I married into a General Motors family, and when I did, I took a special kind of vow: "What is good for General Motors is good for my family."
As I watch Congress consider whether to lend the struggling automaker and its cohorts a hand or let them fail, I say a silent prayer of thanks that the patriarch of our GM family is not alive to witness the cold and angry response of politicians and the public to his company's tough times.
"Dad got lucky," said Ken Mihoces, my husband's brother. "He was able to get a job with GM. Everything else in our life was because our dad worked for GM."
My father-in-law returned from World War II and got a job driving a bread delivery truck at night. But his fortunes, and those of his young family, changed when General Motors decided to build a parts plant in West Mifflin, Pa.
Rudy Mihoces got a job working for the construction company that built the Fisher Body Plant and, when it opened in 1950, he got a job inside the plant. During his 30-year career there, he rose to head of payroll, and he did it with only a few college courses.
His oldest son, my husband, Gary, remembers that the change in the family's fortunes was as substantial as it was symbolic: GM was putting food on the table.
"When sometime around payday, my mother made my favorite dinner - steak with french fries - I thought it came from General Motors," my husband remembers.
"When I got a new sport coat for my confirmation, I thought that came from General Motors. I felt the same about each new baseball glove or bicycle," he said. "I remember checking the price of GM stock in the paper when I was just a kid because I knew what a dividend check was."
"Gary" was a popular name in the late 1940s. There was Gary Cooper in the movies and Garry Moore on TV. But my husband was always proud that his initials were the same as General Motors.
"I told everybody I had monogrammed cars," he said. Whenever anyone praised him for his school work or athletics, he would say, "GM. Mark of Excellence." And when he was courting me, he once left a note: "Get that genuine GM feeling with genuine GM parts."
As a boy, my husband remembers a fierce loyalty to GM cars that continues today. "If our family car (a Chevy, Buick or Olds) stopped at a red light, and there was a Ford or a Dodge or - oh my god - a Volkswagen next to us, we'd make some crack about it," he said.
