The Auto-Biography of a Ford

(A twentieth-century revision of "Black Beauty")

The first thing I can remember was being shoveled out of a great incubator, called a factory, along with several hundred brothers and sisters. All the men in that factory wore diamond shirt-studs.

While I was wondering at this, an old motor-truck named Mercury said to me with feeling:

"Ah, if all the workmen in the world could be as well off as the ones here, there would be no more poverty, and no people so poor as to have to ride in fords!"

I was loaded on a freight-car and carried many, many miles. The car jolted so terribly that I should have gone all to pieces had I not been built for jarring. None of the train-crew showed me any sympathy. They were wicked men, and used language that frequently sent a tinkle of shame to my mudguards. I did not then know, as I do now, that the purest-minded automobile has to endure all its life words and tones of the most shocking sort.

My first master was a careful and conscientious man. He had a large garage full of fords, and he always kept a sharp eye on the door to make sure that nobody who walked out carried off one of us.

One day a man came in with a twenty-dollar bill that he wanted changed.

"Sorry," said my master, "but all I have in my cash-drawer is $2.69. I'll have to give you the rest in fords."

Whereupon he handed him me and one of my brothers and three extra tires, which just made up the amount.

This new master, whose name was Mr. Pious, was very good and humane. He drove me with a gentle foot, and he would say to his children: "Be kind to Black Jitney. Never scratch him or bend him." The chubby little fellows grew so fond of me that before long they would trot sturdily beside me.

Their mother, however, was a cold, imperious woman. She cared nothing for the feelings of a ford. She would drive me at a heartless pace till my radiator was parched with thirst and my gears fairly cried out for oil. Speed was her one desire, and naturally I could not satisfy her. Even when I ran so fast that the effort made me shake from top to tires and I was in danger of losing my lamps, she would call me "ice-wagon" and "rattle-trap" and other cruel names, and refer unkindly to the fact that she could count the palings of the fences that we passed. Finally, this hard-hearted woman prevailed upon her husband to sell me and buy a big sixteen-cylinder Pope-Gregory. This car, as I afterward learned, was so vicious that the very first time she took it out for an airing it assaulted three helpless chickens and a pig.

My next master was a young man whose private life was such as no well-brought-up automobile could have approved of. Every evening, after he had kept me in the garage all day long fuming with impatience and spilled gasolene, he would make me carry him for hours and hours with some young woman who ought to have known better.

What sights and sounds I had to endure—I who had always kept the strictest decorum! Worst of all, his deplorable conduct began to affect me. I found myself thinking thoughts which I had never permitted to enter my mind before, and looking with more interest than I should at seductive, satin-trimmed limousines. My morality was in danger of skidding.

One evening while my master was dining with a young woman at a roadside inn I was left to wait in the adjoining garage. But I was not alone; for close beside me stood a little French landaulet, the most immorally alluring car I had ever seen. Her lines were exquisitely shapely; she was a goddess on wheels.

"Good evening," she sparked enticingly. "Aren't you the car that stood next to me at the country club last Thursday night?"

There was a daredevil gleam in her lamps which set my carbureter a-splutter.

"Yes," I answered, infatuated.

"I knew you, even though you tried to hide your name. Wasn't it lovely—just us two in the moonlight, touching tires!"

A quiver ran through me. I knew that unless I could back out in a hurry, I was lost. I tried hastily to reverse; she had me completely short-circuited.

Heaven knows what might have happened had not my master entered at that moment and saved me. The instant he laid hold of my crank I gave vent to my pent-up emotions in a way that nearly burst my muffler; and when he pressed down the pedal, I fairly leaped through the door in flight.

As it was, I was seething with nervousness. My motor throbbed so violently that I could hardly hold still while the young woman climbed into her seat.

Off we sped down a dark and narrow road. I had no control over myself, and neither did the people I was carrying seem to have control over me or over themselves.

All at once my left fore tire exploded violently, veering me aside into a mile-post. My master and the young woman landed in a clump of bushes, but I was maimed for life. Bad example and bad association had ruined me. Many an innocent, unsophisticated car is thus driven to destruction all because its owner fails to live up to his moral responsibility.

I lay there all the rest of the night, while my gasolene ebbed away drop by drop. In the morning some men came out from the city and dragged me in. They performed a most painful operation on me, amputating various shattered members and grafting on several feet of tin.

Then, before I was really convalescent, I was sold to a new master. This person was a harsh-speaking, unfeeling man, who cared for nothing but money. He drove up and down the streets all day, inviting people to get in and ride; and when they did get in, he forced each one of them to surrender a nickel.

He was very cruel to me. Instead of showing any consideration for my broken health, he would say openly, "Well, I'll get what use I can out of this one, and then buy another." Not once did he ever throw a blanket over my hood in cold weather or steady my slipping wheels with chains. He was so penurious that whenever he drove me through a crowded street, he would shut off my gasolene, and make me run on what I could breathe in from the exhausts of other cars.

Wretched indeed is the old age of an automobile. Bereft of the beauty it had when it was a new model, it declines into squalid neglect. No amount of painting and enameling can restore its youthful bloom.

One day this master was driving me through an amusement park when I broke down completely. He got out, and prodded me brutally in the magneto. I had not the strength to budge.

He grew very angry, and the people in the tonneau demanded their money back. A crowd of idlers gathered to witness my humiliation.

Becoming purple in the face, my master nearly twisted my crank off. He heaped upon me the most insulting and unjust imprecations, as though it were my fault that my health was gone, even making distressing insinuations as to my ancestry. Words failing him, he fell to belaboring me with a hammer and monkey-wrench.

The spectators looked on with indifference. Some of them even urged him maliciously to the attack.

"I'd sell the thing for fifty cents!" he exclaimed, with a shocking oath.

Suddenly an elderly, kindly-faced man pushed his way forward through the crowd. "I'll give you that for it," he said. "Only stop battering it!"

My master left off hitting me. He looked surlily at the speaker and then at the crowd.

"You can have it," he said between his teeth.

Hot tears of gratitude dropped from my cylinders as my deliverer pushed me to his nearby home. From that moment to this I have never known anything but happiness.

For my dear old master is a retired gas-fitter whose hobby is landscape gardening. Relieving me of my tired wheels, he has pastured me in the center of his front yard and planted me full of geraniums. I am lovingly taken care of. My kind master waters me regularly and curries me with a trowel. My working days are over. But what makes me happiest is the knowledge that I can never be sold.