I was born in 1939 in Indianapolis, Indiana.  I turned driving age (16) in 1955—my first year in high school.

My mother and father had negotiated a deal with my grandmother for her 1949 green Plymouth.  As I recall, it had a gearshift sticking up from the floor.  Produced just a few years after the war, the car had no “bells or whistles”.  Its body design was that of a gigantic Volkswagen.  Streamlining and fins were not introduced until the 50’s.

Earning a driver’s license required a lot of work!  We had to master the minute details of the Indiana State Highway Manual.  For example.  How many feet behind a vehicle you should drive to be able to stop safely if the car in front of you should slam on its brakes at 30 miles per hour? etc.

We took drivers’ training class in high school and practiced driving with our teacher and our fellow classmates in the car.    (It was under these circumstances that one quickly realized how unnatural the practice of driving was for some of our classmates.  To this day, as I drive the beltway, I frequently wonder, “How many of the cars that surround me are being driven by people who really know what they are doing!”)

On the weekend, we took the wheel, under our parents’ supervision, in large vacant public parking lots trying to learn the vagaries of parallel parking.  (I know people that have been driving 50 years that still don’t quite understand the angles of this maneuver.)

We grilled classmates of ours who had taken the written test the previous year and particularly focused on the  “trick question at the end.”  The driving test was held on a closed outdoor course by a state highway instructor, sitting in the passenger seat, who would grade you at several points along the course.  With the end of the course on the right side of the road directly in front of you, he would gesture in that direction and say, “When you’re finished, just pull over there”. Many “unbriefed” drivers would fail to notice that there was one final stop sign directly opposite the instructor’s right shoulder.  The “unbriefed” kid didn’t have a chance.  Of course, he followed the instruction of the adult instructor who’d just given him an “order” accompanied by a gesture.  The problem was that the student had just run a stop sign and running a stop sign resulted in an immediate failure of the test!  He would have to wait another month to get his license.

I was a “briefed student” and my green ‘49 Plymouth followed my commands perfectly.  I stopped at the stop sign and passed the test.  I had earned my ticket to unrestricted freedom and a signal to the world that I had passed my first state sanctioned requirement on the path to adulthood!

My other ‘49 green Plymouth’s moment of glory came at a bird watching trip mandated by Mrs. Ruth Richards, my Biology teacher.  Mrs. Richards was an institution at Shortridge High School.  She may have taught during my dad’s days at the school!  A small flinty woman, she would have been well cast as the witch in the Wizard of Oz.

She scheduled two bird watching trips a year for her students at Lake Sullivan, a very large park in central Indianapolis that was a great gathering place for birds.    Needless to say, attendance was a command performance! 

The trip was a success as all students added several sightings to their bird notebook.  Mrs. Richards ended the event and we all returned to our cars.  All of a sudden, Mrs. Richards jumped from her vehicle and started yelling for us the get out of our cars. She had just seen a rare sighting and she wanted all of us to get credit for the sighting. 

I parked my car, moved to the rear of my car and pulled out my binoculars.  As I made the sighting, I heard a thump and a “whoosh” and a scream of one of my classmates, “Jerry, your car!”

I had parked parallel to the lake, neglected to engage my parking break and the wheels somehow moved to the left.  The sounds we all heard were that of my car running down the bank of the lake, just nipping the base of a large tree at the lake’s edge and going into the lake.

Fortunately, no one was injured.  The car just hit the tree a glancing blow and the car only went in the water about half a hubcap high—not high enough to get water in the cabin of the car. 

I called my dad and said, “Dad, you’re not going to believe this, my car is in Lake Sullivan!”

He kept his composure and called a tow truck that easily pulled the car back to the road and I drove it home with just a few scratches. 

Once again, my grandmother’s green ’49 Plymouth had served me well.  I loved that car and all it came to represent—unrestricted freedom, a rite of passage, and in the end—toughness!