Jeopardy! spotlights Ford engineer
Show honors car culture as Grosse Pointe North HS grad continues streak
Jim Moylan has proven that the tiniest things matter most.
So it comes as no surprise to see what unfolded this week on Jeopardy!
The category: “Everyday Arrows” (for $800)
The answer: “The Moylan arrow, named for the Ford engineer whose idea it was, is that little triangle on your dashboard that tells you this.”
The question (for the win): “What is, ‘Which side the gas tank is on’”
Jim Moylan is the guy who went from quiet draftsman to low-key product engineering design supervisor during a 34-year career at Ford. Notoriety didn’t happen until long after he retired, when social media and trivia hunters began shining a spotlight on that tiny arrow that now appears in just about every car on the road. He did an Every Little Thing podcast. And BBC radio named him Hero of the Day.
So many amazing experiences in the final years of his life.
On December 11, one week before his 81st birthday, Moylan died.
Obituaries appeared in Autoweek and Road & Track, citing his impact on car culture, triggered by the Product Convenience Improvement Proposal he wrote on April 17, 1986 — after being caught in the rain and getting soaked at the gas station because he pulled in on the wrong side of the pump.
Ford responded by getting that little arrow onto the dashboards of the 1989 model year Ford Thunderbird and Mercury Cougar.
A headline in The Wall Street Journal called him a “genius.”
“Society loves the founder who builds new companies, like Henry Ford,” Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Wall Street Journal. “I would argue that Jim Moylan is an equally compelling kind of disrupter: an engineer in a large company who insisted on making our lives better.”
Columnist Ben Cohen wrote, “Farley told me he thinks of Jim Moylan every time he looks at his gas gauge.”
‘He started crying.’
In January, Farley visited the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C.
“When I met Jim Farley, and explained that Jim Moylan was my dad, he started crying and I started crying,” Elizabeth Moylan Wilson, 52, of Takoma Park, Maryland, told me.
Wilson, who met her husband while they worked at The Henry Ford museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn, is deputy director of advancement at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
“My grandfather emigrated from Ottawa, Ontario, in the 1920s and worked at the Ford Rouge Plant his entire career, ending as a foreman,” Wilson said. “My dad was the youngest of six. When he graduated (Detroit Catholic Central), he was unsure in terms of career ambition and sense of purpose.”
It’s hard to believe that a kid who initially lacked career direction found a path that made him world famous, just because he got caught in the rain.
On Monday, April 13, friends and family and Ford employees from all over the country celebrated when Jeopardy! aired, honoring the legacy of a man interned at Riverside Cemetery in Plymouth during Easter weekend.
An unexpected, rapid exit
It was only after he pulled a muscle in his abdomen while playing tennis at age 80 in October that an X-ray revealed scarring on his lungs caused by pulmonary fibrosis. He wasn’t a smoker. He hadn’t worked around asbestos. It was a mystery.
But doctors told him to stay active. Family thought he would recover. After Thanksgiving, Jim Moylan found himself unable to finish a tennis match. He went to urgent care and landed in the ICU with blood clots and an irregular heart beat. Steroids weren’t working. Nothing worked.
On December 11, the doctors advised that the only option left would be to live on a ventilator. Jim Moylan said no.
“He was tired. He was done,” Wilson said, crying. “My mom, my brother, my sister and I sat with him at his bed inside Henry Ford Hospital. Dad was so brave. It was the most beautiful, heart-wrenching experience you could imagine. He looked at us all, grabbed my mom’s hand, and said, ‘What a legacy we have, Kath.’”
Kathy Moylan, 80, of Plymouth, is a retired elementary school teacher. Her children Andrew Moylan, 54, and Kara Moylan, 48, both of Plymouth, work on the automotive team for Escalent, a research supplier. They knew a man who led life with gratitude and generosity.
“On his last good night,” Wilson said, “he had saved his pasta and lemon meringue pie to eat with his only granddaughter. She had worked on a project about ecology of the Great Lakes and had done a presentation on loons. She walked dad through that, and it was a really lovely memory.”
He wrote one grandson a letter about when he started high school and things he wished he’d done differently or taken more seriously.
“My father told us he loved us all the time, that he was proud of us,” Wilson said. “There was no deathbed rush or regret. That’s how lucky we were.”
A meticulous planner, Moylan selected his pallbearers and music and even purchased a burial plot overlooking the softball field where he played for so many years with his lifelong friends. Every detail in his life mattered.
Making history as a cultural icon
While Jim Moylan is considered a legend now, Ford initially had to dig through files to find the memo that documented the connection between the man and his arrow. When discovered, Ford historian Ted Ryan alerted the executive team.
Ryan is headed to D.C. to meet with Wilson this summer. She sent new photos to the company archives, noting that Jim Moylan wore jeans only when working on Saturdays.
“Sometimes the best ideas are common sense ideas. How many people would pull up to a gas station and say, ‘Darn it. The gas tank is on the wrong side.’ And then do something about it? The purpose of design is to make your life easier,” Ryan said.
Ryan and his son watch Jeopardy! together every night.
“I totally wanted to take the test to go be on the show but then life got in the way,” Ryan said. “My old boss was the archivist at Coca-Cola. He was the question on Jeopardy! maybe 15 years ago. That’s a career aspiration of mine. I want to be the answer on Jeopardy! one day.”
The contestant who correctly responded to the “Everyday Arrows” question was Jamie Ding, the Grosse Pointe North High School graduate who won his 22nd straight Jeopardy! game on Monday, defeating two other Michigan contestants and pushing his total prize winnings past $627,000, according to WDIV-TV.
Watch Jeopardy! clip here.
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I love this. It’s funny that I sometimes talk to people today who never even pay attention to the little fuel tank indicator arrow! How cool to tell about the creator’s background and story. Thank you.
(Noted: pick something seemingly small - like the fuel gauge arrow - and write a story around it.)
So many fascinating facets to this story. Yes, Moylan has a big legacy.