Actor to bring Henry Ford to life at Naper Settlement

A visit to the Chicago stockyards inspired Henry Ford's idea for the automobile assembly line.

The famed founder of the Ford Motor Company wasn't the first inventor to turn out cars, but he was the first to mass produce them and put them within the economic reach of the common man.

Actor Terry Lynch will portray this complex innovator as part of Naper Settlement's History Speaks Lecture Series at 7 p.m. Sunday in the settlement's Century Memorial Chapel, 523 S. Webster St., Naperville.

Museum educator Cindy Lackore said the settlement planned the program on Ford to mark the 100th edition of the Chicago Auto Show, which runs Feb. 8-17 at McCormick Place.

"We always try to throw someone different in there," she said.

Lynch, who has played other characters at Naper Settlement, including Father Christmas, said he developed the program on Ford three years ago for a school near Detroit.

"He was a controversial man," he said. "But he was also representative of part of our society at the time."

Ford revolutionized the auto industry. Before him, automobiles were seen as a product only the well-off could purchase.

"He wanted a car more people could buy," Lynch said.

Accordingly, Ford streamlined the production process and, in 1914, took the highly-publicized step of paying his workers more than double the prevailing industry wages.

Ford explained that his motive wasn't altruism; he wanted the workers to be purchasers of the products they made.

Famously reported as saying customers could have any color car they wanted as long as it was black, Ford's company produced the Model T with little change from 1908 to 1927.

"He wanted it as simple as possible," Lynch said.

But Ford's stubbornness and initial resistance to change caused his company to lose ground as the auto industry evolved.

"It was his way or no way," Lynch said. "He was not known for bending."

Ford's unwillingness to compromise also got in the way of his political ambitions. He ran unsuccessfully for the Senate and chartered an ocean liner to take himself and a group of pacifists to Europe in 1915 in an attempt to end World War I.

"He wanted to be president at some point because he felt he could run the country better than it was being run," Lynch said.

Ford also displayed some of the more unattractive prejudices of his time, such as anti-Semitism. He was personally kind to workers, but fought unions. An admirer of Thomas Edison, he established schools that promoted hands-on education.

Like many innovative people, Ford was eccentric, Lynch said.

"Their eccentricities," he said, "benefited us all because they look at things from the outside.

If you go

What: History Speaks Lecture Series program on Henry Ford

When: 7 p.m. Sunday

Where: Century Memorial Chapel at Naper Settlement, 523 S. Webster St., Naperville

Cost: $6, $5 for students and Naperville Heritage Society sustaining members

Info:(630) 420-6010 or napersettlement.museum