The hint which eventually led to the place Buchman was seeking came not from Henry Ford but from his wife. At the birthday party she had remarked that Buchman looked unwell and should take a rest. The heat was oppressive, and she spoke of the cool climate of Mackinac Island, in the Great Lakes where Lakes Huron and Michigan meet. Buchman had already heard that war restrictions had left the island empty, and went to make a brief reconnaissance. Mrs Ford established his bona fides with the proprietor of the Grand Hotel there, Stewart Woodfill, and when a member of the island's Park Commissiqn offered the use of an historic but dilapidated hotel, the Island House, for a dollar for a year, Buchman felt he had found his equivalent of Willow Run. The Island House was in a state of hardly describable filth - with two-year-old food still in the pots on the wood stove - but there was, he noticed, a barn behind the main building, where meetings could be held and plays performed.

An advance party was immediately despatched to make the Island House habitable. Hale was one of them. 'Frankly, the place was such a wreck I thought we were being overcharged,' he writes. 'When I woke up the first morning I found 79 bed-bug bites speckling my body. We scoured and scrubbed and bit by bit got the place de-bugged, de-stinked and de-grimed. But there was still much to do when the main force arrived from Detroit.'26 Nevertheless, the Island House opened as the first training centre for Moral Re-Armament on 9 July 1942.

Buchman and most of his team had meanwhile remained in the Detroit area, and this had irritated the 78-year-old Ford. He grumbled to Charles Lindbergh, who was assisting him in the setting up of Willow Run, that Buchman's force had overstayed their welcome and also that they had asked him to an evening party and kept him up much too long.27 Indeed Buchman and he seldom met after that. However, James Newton and Eleanor Forde, now married, were always welcome, and when Bill Jaeger's mother, Annie, contracted cancer and spent a year at the Henry Ford Hospital, Mrs. Ford, who was devoted to her, paid the bills.

Mackinac Island, situated near the border between the United States and Canada, a short plane flight from Chicago and Detroit but forbidden to all motor traffic, accustomed itself by degrees to receiving delegations first from the Mid-West industries and later from all over the world. Stewart Woodfill, whose Grand Hotel was a massive wooden structure of the last century looking like an ocean liner stranded on a green hill, had moved intimately among the industrial tycoons of the past forty years. He described later his first meeting with Buchman: 'I was curious about what was going on at the Island House. As he explained matters, I was impressed with his dedication to very big goals but my business mind could not grasp how such an organisation could successfully function without membership dues, without fixed income and seemingly without working capital. I invited Dr Buchman to be my guest in my hotel. It was the beginning of an amazing documentation of Moral Re-Armament, to which something was added every year I knew him.'28

307

Photo: Mackinac Island, Michigan, where a training centre was set up in 1941 in support of the national campaign evolved at Tahoe.
©Robert J Fleming/MRA Productions