Early Driving Experiences
Tony proudly opened the envelope to show me the before and after pictures of his newly restored 1947 Ford Ferguson tractor. Viewing it brought back memories. Memories of a carefree time, romping about my uncle’s farm in Saginaw Minnesota during the summers of 1939,40 and 41. “I’ll bet you learned to drive on one of these” Tony chuckled. “Not on one like this,” I said. “I learned to drive on an old iron wheeled Case, with a single lever gear box, one gear forward, one for reverse and one speed---and verrrry, slow.”
Leaving that conversation, and much later in the day, my mind drifted back to some of my early driving experiences. I was a nine-year old Barney Oldfield, speeding around the farm on that old Case tractor at the break-neck speed of five miles and hour. By the time I was eleven, I knew I could drive anything that had four wheels and a motor, and I was ready to prove it. I got my chance shortly after my twelfth birthday.
While visiting my then-girlfriend and bragging about my driving prowess, I was unexpectedly given the opportunity to display my driving abilities. The young lady’s older brother, who was within earshot of our conversation asked, “You want to take a drive?” That’s all it took.
We quickly scampered downstairs and into the back alley where the 1932 Chevy soft-top coupe was parked. I jumped into the driver’s seat, barely able to see over the hood, while the girl’s brother slid into the co-pilot position. She wisely remained a safe distance away. After a few instructions from my co-pilot on which pedals were for the clutch, brake and gas, and where the shift positions were, he put the key in the ignition, started the engine, and gave the command to “put it in reverse” so we could back out of the yard. Thus commenced one of the shortest drives of my career.
Placing the gearshift into what I thought was reverse, and giving the gas pedal much too hard a push, the car leaped forward, slamming into the garage. “Step on the brake” my co-pilot screamed. To which I pushed the gas pedal even further, as the car began to spin it’s rear wheels, churning dust, throwing gravel and whipping from side to side as the car tried to push over the garage.
Fortunately for us all, my girlfriend’s brother, after recovering from the initial shock and turmoil, reached over and shut off the ignition. Equally fortunate, the garage sustained very little damage, other than some chipped corner boards and scratched paint. That was the end of our drive, and the beginning of semi-retirement for a deeply apologetic, embarrassed Barney wana-be.
My retirement lasted until my fourteenth birthday:
As a gift, a friend of my mother’s gave me his 1941 Plymouth, four-door sedan to use for a day. Neither my mom, or her friend, were aware of my previous rather calamitous experience. I assured them both that I had lots of training at Uncle Paul’s farm.
There was no better place to be on a hot summer day than Pike Lake, a distance of about ten miles from town, and one of the most popular recreation spots around Duluth at the time. My request to take the car with my friends to Pike Lake was given a positive response, and the plans were made.
So, after a few coaching lessons from mom’s friend, I was ready. On the Saturday we had chosen for my day with the car, five of my friends and I eagerly loaded up with towels, swimsuits, sandwiches, soft drinks and a great deal of excitement to head for the lake.
About a half-mile into the journey, the car began to pick up speed without any urging from me. As we accelerated, I took my foot off the gas pedal and the car began to pick up more speed. Quickly remembering my garage crashing experience, I turned off the ignition and pulled the car to the side of the road and parked. We all got out, I lifted the hood, and we peered at the maze of wires, tubes and various parts, not having a clue what we were looking for or what to do.
Getting to the lake was priority number one. When we got there, surely we would find someone to help us fix the car. At least that’s what we told ourselves. I developed a plan.
Everyone piled back into the car. I assigned my best friend to the co-pilot position, with these instructions: “I’m going to start the car, holding the clutch in, with the gearshift in second. Then I’ll let out the clutch, and quickly shift into third, pushing the clutch in again. Once I let out the clutch we’ll let the speed build up to sixty. Then you turn off the key, I’ll push in the clutch and we’ll coast as far as we can. When we slow down to twenty, you turn on the ignition, and I’ll let out the clutch. We will just keep doing that until we get to the lake.”
And that’s what we did, for the entire trip. One added annoyance was the loud backfiring caused by fuel buildup in the exhaust system as the key was turned off and on. Six kids headed for the lake, sounding like we were being shot from a canon every five or ten minutes, did turn a few heads.
