Still, there was that extra dollar a week to be made somehow. As soon as he had finished supper the first night he hurried out to look for an evening job. It never occurred to him to work at anything other than machinery. He was a machine “fan,” just as some boys are baseball fans; he liked mechanical problems. A batting average never interested him, but “making things go”—there was real fun in that.
Machine shops were not open at night, but he recalled his experiments with the luckless family clock. He hunted up a jeweler and asked him for night work. Then he hunted up another, and another. None of them needed an assistant. When the jewelers’ shops closed that night he went back to his boarding-house.
He spent another day at work in the James Flower shops. He spent another night looking for work with a jeweler. The third day, late in the afternoon, his father found him. Knowing Henry’s interests, William Ford had begun his search by inquiring for the boy in Detroit’s machine shops.
He spoke to the foreman and took Henry outside. There was an argument. William Ford, backed by the force of parental authority, declared sternly that the place for Henry was in school. Henry, with two days’ experience in a real iron works, hotly declared that he’d never go back to school, not if he was licked for it.
“What’s the good of the old school, anyhow? I want to learn to make steam engines,” he said. In the end William Ford saw the futility of argument. He must have been an unusually reasonable father, for the time and place. It would have been a simple matter to lead Henry home by the ear and keep him there until he ran away again, and in 1878 most Michigan fathers in his situation would have done it.
“Well, you know where your home is any time you want to come back to it,” he said finally, and went back to the farm.
Henry was now definitely on his own resources. With urgent need for that extra dollar a week weighing more heavily on his mind every day, he spent his evenings searching for night work. Before the time arrived to pay his second week’s board he had found a jeweler who was willing to pay him two dollars a week for four hours’ work every night.
The arrangement left Henry with a dollar a week for spending money. This was embarrassing riches.
“I never did figure out how to spend the whole of that dollar,” he says. “I really had no use for it. My board and lodging were paid and the clothes I had were good enough for the shop. I never have known what to do with money after my expenses were paid—can’t squander it on myself without hurting myself, and nobody wants to do that. Money is the most useless thing in the world, anyhow.”
His life now settled into a routine eminently satisfactory to him—a routine that lasted for nine months. From seven in the morning to six at night in the machine shop, from seven to eleven in the evening at work with a microscope, repairing and assembling watches, then home to bed for a good six hours’ sleep, and back to work again.