Road to Power

Chapter 1 The Firebird: A Childhood Dream

Barbara Gesaman was having a devil of a time making her sculpture for art class at Crary Junior High in Waterford Township, Michigan. There were toothpicks and glue, and she couldn't get them to stick together, let alone stand up into a three-dimensional structure.

Then she looked across the room to discover whether her classmates were doing any better. She wanted to see in particular how one girl was doing, the one who always built the best projects and who was in the corps of assistants who helped the science teachers in their labs.

Sure enough, her structure was impressive. “It was some kind of Ferris wheel,” says Gesaman, who remained a friend through high school. “She had a great sense of spatial relationships. I think she was already an engineer.”

The girl was Mary Makela. The daughter of Ray Makela, a longtime worker at General Motors, and Eva Makela, née Pyykkonen, a bookkeeper, Mary excelled in school. “I liked math and science, and they encouraged me to pursue that,” says Mary, now Mary Barra. Her parents, both of Finnish ancestry, had grown up in the Great Depression. “They learned a lot and both had a lot of life struggles by growing up in that time,” she says.

Neither parent went to college. Eva Makela attended a two-year associates program to become a bookkeeper, while Ray followed the skilled-tradesman process to become a journeyman die maker. He worked for General Motors Corporation in nearby Pontiac, as did many of ...