Page:Henry Ford's Own Story.djvu/173

 there was plenty of good stuff in him if he would take an interest in the work and do his best.

The next morning he came into the manager's office with his wife, so broken up he could hardly hold his voice steady. "That letter's the finest thing, outside of what my wife has done, that I've ever had happen to me," he said. "I want to stick here, I'll do the best I know how. I'll work my hands off. Show me how to do my work better."

A couple of months later he came into the office and took a small roll of bills out of his pocket.

"Say," he said, shifting from one foot to the other, and running his fingers around the brim of the hat in his hands, "I wonder if you'd tell me how to get into a bank and leave this? And what bank? I'm wise how to get in and take it out, but I ain't up to putting it in without some advice."

To-day that man is living in his own home which he is paying for on the installment plan, and he is one of the best workers in Detroit, a good, steady man.

His chance appearance resulted in Ford’s policy of employing convicts wherever his investigators come across them. Nearly a hundred ex-criminals, many of them on parole, are working in his shops to-day, and he considers them among his best men.

"No policy is any good if it cannot go into a