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Life begins... at 50?! by ROBERT E. LEE Editor, Telescope (Ed. Note: This article originally appeared in the January-February, 1975 Telescope, celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the HENRY FORD II and the BENSON FORD. When both vessels were launched in 1924, they were the "first" in many ways, which is what Mr. Henry Ford believed in. In 1923, the Short Cut Canal was opened in the Rouge River to allow larger ships to carry coal, limestone and ore to his Rouge Plant. Many older boat watchers will remember the sound of the ships engines as they passed by on the rivers. The unique rhythm of the engines working caused many people to say "making money, making money" as the ships passed. As the cargo demands changed on the lakes, Ford Motor Company was forced to change with the times and withdrew the BENSON FORD from service at the end of the 1981 season. Her forward cabins were cut off and transferred to South Bass Island in Lake Erie. The Henry Ford II would spend her final years carrying salt from Cleveland and was laid-up after the 1988 season. In the spring of 1989, Rouge Steel announced the sale of their two self-unloaders to Interlake Steamship. The Henry Ford II was towed to the Frog Pond in Toledo and was later towed to Ramey's Bend near the Welland Canal to be cut up for scrap.) On October 31, 1973, at the end of her 49th year of profitable service for the company that had her built, a ship entered the Lorain, Ohio yard of the American Ship Building Co. August 8, 1974. This dowager lady left the yard as a seIf-unloader. She had spent her 50th birthday, March 1st, in the yard where she was built, undergoing this major alteration, along with other work that involved installation of new service generators, a new built-up propeller, and strengthening of her bow in anticipation of winter service, at a total cost of about six million dollars. None of this is particularly unusual, and yet there is an element of difference present when some of the past events in the career of the particular ship involved are considered. She was the first ship on the lakes to be launched "electrically", the first to be equipped with the type of engine she was given, perhaps the only Great Lakes ship ever to be equipped with an elevator to ease her owner's ascent from the dock to the main deck, the first non self-unloading ship on the lakes to be given a bow-thruster, and, at the time she was built, easily the most luxurious ore freighter to come down the ways. The ship is Ford Motor Company's HENRY FORD II. The American people had become used to looking for the unusual in any project undertaken by the senior Mr. Ford. When he announced that the Ford Motor Company would have two ships built for its steel production operation at the Rouge, it was more than a routine announcement to the shipping industry. The contracts were given, to Great Lakes Engineering Works for construction of the BENSON FORD, and American Ship Building Company for the H-II, as she come to be known. They were practically sister-ships, up to a point. Both were 62-feet wide; the HENRY measured in three-tenths of a foot shorter than the