Detroit and
Toledo had not begun to send forth their hundreds of thousands of motor
cars to shriek and scream the nights away on country roads. Willis was
still a mechanic in an Indiana town, and Ford still worked in a bicycle
repair shop in Detroit.
It was a summer night in the Ohio country and the moon shone. A country
doctor's horse went at a humdrum pace along the roads. Softly and at long
intervals men afoot stumbled along. A farm hand whose horse was lame walked
toward town. An umbrella mender, benighted on the roads, hurried toward the
lights of the distant town. In Bidwell, the place that had been on other
summer nights a sleepy town filled with gossiping berry pickers, things
were astir.
Change, and the thing men call growth, was in the air. Perhaps in its own
way revolution was in the air, the silent, the real revolution that grew
with the growth of the towns. In the stirring, bustling town of Bidwell
that quiet summer night something happened that startled men. Something
happened, and then in a few minutes it happened again. Heads wagged,
special editions of daily newspapers were printed, the great hive of men
was disturbed, under the invisible roof of the town that had so suddenly
become a city, the seeds of self-consciousness were planted in new soil, in
American soil.
Before all this began, however, something else happened. The first motor
car ran through the streets of Bidwell and out upon the moonlit roads.
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