We arrived safely at the lake after the very exausting time it took to cover the ten miles. I watched everyone go swimming while I looked for someone to help figure out what went wrong. After three tries from people nearby, nobody had a solution. So I did the only natural thing—I went swimming with my friends.
Now getting home was going to be a little more difficult. Duluth was long known as the “one-mile wide, thirty-two mile long city.” Nestled along the north shore of Lake Superior, the entire one-mile wide city was also a very steep hill, which among other things, was home to one of the only operating mid-city incline railways in the nation. The other two, being “Angeles Flight” in Los Angeles, and a similar system in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, used by pedestrians to conquer the steep grades.
One other interesting fact was in the back of my mind. My mother’s father, a grandfather I never met, lost his life on the very hill we had to descend, when his truck brakes failed and he plummeted out of control all the way to the bottom before crashing into a bridge abutment. His cargo slid over the cab top, crushing him. That accident orphaned my mother and her eleven siblings. I didn’t tell my friends this bit of history.
Actually, the trip back was uneventful, other than the annoying backfiring. We were getting quite proficient with our makeshift driving system. Quite surprising, our trip down the hill wasn’t as scary as I had thought either. When we reached the summit of the down hill decent, I put the car in low gear, turned off the motor, working the clutch in and out, coasting, then using the gears to slow the car, then coasting, until we reached the bottom. My home was only a few blocks from where we exited, and we arrived without a mishap.
Explaining our day to my mom and her friend was actually more traumatic than our driving experience. “You What?” She shouted. Turning to her friend, she admonished him for “giving us a car that could have killed us” while he was still trying to absorb what we told him and how we got to the lake and back.
Imagine our shock when he lifted the hood, and after examining things for a few minutes, reached down to the gas pedal linkage, slipped it into a hole in the lever on the carburetor, then started the car. We stood there in a state of amazement, listening to the engine purr like a kitten, remembering the anxious moments of the motor racing faster and faster, pushing the car beyond the speed limit as we struggled to keep it under control. Mom never trusted her friend after that. She was convinced he knew the problem, and didn’t really want us to be able to take the car for a day. Whether mom was right or not, we had our day at the lake and her friend’s car took us there and back.
There’s more:
I spent the summer and winter of 1945 running around town with two of my cousins, Erwin and Bobby, in Erwin’s 1928 Model A Ford sedan. Erwin was three years older than me, and Bobby was a year younger. To call Erwin’s vehicle a car was a stretch. It did have four wheels, a motor, and enough working parts to make it move, but that’s about where it stopped. The windshield was cracked, all of the side windows were missing, the floorboards were rusted through in several spots, and the doors had to be wired to the posts to keep them from flying open.
We all took turns driving the thing, and because it belonged to Erwin, we were very proud of it, no matter how it looked. Erwin, Bobby and I were highly insulted one night, when we were stopped for having a missing taillight by a patrolman, and told to “get this trash heap off the street.” As far as we were concerned, the trash heap was our Rolls Royce, no matter what anyone said. Not many kids had their own car in those days. Not in Duluth anyway.
For heat in the dead of winter, there was a “manifold heater” which was nothing more than a hole in the manifold that opened directly into the front of the driver’s area with a swing flap. Closed, no heat. Open, the searing heat would fry your shoes if too close. But in this windowless bucket of bolts, no heat reached the back seat area, where I was assigned a space. During the summer months, this posed no problem. But I spent many cold winter nights huddled in the corner of the rear seat trying to stay warm with snow blowing into the open spaces, never melting, actually drifting into piles on the seat and floor boards. Somehow this was fun.
Wartime gas rationing didn’t curtail our cruising either, even though Erwin’s dad had him on a strict allotment of gas rationing stamps. When we were running low on stamps, we purchased “white gas” which was not rationed because it was used for heating stoves and cooking stoves, and we added it to oil to make our own “gas”. This worked fairly well, but the oil-gas regularly fouled the spark plugs, requiring us to stop and clean them frequently.
