How Did You Learn Driving

It was a different time for sure, back in the years when I was learning to drive and my Dad and others would take me out on dorsum roads where I could take a turn behind the wheel long before I was of legal driving historic period.

I suppose that kind of activity was as illegal then as information technology is at present, but it seemed much less so in those days. In fact, I'm relatively sure that if a law enforcement officer would have caught united states of america dorsum in those days, he would take given united states of america a simple warning and sent us on our way. I'm as well pretty certain that would not be the case today.

Just information technology was a much dissimilar time 45 or more years ago, with a lot less traffic, and so from time to time my dad would take me, and a time or two pretty much the whole family, out in the land to give u.s.a. a little driving feel.

At that place was only one requirement, at to the lowest degree in my case, and that was that I had to larn to drive a transmission shift vehicle before I could drive anything else. That ended up being a good thing, considering the first couple vehicles I endemic were manual shift cars — a '57 Volkswagon followed by a Chevrolet Vega. They were followed by a couple automatic shifts — another Chevy Vega and a Ford Pinto — then a slew of more transmission shifts, primarily various Hondas with a Ford Escort wagon tossed in the mix.

But my begetter was not the just culprit to let me drive well before I had a driver's license or learner'due south permit.

I had a couple female person cousins that let me and their brother do a picayune back road driving a couple times. Their family unit had some kind of old 1940s or 1950s vehicle that they collection around in neighbor's field some, but a couple times nosotros tested our skills on the road for a curt distance.

In all those years I only remember once when nosotros nearly had a little misadventure. On that occasion my Dad decided to allow my sister, four years my junior, try her hand behind the wheel. She was pretty young, and were in a large extended-cab van. Nosotros were on a dorsum road, heading for 90-degree curve, and the closer nosotros came to the bend, the more obvious it became that she was non going to turn in fourth dimension.

The memory of my male parent snatching the steering bike and guiding us around the curve merely in the nick of time is i that has stuck with me for decades.

I'm not certain how much back road driving nosotros did before we had permits after that episode, merely every bit soon as I had my allow, there was one more lesson my father fabricated sure to pass on. Probably like the first evening I had my let, he hopped in the '57 Volkswagen with me, then had me drive to the 2 steepest hills in boondocks to exam my skills with the clutch, brakes and gas pedal.

As many of you know, there are a couple places in Hillsboro where y'all have to come to a stop on a rather steep incline before standing on. I killed that poor machine more than a couple times that night, but before long I caught on and my father's lessons have served me well ever since.

As the years passed and I started having children of my ain, I worked with a guy who had a side gig every bit a driver's training teacher. He is no longer with us, but he ever said that if you didn't know how to drive before yous started driver'southward training, someone had washed you a disservice.

I never forgot those words, or my father'southward lessons. So when my kids became what I believed to be the proper age — and my married woman was not around — I'd bulldoze them out in the centre of nowhere, stop the machine, and tell them to go behind the bike. And that's how they learned to drive, just like the student driver instructor said they should.

I'g not sure that'due south the best way to teach a child today. Too much has inverse, and not for the improve. But I sure did appreciate my lessons, and I never will forget that look on my father'due south face up when he grabbed the wheel at the last 2d possible to keep my permitless sister from driving over a ditch and into somebody's yard — with him forth for the ride.

Jeff Gilliland is the editor of The Times-Gazette. He tin be reached at [email protected] or 937-402-2522.