Looking Out: Driver's ed is a trip, whether learner or teacher

Jim Whitehouse
Jim Whitehouse

The summer I was 15, I took driver’s training. Our little town of Morenci’s school couldn’t afford two cars, so the superintendent’s car doubled as the driver’s ed car.

The farm kids drove pickups to class — farm kids were allowed to drive before age 16 if they were on farm business. One of them told me that his dad would ask him to go to the hardware store in town and pick up a 10-penny nail. That made it farm business. He always forgot to pick up the nail.

The farm kids knew how to drive stick-shift vehicles. The town kids didn’t. Our driver’s ed/superintendent’s/cross country coach’s car had a three-speed manual transmission.

It also sported extra clutch and brake pedals on the passenger side so the instructor could help out a bit.

Being what the farm kids called those of us who lived in our town of 2,000 people a “city slicker,” learning how to drive with that manual transmission and no power steering was a challenge. Our first two classes were spent driving jerkily around the dusty school playground, clutching, shifting and grinding gears.

There were five students in every class, so with the instructor, all six of us were crammed into the old car. The person in the middle of the front seat had to lean to the right every time the driver shifted gears with the long lever on the steering column.

Sometimes that middle kid’s foot would slip and hit the extra clutch pedal in front of the instructor. The engine would race and the driver would be blamed.

Our town’s “main four corners” was only a “main three corners.” It was and is a “T” intersection, with a bank building guarding the endcap. There is a stoplight there. A three-way-stop sign would suffice.

My late mother, who lived virtually her whole long life in Morenci, swore the only reason it was there was so the driver’s ed students could learn about stoplights.

Even so, learning about a three-way stop was not sufficient, so our instructor scheduled two longer-than-normal sessions that summer. One was to go to the county seat to practice using a stoplight that actually controlled four corners and even had a left-turn arrow.

The other field trip took us out of state. That’s not saying much, because Morenci is Michigan’s southernmost town. The city limit is the state line.

The purpose of our Ohio journey was to learn how to drive on an expressway. The Ohio Turnpike. How the school could afford the tolls is a mystery to this day.

Years later, I was asked by a Swiss immigrant friend who spoke no English — and I spoke no German — to teach him how to drive. He was 29 and had never driven a car. I drove him to a gravel road, showed him how to shift the automatic transmission, and let him take over.

At 5 mph, he swerved violently from one side of the road to the other, back and forth, severely oversteering. I, who had grown up sitting on my dad’s lap steering his car on back roads, riding tricycles, bicycles and Radio Flyer wagons, never dreamed that I’d have to start a driving lesson by teaching someone how to steer.

My Swiss friend had grown up on top of an Alp. Every road either went straight up or straight down. The only things he had ever steered were sleds and skis. Alps are like that.

Our sledding hill in Morenci had a vertical drop of 12 feet, so it was hard for me to relate. Given the language barrier, I can also say that teaching someone to steer by miming is not an easy task.

Jim Whitehouse lives in Albion.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Jim Whitehouse: Driver's ed is a trip, whether learner or teacher