My first car was a Vette.

It was a Chevette, but a Vette's a Vette, and who's telling this story anyway?

I plunked down two grand, pretty much all I had, on that used Chevy hatchback in the summer of 1978, just before I drove down to interview for my first newspaper job in that worn buckle on the Bible Belt called Danville, Va.

It wasn't much of a car. The voltage regulator had to be replaced in King of Prussia, Pa., and the car had no pickup even before I drove it into a flash flood in September 1979. It chugged along for another year or so until I sold it for $1,200 to a professor and his brother, a GM mechanic, neither of whom thought to ask the most pertinent question, "Has this car ever been underwater?"

That used Vette was the first, last and only car from a Big Three automaker that I've ever owned.

My next car was a used Datsun 200SX that I bought from a co-worker who couldn't keep up with the payments. He taught me to drive a stick one afternoon and we made the deal. I wended my silver Datsun through the Blue Ridge Mountains for eight years before flipping it over one sunny September vacation day in Maine, for reasons I can't explain beyond an evident inability to drive in states with one syllable.

I returned to Virginia and, days before moving to Pittsburgh, bought a 1989 Honda Accord. That was made in Ohio, not Osaka, and I felt good about keeping the jobs, if not the profits, in the USA. I kept it 12 years, until our second child was born. Then my wife and I traded in each of our cars to get a four-door with more space for car seats.

I didn't want a gas-guzzling SUV or minivan. I wanted an American-made station wagon like my old man drove, and I wanted standard shift. (A standard shift is perfect for the city because most car thieves can't drive one. Learning when to depress the clutch, shift the stick and ease your foot up takes several hours under the careful tutelage of an adult, an experience not generally found among thieves.)

In my search for that American-made, standard-shift wagon in the autumn of 2000, I discovered Chevrolet and Ford had essentially given up on this iconic car of the '50s and '60s. They were riding high with minivans and SUVs and didn't need my quirky, old-school choice. We wound up buying a Subaru made in Indiana.

That put my score after 30 years of car-buying at three American-made cars but only one from the Big Three, and that a used model.

I feel oddly guilty about this today. I can't say I regret my choices, but such mundane decisions multiplied by millions have many thousands of auto workers in Michigan and Ohio wondering how much longer they'll have jobs.

The Big Three -- General Motors, Ford and Chrysler -- could soon form a triflunka, a triple bankruptcy, a once-unthinkable proposition. As yet, however, the car companies have no place in the federal "stimulus plan ... to fix the salvage plan ... to prop up the rescue plan ... to save the bailout plan'' -- the apt phrasing of Rob Rogers' Tuesday editorial cartoon.

There's no realistic way for the Big Three to survive without lots of people losing their jobs. Auto workers are digesting that thought with their Thanksgiving dinner today.

I read that in 1921, when the Ford Motor Co. seemed to be in a bit of trouble, Henry Ford received dozens of letters from Ford owners all over the country offering to help him out, in amounts anywhere up to 100 bucks. But in a year when the government has taken on $7.4 trillion in direct and indirect obligations, backing all manner of shoddy financial paper, Congress has balked at a $25 billion loan to the auto industry.

Reluctance is understandable. President-elect Barack Obama carried Michigan and Ohio, but he rightly chided politically clueless auto execs for flying private jets into Washington without a viable business recovery plan.

Like most Americans, I have an inner Jimmy Stewart that tells me we can get out of any fix if we work together. But Detroit isn't Bedford Falls, and Mr. Obama may have to summon his inner Mr. Potter and oversee a kind of managed bankruptcy that forces a harsh reorganization on the auto companies.

That would mean layoffs but, perhaps, survival if Mr. Obama expends some of his enormous goodwill to urge supporters to buy Detroit's cars.

I'd be interested, but no time soon. The Chevy Volt, the plug-in hybrid designed for those who travel less than 40 miles a day, isn't due out until 2010. Our Subaru has only 60,000 miles on it and I remain a member of the ride-the-horse-'til-it-dies school of consumerism. With an economy stuck in reverse, that school has record enrollment.