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17 · Thursday, February 25, 2010 OAKVILLE BEAVER · www.oakvillebeaver.com Those were the days when Ford moved in By Melanie Cummings SPECIAL TO THE BEAVER C C E R A M I C S · C A R P E T · O R I E N TA L R U G S · E R A M I C S · C A R P E T · O R I E N TA L R U G S · V I N Y L · H A R D W O O D Oh, how times have changed. When Ford Motor Company set up shop locally nearly 60 years ago, it's biggest challenge was not buying up the 400 acres of property from landowners such as the Hall family's farmstead, Canada Dehydration Co. and the Hamill estate near the lakeshore. Nor was it the task of extending a water pipe 2,600 feet out and 30 feet down into Lake Ontario; or overseeing the 1,600 people needed to build the $50 million, 32.5-acre building that would house the country's largest factory in 1951. Nor was it overcoming the animosity among the 7,000 residents of Trafalgar Township who feared a population explosion by a factory that would only provide seasonal employment. No, the biggest job the established automaker faced was finding enough people to hire -- an estimated 5,000 at the time -- to keep up with the post-war demand for vehicles. Such a retrospective is enough to make a recession-weary labour force long for days of prosperity. More than 125 current and past employees of Ford gathered at Halton Region Museum Sunday for Heritage Day to learn about Ford's history in Canada and to share their stories of the life at the Oakville plant. Upon hearing the news that Ford was hiring back in 1953, Gord Hazzard took a day off work from his job in the payroll office at Hamilton steel company Stelco to be among the 500 people who showed up daily at the temporary recruitment office set up on Reynolds Street. Hazzard's resume was plucked from among the 20,000 applications submitted in that monthlong hiring blitz. By July he was doing the "crazy" commute -- at least that's what many of his acquaintances called the 30-kilometre drive -- from Hamilton to Oakville. In those early days it was Hazzard's job to walk, or cycle, down the miles of the plant twice GRAHAM PAINE/ OAKVILLE BEAVER LOOKING BACK IN TIME: Hundreds turned out to the Halton Region Museum on Sunday, Heritage Day, for All Things Ford, a special presentation on the history of the Ford Assembly Plant in Oakville. Here, two longtime Ford employees look over a commemorative book on 100 years of Ford in Canada. George Macenko, left, worked at Ford from 1955 to 2001), while John Gayford was there from 1986 to 2008. Gayford recently returned from sailing from Oakville to Melbourne, Australia. He and four others sailed their 46-ft. sailboat , 117 days at sea, raising more than $22,000 for men's cancer research. a day recording the time cards of the 1,500 workers on the line. "I got paid 25 per cent more, met lots of good people there and the camaraderie was great," said Hazzard. Love blossomed for him, too. His future wife, Thelma, started working in the payroll department in May 1954 as a comptometer operator (adding machine). Hazzard's is one of many stories that Irene Saunders is asking her co-workers to put on paper for posterity's sake. She was a Ford employee between 1963 and 1991 and now produces the retiree's newsletter for Ford. Historical consultant for Ford Oakville, Sandy Notarianni, has already done her part by cataloguing thousands of photos (some by famous Canadian portrait photographer Yousuf Karsch), manuals and films found in a storage area in the Windsor engine plant. Among them were the original patents and charter of the Walkerville Wagon Company with Ford. Gordon McGregor inherited the wagon company and in hearing about Henry Ford's endeavours to build an affordable car, could see the future lay with cars, not wagons. McGregor applied for and got the okay from the Detroit-based Ford Motor Company to build the cars in Canada. Archivist Notarianni said that workers in the Windsor engine plant even found the original payroll books on the cover of which the Walkerville Wagon Company has simply been scratched out and Ford Canada scrawled over top. "Incidentally," said Notarianni, "the average wage on those early books was $15 to $20 per week." The inventor Henry Ford perfected the moving assembly line, making automotive production more efficient and cost effective, and as a result, managed to whittle down the $1,100 price tag for a hand-built car in 1904, down to $250 by 1950. Such affordability certainly made employee Gord Hazzard's "crazy commute" much easier on his pocketbook. 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