Cars and Driving - by Mom

            I first took Drivers Ed in High School, at Academy Immaculate Conception when I was a 16-year-old Junior. It was a required part of the curriculum.  I don’t know if that was a State requirement in Indiana, or if that was just our school.  The Driver’s Ed teacher was a young coach from Ferdinand High School, the public high school in the town, whom the Sisters borrowed once a week to take us out driving. The classroom part was handled by the Health teacher, who also taught math and Phys Ed.  We saw all the horrifying films of smashed heads and bloody crushed bodies of teenagers as part of our training. Those films made some girls laugh, and some of us cried.

            Driving with the coach was a mixed experience.  My friend Sheila Washington actually dated him (secretly, of course) until the nuns found out.  But as for me, all he did was yell at me.  You have to know that southern Indiana around there is not flat—there are lots of twisty, well-wooded roads, with blind curves and what felt like mountains to me. 

            I had never driven anything, including a bicycle (not kidding) and I was terrified.  We got out on the country roads and I was going about 15 miles an hour, until I got to a really curvy part and I slowed way down.  I remembered the driving “theory” instructions to speed up a little coming out of a curve, so I would spurt on the speed, but then there was another curve, and so I slowed way down again.  Following the pavement seemed like an impossible task; I was so sure I would run off the road!  I’m sure it must have been a terrible ride for the girls in the back. Finally, Denny ( or whatever his name was—he couldn’t have been much  more than 5 years older than we were) yelled, “Just drive the car!” I was crying but this time, paralyzed by fear, and I yelled back, “You’re supposed to TEACH me to drive the car!”  He said, “Haven’t you ever driven before?”  I said no, and he softened up, and taught me how to manage the speed and the curves and the whole thing.  Not so bad after all….

            Nevertheless, I didn’t get my license until after I turned 18 because the insurance rates were much lower for an 18-yr. old High School Graduate.

            When I started driving on a regular basis, I think I drove my parents’ International Harvester Travelall. It’s a brand /  company that no longer makes passenger vehicles.  I think they were originally a tractor company that made cars for a while. The Travellall was the forerunner of today’s SUV.  It was bigger than a jeep and smaller than a suburban. 

You can see (other) pictures here : http://dayerses.com/international-harvester-travelall.html.

            I drove very little as a teenager.  I didn’t get my license until age 18, then I went off to college sans  vehicle. Living in St Louis as a “poor student”  I either walked or took a bus wherever I wanted to go.  I didn’t even have friends with cars until my Junior year.  In my senior year, I persuaded my parents to let me and Peter and some others take the Travelall to Dallas for our friend Sally Schwab’s marriage to her high school sweetheart Tony Tinkle. (Yes. Those are their real names.) I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I was allowed to keep it in St. Louis from August until I went home for Christmas break.  I broke it about 2 months into the semester, procrastinated fixing it until the last minute, then baked cookies for the mechanic-friend of the guy I was dating, who  fixed it enough so I could get home to Evansville.  Actually the sequence of those events now seems very flawed, but it was some combination of those real  moments.

            I returned the vehicle to my folks, and didn’t own another car until just before I married Kent in SLC. Shortly after I moved there, he insisted I buy a car. I was determined to take a bus to work from 3^rd East and 3^rd South to the U of U Medical Center where I worked.  That is, until I learned that the first bus didn’t run until 90 minutes after I needed to be on the job. So Kent bought me a used gray Rambler, which looked sort  of like this picture (but gray):
     

One morning in the early dark I backed it into a large dumpster behind my building, specifically, I backed the rear vent window into the protruding arm of the dumpster, smashing the window out , letting the cold air in… Brrrrr….. for the rest of the winter.

            My only real accident was on our honeymoon.  We had been married less than 48 hours, and we had driven from SLC to just outside of Battle Mountain, NV on our way to San Francisco.  Road trip! NOT! Near Battle Mountain, Kent got sleepy and pulled over and asked me to drive, which I was happy to do, although I had very little experience of long-distance driving.  The morning was clear and bright, the road was dry, and shortly after taking the wheel, I fell asleep, waking up as I drifted off the road, over-corrected at the median and rolled the car 1 ¾ times across our lanes and onto the shoulder.  You might think this was terrifying, and it would have been, if I had been awake to see it all.  The big problem was that I didn’t have a valid license at the time, having not driven much, I had not renewed in Missouri, and hadn’t gotten around to getting a Utah license. I don’t remember a ticket; since no one was hurt, maybe there wasn’t one.

            I remember thinking that Kent would be perfectly understandable to get the marriage annulled.  But he didn’t.  WE had the totaled car towed to Ely, where we got a little plane to Reno, and from there to San Francisco, where we enjoyed our honeymoon without recrimination or sorrow!  Thanks to Dad being very forgiving and loving.

Links:
Rambler:
www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=rambler+car&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&q=rambler+car+pictures&revid=1021405042&sa=X&ei=f_w6UOK6LuSViAK2v4D4DQ&ved=0CHgQ1QIoAA&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_qf.&fp=f4f342edee0689e5&biw=1115&bih=613