Learning To Drive

Discussion in 'Automotive' started by Hal Pollner, Feb 11, 2020.

  1. Hal Pollner

    Hal Pollner Veteran Member
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    My Dad taught me to drive in 1950, when I was 14 years old.

    The car was our family 1938 Studebaker Commander Six, like the one shown.

    It had Overdrive and a Hill-Holder, which was the only car I recall that had this feature, and I owned 27 cars!

    Hal
    175.jpg
     
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    Last edited: Feb 11, 2020
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  2. Beth Gallagher

    Beth Gallagher Supreme Member
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    We lived on a farm so I learned to drive an old Dodge farm truck when I was 11 or 12. I didn't have a driver's license until I was 16, though.
     
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  3. Al Amoling

    Al Amoling Veteran Member
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    I learned to drive in this beauty. Got my license the day I turned 16 in 1954. Ours was monotone dark blue. My first car which I bought with my brother was the 46 Pontiac Maroon colored convertible which we bought in 1955. 950454c91770029aece2b2731fe0b6ce.jpg
    th.jpeg
     
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  4. Thomas Stearn

    Thomas Stearn Veteran Member
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    I learned to drive in this Russian "car" called Moskwitsch in 1983 being pronounced "fit to drive" after just 8 hours practice. Had never driven at night, nor on a highway, nor in a larger town with traffic lights. Would have been too expensive for the state which was running short of gas. They wanted to economize on gas and were not interested in more driving lessons.
    While driving to a larger city for the first time with my own car, I almost knocked a lady or two down at a junction with traffic lights... I was not used to it and had never practised that. But I had "helped" to save gas.

    Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-J1113-0302-002,_Berlin,_PKW_-Moskwitsch-_und_-Wolga-.jpg
    Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-J1113-0302-002 / Sturm, Horst / CC-BY-SA 3.0 [CC BY-SA 3.0 DE (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/de/deed.en)]
     
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  5. Von Jones

    Von Jones Supreme Member
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    I remember my mother's friend got me behind the wheel of his Renault in the 70s. When he was explaining to me what to do with the gears and pedals I thought all cars were made that way and didn't want to learned to drive. I changed my mind when my mother came home in a Plymouth Duster which was automatic.
     
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  6. Bill Boggs

    Bill Boggs Supreme Member
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    I learned to drive watching my dad drive an (old at the time) Model A Ford. Our first family car was a model T but shortly
    before the war dad traded for a Model A. I think it was a 1932, black, four door Sedan. In 1947 my mother’s cousin
    had a junkyard where he burned out wrecked cars and sold the metal. We lived across the street from his operation. I
    was working on a small farm four miles outside Wichita Falls, TX and had to walk back and forth every day. My dad told
    me our cousin had a car he might sell me pretty cheap. It was a 1929 buick four door sedan someone had cut off and
    made a pickup out of it. I bought it for twenty-five bucks. You cranked it to start it. The next morning I got in it and drove
    it to work. The farmer I worked for wanted me to use it to haul stuff around, (hay to feed his cows out in the field and
    sacks of chicken feed to be spread around a large yard and lot). I got five dollars a week more money using my pickup.
     
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  7. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    I learned to drive a tractor first, then a Moped, a Yamaha 80 and a Honda 90. My uncle had an old car that he let us drive in the field. Oddly enough, this was the uncle who I usually avoided because he always seemed to be in a bad mood, but he let my cousin and I drive it in the field. We even found a slope where if we hit it at the right angle, it would roll over, and we rolled it over repeatedly, which did no noticeable damage to either the car or to us, given that cars weren't made out of plastic and fiberglass then. I don't know what year, model, or make it was, but it was one of those with a rounded roof. My dad didn't let me drive a car on the road until I got my license at sixteen, although I had motorbikes.
     
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  8. Beth Gallagher

    Beth Gallagher Supreme Member
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    That sounds like the old Dodge farm truck I learned to drive. It had belonged to my grandpa and was just about worn out, so no one cared who drove it or what kind of "adventure" was had except it had to remain on the farmland...no driving on the public roads. It had the old stomp starter button on the floor. The tractor was used to haul it out of many a muddy mess.
     
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  9. Ed Wilson

    Ed Wilson Veteran Member
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    My father and I both had the venerable slant 6 Duster.
     
