A couple of weeks ago, when we were indulging in an afternoon social celebration, one of my guests commented that he was thinking of buying a new car because the one he had been driving was about to top 250,000 miles and was showing a bit of wear. The rest of us expressed our awe, and bit by bit, we all talked about our cars.
Later that day, I pondered my own experience. And thanks to the fading memory of my age, I could not remember how many cars I have had.
I did remember learning to drive. When I was 15, my father taught me. He had a 1939 sedan that lasted through World War II, when there were no civilian cars being manufactured. That car was a Dodge sedan with a manual gear shift. He also had a pickup truck with a gear shift on the floor. All cars and trucks had manual shifts, and we had to learn to handle the gears. Unlike most modern cars, there were three pedals, the left one for engaging the gears, the middle one for the brakes, and the right one for the accelerator. Only the fit foot handled the brakes and accelerator.
In those days, our high school did not offer any driver education program. Some of my classmates, who lived on farms, had learned to drive their family tractors before they moved on to driving cars. After my father had given me some training and had allowed me to drive on highways, I was ready to take the test and get a driver’s license. The highway patrolman was a neighbor and friend. He let me drive his patrol car and signed my application without any serious challenges.
Unlike many others, I did not get my own car in high school or college. Shortly after the Army sent me to Chicago, I bought a used car. It was a Plymouth sedan, priced at $600. The mileage indicator showed 30,000 miles. That car lasted until I got married and my wife needed to drive to the school where she was teaching a fourth grade class. It stopped one winter morning when she put her foot on the floor and it broke through.
We bought a Studebaker and then, a few years later, a second one. Studebakers faded, and we switched to a Ford sedan. A few years after that, when I agreed to move from Chicago to Washington for the American College of Radiology, I negotiated to get a leased car. And I had to get a second car for my wife. The leased car was a large Ford and the smaller one a Chevrolet. Both of them had our first automatic transmissions.
Get Radiology Tree app to read full this article<
Get Radiology Tree app to read full this article<