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'Its borders are so many vast prairies,
and the freshness of the beautiful
waters keeps the banks always green.
. . . " So wrote Antoine de la Mothe
Cadillac in 1701 of the site of his new
settlement on the river between Lakes
Huron and Erie. He'd chosen a spot
where his cannon could shoot across
the strait, and the village was called
Ville d'Etroit.
"Here," said partner Chauncey Nor-gadgets,
to see what the other fellow
was making and to swap ideas. No one
seemed to think of money except as
something which was used for building
an automobile." But then, as Henry
Ford's dreams of turning the automobile
into a necessity materialized, auto
making became big and serious business,
symbolized as much as anything
by the shift of the auto magnates'
gathering place to the Detroit Athletic
Club, a bastion to this day of the city's
industrial standard bearers. Harold
Scott, partner-in-charge of H&S Detroit
Office from 1940 to 1963, was a director
of the DAC.
Over one fourth of the 9 million cars
those cars and trucks takes only 17 per
cent of the area's labor force. Even
excluding the automotive industry entirely,
Detroit has more other manufacturing
employment than such cities as
Cleveland, or St. Louis, or Newark.
Predictably, H&S Detroit is in the
thick of the auto business. With Gen-ton
one day last May while driving
northwest on Woodward, a mere three
miles from downtown Detroit and with
the city still all around, "is where I
camped out when I was a boy—in the
woods."
The city today has a million and a
half population, and two and a half
million more in the metropolitan area,
but the time when it mushroomed was
in the early 1920s as the nation's auto
production went from the first million-car
year in 1916 to over four million in
1923-
Up till then, autos has been sportsmen's
playthings, and the men who
made them gathered in the Pontchar-train
Saloon "to bring their own
and trucks built in the U.S. roll off
Detroit area assembly lines. The significance
of this, the Chamber of Commerce
is quick to say, is that while
Detroit is still the Motor City—headquarters
of all four largest passenger
car manufacturers are there—making
eral Motors as its largest client this is
bound to be. But, interestingly enough,
as photos on these pages show, the auto
business is a great deal more than
shiny new cars coming off the assembly
line. The industry depends on hundreds
of parts manufacturers whose
products funnel into car production at
appropriate stages.
Dow Chemical Company drives
home this point with billboard and
magazine ads that picture a futuristic
car, "the 1967 Dow," symbolic of all
the plastics and other chemically-derived
products that go into automobiles.
Dow's plant at Midland, Michigan,
120 miles north of Detroit, is
reputed to be the largest chemical
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