…in the birthplace of General Motors:
We remain the only GM dealership in the city limits of Flint. Isn’t it ironic that the birthplace of General Motors has only one dealership? The employees of the dealership for the most part felt confident that our performance and Mr. Applegate’s integrity and straight forward way of doing business would sustain the storm and survive the cut.
Some felt that our location would be a hindrance to our longevity….perhaps it worked in our favor…who really knows…it’s impossible to second guess or try to predict GM’s thinking. Remaining in business is not only a victory for Mr. Applegate and his employees but also a victory for Flint. I feel that is the untold story. How strange would it be for Flint not to have a GM dealership?
It would be surreal, like the empty field that I saw a couple weeks ago when I drove past where the old AC Spark Plug plant, near which I grew up, and where my father and brother worked for decades, used to be.
In the 80’s I was just a kid, and in the early parts of that same decade my family was rather prosperous (in lower middle class standards) while dad was a truck driver for “tucker freightways.”
I rode with mom in a car to drop my brother off at the airport as he was joining the airforce, and we drove pass where dad used to work only a few years before. It was a flat land, it was a field gone to weed, “that’s where dad used to work, it looked different back then” Back then was only 7 years before. It was when we would have a random gift giving, it was when we had “international doug day” (no kidding, my parents would give me gifts randomly and call it that) and international (doug’s brother day)
When dad worked at tucker, us kids were spoiled.
Then it went out of business, and to see that empty barren lot years later, I wanted to find the guy who owned it and spit on him.