Ford was just getting under way with his tri-motor aviation venture at that time. He had an airplane factory at Dearborn Airport. Selfridge Field is just outside of Detroit, so I moved into Detroit and applied for a job as pilot at Ford’s Dearborn Airport. I was told that the only way I could get on as pilot was first to get a job in the automobile plant, and that I would later be transferred to the airplane plant, and still later to the airline between Detroit and Chicago as pilot. After standing in long lines every morning for a week I finally got a job in the automobile factory. I was given a badge with a number and told to report to such and such a department the next morning.
Early on the morning I was to start work at the Ford factory I got on a street car and started for the plant. I had on work clothes and my badge. Long lines of workers sat on either side of me. Across the aisle another long line sat facing me. They sat with hunched shoulders and vacant faces, dinner pails on their laps, eyes staring lifelessly at nothing. The car lurched and jolted along, and their bodies lurched and jolted listlessly like corpses in it. A sense of unspeakable horror seized me. I had forgotten the rubber factories. Now I remembered them again, but I didn’t remember anything as horrible as this. These men impressed me as things, not men, horribly identical things, degraded, hopeless, lifeless units of some grotesque machines. I felt my identity and my self-respect oozing out of me. I couldn’t become part of that. I couldn’t. Not even for a short time. Not even long enough to get into the airplane factory and then to become pilot. Not even for that. I wouldn’t. Not for anything. Life was too short. Even cadet status in the army was better. I got off the car at the factory. I watched the men file into the factory. I shuddered across the street. I caught the next car back to town. It was like getting away from a prison I had almost been put into. I went out to Selfridge Field and enlisted as a cadet.
I began to think. What would I do when the six months was up? Go back to Akron, the factories, and school? I couldn’t stand the thought of the factories. A college degree wouldn’t be worth it. Besides, I would drop out of aviation. But how? Stay in aviation? Stay in the army? How? As an enlisted man? I didn’t like that thought. As an officer? It would be difficult to get a regular commission, and even so, where would I get in the army? Go outside and take my chances? The outside was a cold unfriendly place. I was afraid of it by then. Your percentage chance was small outside. The army was warm and secure. O. K. I’d try to get a commission.