My first car was a used Volkswagen Bug. I loved that little car. But. This was an anomaly in my family.
You see, we were a Chevrolet family for a long time. That’s all we had. Later, we branched off to cars from all divisions of General Motors. It was because my dad worked for Frigidaire, which was a division of GM. My dad was a design engineer. He figured out the best way for Frigidaire to construct and produce their refrigerators.
My dad had a lot of patents in his life. Something like 57, if I recall correctly. It made us proud of him. My inventor dad.
Anyway, that is why we drove those GM cars. We got a huge discount. So. My second car was a Chevy Chevette. This had nothing to do with the discount. This, too, was a used vehicle. But despite its age, I loved that little car because it got me where I was going.
Because of all this upbringing, we though a Chevrolet was the best car anyone could possible want or buy. There were no others.
So it saddened me in my adult life, when I found out that Arthur Chevrolet, an auto racer and member of the Chevrolet auto brand, died by suicide in Slidell, Louisiana. This happened long before I was even born. He died on April 16, 1946.
The Chevrolet brothers (Arthur and Louis) were born in Switzerland. Arthur’s birth year has been listed as 1884 and 1886. And. Louis Chevrolet was born in 1878.
By the early 1900s, Louis and Arthur, along with their younger brother Gaston, had left Europe and moved to America, where they became involved in auto racing.
By 1905, Louis Chevrolet was making quite a mark in the racing scene in the United States. So much so that Louis’s racing prowess eventually caught the attention of William C. Durant. Who is Durant? founded General Motors (GM) in 1908.
Because of this, Chevrolet began competing and designing cars for GM’s Buick racing team. In 1911, Chevrolet teamed up with William Durant to produce the first Chevrolet car.
The two men clashed about what type of car they wanted. Apparently, Durant argued for a low-cost vehicle to compete with Henry Ford’s Model T. However, Louis Chevrolet pushed for something more high-end.
In 1915, Chevrolet sold his interest in the company to Durant, and the following year, the Chevrolet Motor Company became part of General Motors. Throughout all of this, Arthur had played a lesser but supporting role in these automobile endeavors.
Throughout this time, Louis Chevrolet’s brothers continued racing and building cars. Despite Louis and Arthur’s talent for racing and design (in addition to building cars, they also designed aircraft engines), they had little gift for finance. They were often were pushed out of their endeavors before they could reap the rewards due to them.
By the 1930s, both men were broke, and their racing careers were over. Louis returned to Detroit to work in GM’s Chevrolet division. He died on June 6, 1941. His brother Arthur died by suicide five years later. He must have felt hopeless.
I always wonder what people are thinking when they commit suicide. It saddens me that so many people choose to end their lives this way. Because, in most cases, things will change. Everything changes in this world, one way or another.
About 50,000 people died by suicide each year in the United States.
Also, around 660,000 people visit the emergency room each year for self-harm injuries in the U.S.
If only, somehow, they could have seen things differently.
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“Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.” – Seneca
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“The end is where we start from.” – T.S. Eliot
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“Nothing in the universe can stop you from letting go and starting over.” – Guy Finley
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I drove a Chevy. And this is how it began.
