ONE of Henry Ford's earliest friends and financial backers died in Detroit last month. He was John M. Colquhoun, a well known character whose lunch wagon stood near the City Hall for many years. When Henry Ford was an engineman with the Edison Company, thirty years ago, he was a nightly visitor to Colquhoun and it was his habit to draw on the wagon's serving counter pencil sketches of the automobile that he was planning.

Colquhoun helped to finance the actual building of the first Ford car and a few months ago Ford bought the old lunch wagon and gave it a place in his museum of vehicles at Dearborn.