Learning to Drive in the 60's

Some time ago I posted about rental cars I have known. That may seem an illogical place to begin writing about the place of the automobile in my life but anyone who has been reading my blog will see that there is not much order there. Perhaps that is a statement about my life.

In any case, I thought this time I would write about the vehicles on which I learned to drive before getting my own first vehicle.

When I was a boy, we did not even own a car for most of my childhood. I was going on 13 before we got our first vehicle, and it was not even a sedan. It was a baby blue 1953 Ford delivery wagon which was given to my father by the mission-minded Fred Hamm, owner of the Plymouth-Chrysler dealership in Morden, Manitoba, at the time. I do not believe I ever got behind the wheel of that car other than perhaps to sit there. it had a bench seat in front, where I got to sit most of the time as I was the oldest and so had the longest legs by that time. Back of that was simply a raised platform on which we put blankets and cushions for the children to sit on. There would have been 3 or 4 of us on that at any one time. There were no windows on the sides behind the front doors either, so it certainly was not a vehicle for touring. 

However, the next year, 1960, my father made an even trade across to a blue 1953 Plymouth sedan. This was so we would have a better touring vehicle to go on our first all-family trip to British Columbia to visit our relatives there, particularly our grandparents on the Brandt side. Now, the main reason we did not have a vehicle in those days was because we did not live in a community that had access to roads and highways. However, this began to change in the late 1950's. So it was, that on one occasion when father and I had taken what was our means of transportation, our outboard powered yawl, as we called them, across the lake to where we had built a garage for our car, father decided it was time for me to try driving. I was 15. It was a standard. We backed it out of the garage and drove it up the two-mile driveway to the highway and back. This was all crushed limestone roadway, not smooth dust-free pavement. I may have tried driving that car a couple of other times but it was not until the following year when we got a 1957 Plymouth Savoy Sudan, typical 1950's two-tone gray with blue-white roof and lower side panels, that I really began to drive. It was a V-8 with one of those nifty push-button automatic transmissions Chrysler products sported in those days. Of course, the automatic made it much easier to drive. It also had a radio, which made it even more appealing in those early days of pop music. As Chuck Berry sang for our generation: “Cruisin' and playin' the radio, with no particular place to go.”

So it was, that I would often ask my father for the keys when they were visiting relatives, particularly at my grandparents, in southern Manitoba. He obviously trusted me as I generally got them.  This was perhaps all the more remarkable because I only had a learner's license, but the stipulation then was to keep off the highways, which made it much less likely for me to be stopped by any roving officers of the peace. So, I would gather up so me of my older siblings and cousins and off we would go, with cool me showing off my improving driving skills with that roaring V8, windows down, radio blaring, as we cruised around the gravel and dirt grid roads of the countryside. It beat being stuck in the living room visiting with the grandparents, parents, and uncles and aunts. 

I should add that my basic driving skills were thus developed with the help of my father but also my grandfather, on mother's side, and those uncles. Over the years, as I joined them on various farm operations, they would let me drive the farm trucks, particularly during combine season. That was a good way to develop driving skills, as it entailed slow speeds and off-road driving. One particularly important technique was learning to drive at just the right speed to go under the augur of the hopper for the grain to fall into the box when the hopper was full and the grain needed to be transported to the granary without it falling either on the roof of the truck if you went too slow, or back onto the field behind the truck if you went too fast! Anybody who has grown up in a farm will know about that. I had forgotten about that until writing this (the powers of association that I as a psychiatrist should know about) and I have to laugh at remembering those hot sweaty, dusty harvesting days and my grandfather or red-faced uncle (and he would swear too) yelling at me about those errors before I got it right.

The next summer, between my grade 11 and grade 12 years, I spent the summer on the farm working for my grandfather. For most of my childhood years he had driven a blue-green 1950 Dodge sedan, a standard. He had by this time replaced this with a nice 1961 dark red Pontiac Laurentian sedan (this from a man who had clearly told me once while riding with him in his old red Dodge farm truck, that red was not a colour for a car), but had kept the old Dodge. I got to use it sometimes then in the same way that I had used my father's Plymouth. In those days we obviously didn't think about the environment and fossil fuels the way we do now. Going for evening or Sunday drives was a common form of relaxation.

We decided then too that I should really get my Drivers’ License. In fact, we deviously thought it would be easier to get it by being tested by old Constable Felde, Winkler’s policeman, than it would be by getting tested by some professional from the Motor Vehicle Branch in Winnipeg. Sure enough, I completed the test and had my license in no time. However, we had not counted on the fact that when I returned to Winnipeg at the end of the season and dutifully reported a change of address, that I would be required to be re-tested. I failed. However, after 2 lessons with the then-popular Joe Vine Driving School (Manitobans my age may remember their regular radio commercials) I had aced parallel parking and passed the test.

Then, in the late winter of 1962-63, my father returned to Fred Hamm's and came home with a brand-new 1963 Plymouth Savoy sedan. This vehicle had the then-popular slant 6 but still had the pushbutton automatic. It was a bottom-of-the-line model, but at least it had wheel covers and not just hub-caps, a chrome rain drip above the doors and a radio. And, it was bright red. We Mennonites were obviously getting less conservative in our color choices! The car my grandfather had before the Dodge was your classic black, the 1939 Chevrolet that took him through the war years.

My father could not afford, so he always maintained, the additional auto insurance charge to cover me driving on my own. I was not earning enough to pay for my portion of the insurance either. It was pretty steep in those days of private insurance. So, I continued to drive with him riding shotgun, whether to church, a family visit, or even a trip to the country. Otherwise, when it came to driving myself, I continued to be restricted to those country cruises with siblings and cousins. It was still fun. Although it would have been a lot more fun to be able to drive on my own. It really put a crimp into one's attempts to begin the dating game. It just was not cool to have your parents chaperone you, much less ask someone on a date by bus. At least that's how I felt, although that may have had as much to do with my own inferiority complex with which I struggled in those days as anything. I think the only time I got to drive a vehicle in the city on my own was the day my father married my step-mother. She had sold her car, a 1960s black Comet compact sedan, to my uncle's sister-in-law. We were going to stick with one family car. I guess they were busy that evening after the wedding and reception, so I got to drive my new mother's car from North Kildonan all the way down to the Osborne South area where she lived. I can't remember how I got home then though. Perhaps my father did follow after and take me home. This was in 1964 and it would be another 3 1/2 years before I got my own wheels and really started driving on my own.

2013-8-14

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