Henry Ford, my dad, and finding the raft.
I grew up in Dearborn, Michigan. Which has a complicated racial history, to be generous. Take a moment to explore its 40+ year segregationist mayor, Orville Hubbard. A whole different world from what Dearborn is known as today: a majority Middle Eastern/North African suburb of Detroit.
I really never spent much time there after turning 18 or so. Other than to visit my mother and father at the home I grew up in, watching as they aged and declined. My mother died in 1996 at age 73. My father made it to 90. The house I grew up in was also his family home. He spent 75 years there.
My parents lived a life. Growing up for me was this nice little existence with two loving parents who were just focused on stability and calm. Their own life stories were less so as they managed their childhoods through the Depression and war years. My mother's family were Polish immigrants who settled in working-class Detroit. My father's family moved up from Louisville, Kentucky, seeking better job opportunities.
But still. There were moments. Most come from my father, who was the kind of person who things just happened around. And one of the stories that keeps coming back, repeated and treasured by my now adult children, is his relationship with Dearborn's most famous resident, whose namesake company is still headquartered there.
Henry Ford was Elon Musk generations before Elon Musk was Elon Musk (some things apparently don't change much). A guy with immense wealth and fame who was deeply evil: anti-Semitic, violently anti-union, cozy with Nazis.
My father's stories start when he (my dad) was 5 or 6 years old in 1933 or 34. There was a dedication of a park in Dearborn - Ford Field - at which Henry spoke. My dad said he walked up to the podium and pulled on Henry's pant leg. Just...because.
But the more memorable story happened a few years later. A narrow section of the Rouge River - where Ford's famous Rouge Plant sat, further downstream - winds its way through Ford Field and toward Henry's Fairlane Estate. The Ford Field part of the Rouge was my father's playground. He and his crew of young friends hunted turtles and frogs. Ran about. Skated on it in the winter. Sometimes gathered something edible to take home for the family.
One of their adventures involved building a raft of thin branches harvested from the riverside. They hopped on the makeshift ship, navigated down the river toward Fairlane Estate, hellbent on invading the Ford compound.
Which they did.
Only to be turned back by Ford security staff who apparently assessed the threat as boys-being-boys and sent them back to the river.
According to my father, there were multiple attempts. I am not sure how many, or what led them to finally move on to some other adventure. I am sure it was a classic 10-year-old boy collective decision. Both to try again, and finally to move on. Wish I could have been there.
But the still story resonates today.
Here is this group of feral youngsters, the offspring of working-class parents in the Depression, deciding that the most important task they have is to raid the estate of a rich, powerful and flawed industrialist, in a makeshift craft. And they do it multiple times.
Makes me want to find a raft.
Rmhermen, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Jeff Merrell - Community Listening © 2026 by Jeff Merrell is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0