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  10. Yvonne Smith

    Yvonne Smith Senior Staff
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    I learned to drive in the big old 1-ton line truck that my dad used to drive. He was a lineman for the local REA , and back in those days, he could take his family along with him on “trouble calls” , which was when someone’s power went out on the weekend or overnight.
    In the summer, sometimes, I just spent the day, riding along with him, and often we were on little narrow dirt roads back up in the mountains somewhere, looking for a bad transformer, or trees across the power line.

    When we were out there , he would put the truck in 4x4, and compound low, and it would barely creep along, and then he let me sit on his lap and steer. As I got old enough to reach the pedals, then I learned to actually drive the truck and be able to shift gears, and not have to stay in 4-wheel low all of the time.
    It was a good learning experience for me, and knowing how to drive a stick shift, and when and how to gear up or down was a big help in my being a good driver.
    After I grew up and got married, we always had a pickup of some sort, and I had to haul horses or a truckload of hay, and it was a good thing that I had that experience with using gears when I learned to drive.

    This picture is after I was grown and married, and is me (With my oldest son) sitting on the line truck, and my mom standing beside it. You can see how large of a truck it was, and not the usual vehicle that most people might start learning how to drive with.
    13A8FB4E-9347-42BF-979B-3CCEE824CA15.jpeg
     
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  11. Thomas Stearn

    Thomas Stearn Veteran Member
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    Rolling over in a truck and not getting hurt? How's that possible without (having fastened) seat belts, I guess?
     
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  12. Thomas Stearn

    Thomas Stearn Veteran Member
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    Any reason why automatic has always been so popular in the US?

    Meanwhile they have been on the increase here as well but about 20 years ago they were virtually unknown.
    When my brother wanted to rent a car in Frisco the dealer took for granted that everybody is used to automatic. He gave instruction as to where the car was parked and how to drive it and then left my brother alone. My bother followed the instructions but couldn't move the car. So he had to go back to the dealer's office several times to ask him for more detailed instructions. It didn't work. After the third or fourth time the dealer accompanied my brother to the parked car and and said something like "Now show me." My brother did what he'd been told but the car didn't move. All of a sudden the dealer looked at my brother's feet and said: "You must press the brake before starting the engine." My brother replied that the dealer had never mentioned that. The dealer said that every child would know that you have to press the brake and that there was no need to mention that. My brother said that that would apply to cars with automatic only and that he'd never driven one. The dealer's last answer was like "Are there cars without automatic?"
     
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  13. Beth Gallagher

    Beth Gallagher Supreme Member
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    It's actually difficult to buy a new American car with a standard (manual) transmission anymore unless it's a stripped bottom-of-the-line model or conversely a high HP muscle car. I suppose because Americans are increasingly lazy. :) I learned to drive in a manual so all my driving life I could get into any vehicle and drive it. Of our 5 children, only one son can drive a standard.

    The last car we bought with a manual transmission was a new Mazda in 1988. When I was young I preferred a manual but nowadays on the crowded freeways around Houston I'd much rather have the automatic transmission because of heavy stop-and-go traffic. I'm sure the change to automatics is "customer-driven." :D
     
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  14. Thomas Stearn

    Thomas Stearn Veteran Member
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    Thanks for your input, Beth.
    If I ever had to buy another car, it would most likely be a hybrid with automatic or an electric car. I actually wish, though, I had an automatic right now for the reasons you mentioned.
    It probably was a cultural difference that led to the poor image automatics had in Europe. Yet it has been changing as I wrote. Old automatic gearshifts looked so ugly like an asparagus spear rather than a thrust lever of an airplane what they should look like. And a car with automatic was between 2,000 and 4,000 bucks dearer than a car with manual transmission which the vast majority didn't want to pay.
     
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  15. Ken Anderson

    Ken Anderson Senior Staff
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    It wasn't a truck. It was a car, and we weren't hitting anything other than fairly soft ground. No, as far as I am aware, no one used seat belts then on a regular basis but, since we were trying to roll it over, we did use the lap belts that were there; although the first time, we weren't, and we were just fine. On that same subject, I rolled my dad's station wagon over once, with about ten of us in the car, and no one was seriously injured, and I was in another car that rolled over to the point where it looked like no one could have survived the accident, yet neither of us was injured, and I was in the backseat of a car that his a tractor-trailer at an intersection and, while the driver and passenger in the front seat were killed, one of my knees hurt for a few days, but I was otherwise okay. No belts.
     
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