PASSINGS

Floyd Apple, Worked for Henry Ford

Floyd Apple, 89, one of the last people to see Henry Ford alive. Apple came to work at Ford’s Dearborn estate outside Detroit in 1925. While delivering a load of topsoil for a contractor, he was asked by Ford’s powerhouse foreman if he knew anything about boilers. Apple fixed the troubled boiler and stayed for 25 years. Many evenings after dinner Ford would walk down a 300-foot tunnel that connected the mansion to the powerhouse. He then would accompany Apple on his rounds, checking gauges, boilers and generators. Apple was with Ford shortly before Ford’s death in 1947. In Detroit on Friday.