"Hank the Deuce"

and Fulton Sheen

I have a subscriber to thank for pointing me in the direction of this story.

Henry Ford II (1917-1987), son of Edsel Ford and grandson of THE Henry Ford, 23, fresh out of Yale without graduating and a Methodist, converted to Catholicism.

The year was 1940 and “Hank the Deuce” as he was known in the motoring world was engaged to Anne McDonnell, 20, of Southampton, Long Island.

Anne was a graduate of the Convent of the Sacred Heart, founded in 1881, the oldest private girls’ school in the US, and still open today.

In America’s Bishop, the biography of Fulton Sheen by Thomas Reeves, we learn that Sheen, then 45 and host of the popular radio program “The Catholic Hour” (begun in 1930) was instrumental in Ford’s conversion and presided at their wedding. “My inspiration was certainly Anne McDonell,” Sheen told an interviewer, “But Henry was a religious man himself.”

When word got around that he was receiving instruction from Monsignor Sheen as preparation for reception into the Church, Ford began getting a lot of mail telling hm what a terrible thing he was doing, and his grandfather, THE Henry Ford, considered disinheriting the young man.

Ford was received into the Church on July 12, and the following day Monsignor Sheen presided at the marriage in the Church of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on Long Island.

According to Reeves, THE Henry Ford, 79, danced with the bride at the reception, so apparently, all was forgiven on the wedding day.

We wish to conclude that they lived happily ever after, but alas, the union persisted only 24 years, with the couple divorcing in 1964.

When Ford died of pneumonia in 1987 his remains were cremated following a funeral service in a Grosse Pointe, Michigan Episcopal church.