“Take the money; that’s all right. Pay it back when you can. Your word’s good enough for me,” he said. He believed in Ford.
It was a demonstration of the practical value of friendship—a pure sentiment which had come unexpectedly to the rescue when all material means had failed.
Hard work, real ability, business sagacity, had been unable to give Ford the start which his friendship with the owner of the little lunch wagon had brought him. It was one of those experiences which helped to form Ford’s business philosophy, that philosophy which sounds so impractical and has proved so successful.
“Any man who considers everything from the standpoint of the most good to the most people will never want for anything,” he says. “No, I don’t mean mental influence, or psychic attraction, or anything like that. I mean plain common sense. That’s the attitude that makes friends—all kinds of friends, everywhere, some that you never even hear about—and friends bring all the rest.”
He took Coffee Jim’s money, gave up his job at the Edison plant, and went to work on the little racer.
“It seemed pretty good to be able to work all day on the car, as well as the evenings,” he says.
He took down the engine and entirely rebuilt it, substituting the best of material for the makeshifts he had been obliged to use. He spent long hours designing a racing body, figuring out problems of air-resistance and weight.
Eight months of careful thought and work went into that car. At last, in the early summer of 1902, it was finished. At 4 o’clock one morning, business being over at the lunch wagon, he and Coffee Jim took it out for a trial.
It ran like the wind. Down the quiet, vacant streets of Detroit, in the gray chill of early morning, they raced at a speed that made the houses on either side blur into a gray haze. Coffee Jim clung breathlessly to the mechanic’s seat, while Ford bent over the steering lever and gave her more power, and still more power.
“Holy Moses, she sure does run!” Coffee Jim gasped, when the car slowed down smoothly and stopped. “You’ll win that race sure as shooting.”