Dad's Life: One Sweet Ride, Thanks to GM

My father would be heartbroken: A GM dealer for four decades, he loved that company like a member of our family. It was easy to see why. From the time he got into the business, just before the war in 1941, until the time he got out, in 1981, the Chevys and Cadillacs he sold gave him a life he never dreamed of when he left his farm in the Northern Neck of Virginia and headed for Washington to make his way in the world.

If he were alive to see his beloved company in bankruptcy, I'm not altogether sure he wouldn't cry. And he would have a hard time believing that the American ingenuity that gave him such a wonderful life (what was good for General Motors was most definitely good for his family!) had been supplanted at GM by complacency, timidity and an inability to read the American car psyche it had once unmistakably nailed.

It wasn't that way when he started out. He had had the good fortune to work for the late Art Bowis, whose Chevy Chase Chevyland on Wisconsin Avenue became an institution in Washington. It was Art's influence that helped Dad get a Chevy dealership in Winchester, Va., about an hour and a half away in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And the good life just got better and better.

As prosperous suburbs sprung up after the war, superhighways unfurled across the country, tantalizing car makers to produce creatures of speed, power and romance. The vehicles got more exotic with every model until GM quit being an innovator and, ruefully, became a copycat -- and not even a good one at that.

In the meantime, my family had a new car every year (my favorite -- don't read this Ralph Nader -- a Corvair station wagon). And that was only one of the perks of living life in the halo of the Chevy mystique. Soon after the war, my dad built a big white house on a hill with the Blue Ridge as a smoky backdrop. Having learned to love boating as a Coast Guard patrol officer in the Chesapeake Bay during the war, he soon acquired a succession of boats that, over the years, we spent our summers on. Business was so good he could afford to leave the dealership in the hands of trusted deputies for weeks at a time, while we cruised the quaint ports of the Potomac and historic creeks of the bay, before pollution had entered the public consciousness or anyone had even heard of the Chincoteague ponies. (It was actually the horseflies that made a deeper impression.)

Looking back, it was an idyllic existence. During the three-hour ride to the marina in Colonial Beach, where we kept the boat, Dad would whistle his favorite tunes ("See the USA in your Chevrolet,' for instance; he adored Dinah Shore) while we kids competed to count corn fields on either side of country lanes where a traffic jam was four cars at a crossroads.

As we got older, the cars got sexier and that made us happy. When he graduated from high school in 1963, my older brother, John, got a midnight blue Corvette Stingray that was better than babies for attracting girls. He didn't want me to drive it, but I wanted to learn how to handle a stick-shift so I had to practice on my boyfriend's 1956 brown and white Chevy BelAir he called the Wahini Warrior. In the summer after I graduated from high school, Larry and I, and my brother and his girlfriend, drove down Route 17 together in our separate cars to Virginia Beach, carousing with each other on the road as the radio blasted out rock 'n' roll tunes that seemed to glorify the era of the almighty automobile.

After college, John got a red convertible Corvair Monza Spyder -- turbo charged -- with a white interior and an aluminum dashboard with a pressure gauge. For that era, it was super-fast _ easy to get to 100 mph, sometimes 110, which made it a stealth-mobile because its looks were so unsporty. It probably got no more than 20 miles per gallon, but then gas, John remembers, was 28 cents a gallon.

When I purchased my first car, after I graduated and went to work for The Associated Press in Des Moines, Iowa, I broke with our GM family and bought a 1968 Fiat 124 Sport Spyder. I remember being afraid to tell Dad, who I knew would be disappointed that I hadn't bought a Chevy from him. But even then, I'd become aware that the GM charisma was starting to dim, that American-made cars were beginning to be perceived as technologically inferior to the upstart Japanese brands coming to the fore. The world was changing, but GM wasn't. It made me sad, but as time went on, it became a fact of life.

When he was ready to retire, I think Dad knew that his magnanimous benefactor was being overtaken, though he was always loathe to admit it. He asked my younger brother, Lawrence, if he wanted to assume the business. But he also told him it was the toughest time he'd had in 40 years. Lawrence told me later, "I didn't want it to fail on my shift.'' Even then, we realized that GM seemed to be on a downward spiral. And that was nearly 30 years ago.

The tough times didn't keep Dad from buying GM stock; he was loyal to the end. It was only after he died five years ago that my siblings and I sold the stock and GMAC bonds that were in his portfolio, a move that would have traumatized our father.

Another event that would have shaken his faith: Chevy Chase Cars, now owned by Art Bowis' grandson, John, has dropped Chevrolets from its inventory and replaced them with Nissans. The dealership said its clients prefer imports (it began selling Acuras years ago), and as GM sought to cut its costs by reducing the number of its dealerships, Chevy Chase Cars had to minimize its exposure to risk. Art Bowis, I'm sure, would be heartbroken, too.