Henry B. Joy of Detroit was determined to make it clear that her money was “pre-gasoline.” To emphasize the point, for fourty-four years, until her death in 1958 at the age of eighty-eight, she maintained—and drove herself—a 1914 brougham car that operated on electricity. The shiny little two-seater, which was unable to exceed a speed often miles an hour, was quite a sight around Grosse Pointe, where her neighbors (the Henry Fords, the Walter Chryslers, the John and Horace Dodges, the Ransom Oldses, and a great many brothers named Fisher) were all regarded by people like the Joys as “ex-bicycle salesmen who came in with internal combustion.” Mrs. Joy’s only concession to Detroit’s automotive aristocracy was to permit her vehicle to be displayed at the 1957 Automobile Show. “I am very respectful of the age of my little car,” she said at the time. “I have to treat it very carefully because it is very difficult to get parts.” Mrs. Joy was a Newberry, and the Newberrys are another old-line Detroit family that put down roots in the city early in the nineteenth century, long before automobiles were dreamed of and when, it seems, Detroit was a place quite unrecognizable in relation to what it is today.
