“I came to Detroit and obtained employment in a shoe factory. Soon after that my partner and myself started one of our own. He had a little less than a thousand dollars, and I had $460—left from my army pay.”
“That seemed a large sum, I suppose?”
“Yes, and I thought if I could ever get to making fifty pairs of shoes a day I would be perfectly happy.”
The number is amusingly small, when it is remembered that this factory, the embryo of which he spoke, grew up under the Governor’s personal supervision, until it is now one of the largest in the United States.
“But tell me, Governor, when you were starting out in life, did you ever look forward to the career you have carved out for yourself?”
“No,” said he, with the promptness that characterizes all of his speech; “I never had anything mapped out in my life. I did whatever there happened to be for me to do, and let the result take care of itself.”
“Is it the same with your political success, or is that the outgrowth of youthful ambition?”
HOW HE BECAME MAYOR OF DETROIT.
“No, I was pushed into that by accident. I had never been in the common council chamber before I was elected Mayor of Detroit. The thing that caught me was that my friends began to say I was afraid of the position, so, of course, I had to accept the nomination to prove that I wasn’t.”