In the years before I met him at the University of Michigan in 1989, my friend Mike was probably the only professional Jewish foreign-car mechanic on Long Island. He was undoubtedly the school's only engineering grad student who could rewire a Fiat 128 blindfolded. We met in the car club, which wasn't a typical car club in that it wasn't a bunch of dudes standing around an open hood staring at an empty engine bay. It was a club in the business school for type-A sharpies who wanted to work in the auto industry (and for hangers-on like me earning useless liberal arts degrees). These people might have taken their blue-chip sheepskins to Wall Street or into the energy sector or one of the many thriving consumer-products companies that recruit at Michigan, but they wanted to stay in the Rust Belt making cars. They were exactly the kind of eager, energetic minds that, at the time, up-and-coming Silicon Valley was turning into millionaires while sclerotic Detroit was beating them down and driving them out in droves. Mike went to work at Saturn as a chassis engineer in the optimistic days during the brand's launch. The optimism ran out, though, and after a couple of years, he decamped for Silicon Valley. READ MORE ››
from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com
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