Friday, September 4, 2009

When Cars Were a Family Affair

Peter Bourque (front row) and family in Flint. (Photo courtesy of Jacques Bourque)

Flint Expatriate Peter Bourque, a retired high school teacher living in Tuscon, remembers his hometown in an article published in the Arizona Star. He writes:
At family gatherings, talk among the men, to my disinterest, was invariably about "the shop," "the line" and "tool-and-die makers," a trade which I never understood. One brother-in-law, Art, had gotten a college degree and was white-collar at Buick. Another, Stan, worked for Oldsmobile in Lansing. My brother Jacques chose Ford in Detroit for his lifelong employment, but no one seemed to hold that against him.
Read the entire story here.



2 comments:

  1. "Change" isn't always a good thing. A lot of changes in the past... Flint's past, or GM's, or mine, maybe even yours...weren't for the better.

    The past is unchangeable. We have some control over the future.

    Some people have trouble focusing on the future because the past seems so unfortunate to them. I understand their distress.

    My constitutional makeup, though, requires me not to commiserate with them. I'm forward focused. I think we all should be.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Despite its potential corniness, I've always liked the saying "Change is inevitable, but progress isn't."

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for commenting. I moderate comments, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You might enjoy my book about Flint called "Teardown: Memoir of a Vanishing City," a Michigan Notable Book for 2014 and a finalist for the 33rd Annual Northern California Book Award for Creative NonFiction. Filmmaker Michael Moore described Teardown as "a brilliant chronicle of the Mad Maxization of a once-great American city." More information about Teardown is available at www.teardownbook.com.