I only remember one incident while driving Erwin’s “Rolls”. It was an evening in the dead of winter. Snow covered all the roads, most of it hard packed and slightly icy in spots. All of Duluth’s North-South streets were steep, running down to Lake Superior and the Bay. Most of them had parallel curb parking, but some had perpendicular spaces. I pulled into one of the parallel spaces and stopped. Then we sat helplessly as the car began sliding sideways on the ice, coming to rest directly on the car below, which began to slide onto the car below it. This was not good.
Our solution was to walk home and let the owners of the downhill cars work out the details. When we returned the next day, one of the fenders was missing, but the car was operable. So we drove home. Erwin later found a replacement for the missing fender, and the Rolls was as good as new.
And still more:
When I was sixteen, my mother and brother and I moved to Hawthorn California, where my mother’s brother and family had moved a couple of years earlier. Using money I had saved from working after school and during the summer, along with a little help from mom, I bought a 1931 Model A Coupe, with a Roadster back seat. I was in heaven, and mom was a nervous wreck, convinced I would end up a statistic on a “too fast California road” before my seventeenth birthday. By a fluky incident, she was almost right.
That Model A was my most proud possession. It took me, my cousin Dennis, and friends everywhere. We explored the beaches, mountains and deserts of my newfound California home, with an independent spirit I had never known. Until one evening, after dropping my girlfriend off at her home. To tell this story, I have to set the scene.
Hawthorne Boulevard was a divided main street for the town, separated by a median, which contained the tracks for the old redline rail system, used to travel into far away Los Angeles and Hollywood. The center of town was marked by a cul-de-sac containing the movie theater in its center, the police station to the right of the theater, and a candy and ice cream store to the left. There was a separation in the boulevard median to allow traffic to enter and leave the cul-de-sac from both north and south-bound boulevard lanes.
A popular, but now outlawed accessory for cars of the day, was a steering wheel knob, dubbed “necking knob”. This item was place on the steering wheel in a location to allow the driver to turn the wheel with one hand, while also giving great muscular leverage for turning wheels, which in those days had no power assist. I, of course, had a necking knob.
Well, on this particular evening, I was traveling north on Hawthorne Boulevard, nearing the cul-de-sac entrance at a leisurely pace, when a huge old Packard touring car loaded with what seemed like a family of twenty people, decided to go to the movie. The driver made a sudden left turn directly into my path. Continuing straight, I would have hit them broadside. Instinctively, I grabbed the necking knob, whirling the wheel as hard and fast as I could. The other driver, startled, and oblivious to my presence, continued on his path without braking. Responding to the quickness and severity of the turn, my little Ford coupe rose up on two wheels.
At just the right moment, and in just the right place, the Packard clipped the left rear bumper of my coupe, flipping it onto its top. My Ford, with me crunched in a ball on the inside roof slid across the roadway coming to an unceremonious stop right in front of the police station. Dazed and shaken, but not harmed, I extricated myself from the car with a bystander’s assistance.
A small crowd gathered, while the concerned and puzzled police station desk sergeant began to write an accident report. His first, and probably a national first, for any desk sergeant writing up an accident report where a car slid upside down up to the front door of the police station . With the help of several male onlookers, we righted the car, which I was sure was destroyed forever.
They just don’t build them like they used to. After righting the old Ford, I inspected the damage. A slightly scratched top. Both fenders had paint scrapes on the edges. The driver’s side window was broken. But of course, I was sure the car wouldn’t run. Encouraged, and urged by bystanders to get in and start it up, I did. And it did! However, the desk sergeant wouldn’t allow me to drive off without my mother’s permission.
Again, the explaining was worse than the happening. Mom was more convinced than ever that I wouldn’t live to my seventeenth birthday in the “fast moving California environment”. She vowed to leave and return to the Midwest. We did move a few months later, when school was out. But not to Duluth. We moved to Detroit Michigan, where mom had three sisters. She felt it would be a safer environment for me and my brother Jim. I wasn’t happy about leaving California and planned to return.
After spending the summer in Detroit, working as a hod-carrier, I quit school on the day of enrollment for my senior year and returned to California. Arriving back in Hawthorne a few weeks before my seventeenth birthday with a hundred and fifty dollars in my pocket, my new life was in front of me. I was ready for the next driving challenge.
©2002 Bill Effinger