A Rust Belt Kid Sticks with Chevy

Earlier this summer, I stopped at the local hardware store for some chain saw oil. As I got out of my 2023 Chevrolet Traverse, I heard something still running under the hood even though I had shut off the engine. It was the fan. The dashboard delivered the bad news: coolant at 240 degrees.

My dealer in Pittsburgh found the coolant a gallon short but could not find a leak. They suspected a bad radiator cap, replaced it and refilled the coolant. The next week I drove to Indianapolis and back without a hiccup.

A month later, while taking my daughter to Notre Dame, it happened again. The South Bend dealer, like mine, found only a thirsty cooling system. They refilled it, and I made it home. Back in Pittsburgh, my dealer took a closer look. They found a cracked cylinder head leaking coolant into the engine. The repair estimate: $10,000.

That was not in this year’s budget. I had put 104,000 miles on the Traverse, but they were mostly highway miles: Iowa in 2024 to help my friend Ron DeSantis in the presidential primary, and trip after trip on family and business matters to South Bend, Buffalo, New York City, Harrisburg and Washington. I stayed on top of oil changes and routine maintenance. The car should have gone further. Pouring $10,000 into a three-year old vehicle made little sense, especially considering what might break next. Better to put the money toward a new vehicle.

I talked it over with a friend who is one of those guys who would do anything for you. He also knows cars and has plenty of common sense. He grew up around his dad’s auto repair shop, and I once helped him put the transmission back in his pickup truck. He was pretty blunt about my options and suggested I consider a Toyota. And he reminded me of the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.

So I considered Toyota. For a minute.

I know the arguments. Foreign automakers build cars in American plants with American workers. Detroit puts engines and parts made overseas into cars assembled here. Foreign manufacturers score high in customer satisfaction surveys. And yet I still cannot bring myself to buy a car without an American manufacturer’s name on it.

Perhaps it is because the recession of the early 1980s left its mark on those of us who came of age in the Rust Belt. My friend was born in 1976; he was entering first grade in 1982 while I was already in college. At the time, unemployment topped 20 percent in Pennsylvania’s Beaver and Cambria Counties and the Mon Valley. In Buffalo, where I grew up, unemployment hovered around 13 percent. The 2008 financial crisis, by contrast, saw national unemployment peak at 10 percent and recede far faster than the misery in mill towns in the ’80s and ’90s.

For some of us, the romance of the industrial heartland is haunting. It finds you at Pittsburgh’s Kennywood Amusement Park, where you can look down at the Edgar Thomson Works, still making steel along the Monongahela River as it has since Andrew Carnegie’s day. It finds you in Gary, Indiana, where U.S. Steel still stretches along Lake Michigan. It finds you in the Cleveland flats along the Cuyahoga River, and heading south out of Buffalo over the Skyway, where the remnants of Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna plant, which once employed 20,000, still line Lake Erie like the bones of a giant.

You don’t argue your way out of these memories. You mourn them, and in small ways you honor them.

So it’s back to GM. This week I drove off the lot in another Chevy. How long the new-car smell – and the new car itself – will  last, I cannot say. But I am content that, in my own small way, I am still doing my part. A generation of us grew up with the old jingle that put Chevrolet in the same company as baseball, hot dogs and apple pie “in the good old U.S.A.” My friend may call it insanity. I call it loyalty.

*Congressman Keith Rothfus served 3 terms in the U.S. House. He is a Notre Dame Law School graduate living near Pittsburgh where he and his wife raised their family.