Growing up in mid-century Little Rock, I always thought my smaller-town friends knew a whole lot more than I did about a lot of things, most visibly driving a car. Many of them did at least some driving as soon as they could reach the pedals and see over the wheel—no mean feat with standard transmissions. Maybe there was some sort of local option their parents knew about that my parents ignored. The best I could do was a learner’s permit until I was 16, and I had to earn that by taking lessons from several sources.
My mother tried briefly to get me started in her 1955 Plymouth (two shades of green) at the War Memorial Stadium parking lot. She thought I would never learn to operate both the accelerator and the brake with my right foot instead of braking with my left. She gave up fairly quickly after lots of jerking and jolting and turned me over to the Thompsons, who were used to such challenges. I am reminded of the experience pretty regularly when driver-ed cars creep down our street on Saturdays.
Waiting on wheels was especially stressful because my 16th birthday did not arrive until several months into my junior year, and I thought I must be the only 11th grader without a license. The day I did get my real license, I took the Plymouth for the afternoon but was anxious about a lack of pick up and speed. I finally noticed that I had put the gear lever (on the dashboard) in second. Not cool.
My father’s car was a red and white 1957 Desoto coupe (killer fins, serious machismo) whose gear shift consisted of a cluster of buttons on the dash. Strange, but it was nonetheless the datemobile of choice. It did not occur to me that he had chosen a car with a major spiff quotient less because of his own desires than those of two teenage sons until he attached a license plate from my high school to the front bumper.
My first few months of driving were unusually eventful. During the first week, I was driving carpool, and we went to lunch at Weber’s Root Beer across from UAMS. As I was traveling west on Markham, the car in front of me stopped suddenly. I braked and looked in the rearview mirror in time to see a new Rambler on a test drive. The customer had turned to speak to the salesman, who was, in fact, looking in horror at me and the Plymouth. I was certain that the rear-end collision was somehow my fault and that I would be grounded for life.
Some months later, I was driving a church group back from a mission of some sort to darkest Conway (pre-interstate) when the world was suddenly enveloped in fog. The only way to see was to use just the parking lights. I was elated to have made it safely to Park Hill for the first drop off when a helpful passenger unexpectedly wiped the cloudy windshield in front of my face. We did have a spare to replace the tire that was smashed against the curb.
Getting the license and using it are a rite of passage for teenage guys. My younger daughter had to wait several months for hers while she worked on sagging grades, but it inconvenienced her mother and me more than her, as I recall. It is just different for guys. A current print ad for an insurance group claims that an important part of the brain related to judgment does not mature until the mid-20s, which sounds right from my own experience. How else would you explain doing something as stupid as drag-racing on Reservoir Road (then gravel) and hoping no one was coming over one of those hills? I am more than glad to have that sort of foolishness a half-century behind me.
On the other hand, I have not had a vehicle since then that gave me the rolling high that Desoto did. It must have been those fins.