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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 14