of the brands! The Harley was only a 165 cubic centimeter 2-cycle and altho racy looking, woefully under-powered. It also didn’t have any rear suspension and Monika complained bitterly about going over railroad tracks when we were first dating—she was kind of thrown in the air if I went over the tracks too fast and had to grab on (me) for dear life. The Indian was a version built in England that had a Lucas electrical system on it, and they don’t call Lucas “The Prince of Darkness” for nothing. The electrical system never worked correctly and various nuts and bolts were always vibrating off the motorcycle itself, which was disconcerting, annoying, and occasionally dangerous. Since these pieces were a Whitworth thread (neither American nor Metric, but something the British had just for themselves), it was almost impossible to get replacements. Ah, the good old days. I suppose it is just as well the machines were so under-powered and unreliable as to depress my driving—with more driving my chances of dying would have no doubt been much higher and I came much too close—way, way too close—as it was.

But far and away the stars of the show were the automobiles. Understandably enough, many examples were Fords but the museum was remarkably fair and even-handed in its treatment of all makes of automobiles from the early time to the present. That even-handedness carried over to other exhibits like Byrd’s Arctic aerial expedition where they covered the arguments for and against Byrd actually having achieved his goal. The history of the competing makes such as GM and Chysler were documented in the automotive section as well as the development of the labor union movement in the 1930s. The only point where I felt the museum’s objectivity failed was in the “safety car” exhibit where they listed the innovative safety features of the concept car but failed to discuss the industry blockage of safety features like seatbelts, airbags, and crashworthy bumpers on production models for many years. Those delays probably cost many thousands of American lives. I still remember how I had to install seatbelts on our 1960 Chevrolet myself after we both sailed upwards off the seat and hit our heads on the roof one time, but that’s another (embarrassing) story.

A separate little section had racing cars and sports cars, and oh they looked so sweet. How I itched to take them for a little spin (literally and figuratively) in the parking lot. Ford had an on-again, off-again relationship with racing, and I was surprised to read that the original Henry Ford had participated in a race and won it in 1903, which is how he made his name and obtained financing for his first production efforts. The Indy cars looked low and sleek, and the MG-TC just looked like a classic British sports car with all the pros and cons that are implied by that.

Yet another section was about traveling and camping with cars. Along with an early but pristinely-restored Airstream trailer I saw saw a 1960 Volkswagen Camper in all its glory. My brother still owns and drives one of these 1960s babies, so I was extremely interested to see what the museum restoration of one looked like. I also saw a travel trailer used by the Lindberghs in the 1940s to travel thru over 30 states, which at least made me feel in good company. Well, what with one thing and another, there went the morning and we were off for lunch in the Michigan Café, where we found a good variety of quite hearty meals for reasonable prices, a pleasant surprise.

After lunch we tackled the aviation section entitled “Heroes of the Sky”. Again, since I’ve been a Private Pilot for over 20 years I probably was more interested in these things than a more normal person, but epochal events like Lindbergh’s solo crossing of the Atlantic and Earhart’s doomed last flights surely still stir the souls of many folks. The 1903 Wright Flyer was, of course, given a place of honor in the center of the exhibit, as is only fitting. The Wrights scientifically tested every major aspect of an airplane and I mean everything: wings, propellers, control systems and last but not least, they built their own aircraft engine. Finally they put it all this together in the first working example of an airplane and taught themselves to fly something that is so hard to control that modern attempts to fly a reconstruction of the Flyer have been unsuccessful! Despite the fact that I do not like their attempt to patent their inventions and force all other manufacturers to pay royalties to them, I still say all honors to the Bishop’s Boys!

Nice examples of Bleriot’s channel-crossing aircraft plus Ford-built planes like the Ford Trimotor and the Flivver were present and documented well. Henry Ford gave up development of the Flivver when the test pilot, a good friend, crashed and killed himself in the prototype. The joys and thrills of barnstorming were presented with movies and exhibits, but the museum also covered the risks and dangers of early flight. The risks were, for example, graphically illustrated by the deaths of 31 out of the original 40 U.S. mail pilots—Lindbergh was indeed “lucky” just to have survived his stint carrying the mail.

I almost cannot credit the story that when Lindbergh bailed out of a mail-carrying flight as he was about to run out of fuel in fog and bad weather, he set the plane to circle around. The plane then circled around him as he descended in the fog in his parachute. After landing in the dark he then tracked down the wreckage of his airplane, retrieved the mailbags, and returned them to a post office for delivery.

Are you kidding me? Would you set the plane to circle in the same area where you “hit the silk”? I would have set that sucker to just keep right on going straight and get as far away as possible while I parachuted quietly down hopefully in some nice, soft field. And after landing I definitely would have been too busy kissing the nice, solid ground beneath my feet to even think of retrieving the mailbags from airplane wreckage that could burst into flame at any second. When you meet people like that, you just hope they are on our side, I guess, because you surely do not wish to fight them. In fact, I’ve read a claim that Lindbergh flew combat missions in the Pacific Theater under an assumed name and had several “kills” to his credit, but I can’t vouch for that and nothing about that was mentioned in this museum.

That all took several hours, of course, so we finished off the afternoon by ripping thru the Industrial Revolution exhibits (but there was a full-sized 1760 steam engine, for heaven’s sake) and taking a guided tour of Buckmeister Fuller’s Dymaxion house. Outside, this structure roughly looks like a fat, silvery flying saucer getting ready for take off. Inside, I found an absolutely fascinating and inventive use of a donut-shaped, stressed exoskeleton together with innovative interior furnishings to get a 2-bedroom house into a little over 1,000 square feet of living space. You really have to wonder if mass-production of these things would have changed the nation’s housing patterns in the post WWII era, or even now, for that matter. We ended up exiting past the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile, and I thought of Sam who drove one for a summer. But then it was home to our trailer for a simple supper and doing some serious work transferring pictures (well over 200 for the day) and writing the journal while Monika played the dulcimer.