Another Memory!
When you pay for new cars, you would think that the buyer would also be a “DRIVER”, but not the case with my mother. She was paying for everything my father had to have!
So, before we moved my father was going to teach my mother how to drive. Living on Myron Avenue was at the foot of the hilliest terrain of a subdivision, and the absolute worst to learn how to drive! I do not believe there are any straight and level streets in that neighborhood. The only good thing, in the early 1940’s there just was neither traffic jam, nor many cars like today constantly in and out and on the roads causing all kinds of congestion. The area we lived in was mostly quiet, you might say really peaceful.
Would you take your three small children and put them in the back seat of the car, and remember in those days, there were no “safety seat-belts” and of course no individual child care seats? But in our case the kids were along for the ride and what a ride this was. I am the oldest and am supposing to be sure that not a “peep” comes out of the mouths of my brothers. This was a “first of first and the last” let me make this clear, right now! This was almost like one of the movies they make today to scare the “H” out of the audience, and we were truly scared!
My mother was told how and what to do and when, and trying to synchronize everything into getting the shifting of gears to synchronized in a way to get up a hill and everything came to a halt – right there. Nothing moving and we are not going anywhere? We just slowly rolled backwards, some till the car leveled out. Again and again, more attempts were made, only now with lots of screaming, and every -bodies’ nerves, shot!
“Put your foot to the floor, all the way!” “More gas and hurry UP!” and my mother is trying to obey the orders and trying to get the vehicle to go up a steep hill and it just is not going up any further. We are rolling back down and at a pretty fast clip, and we, three kids are screaming as we are looking out the rear window to see the car going backwards. If this situation took place today, we would have been in a major accident, and all out fault! When he car stopped we all got out, and my mother took us home. Where my father went no one knows, but my mother never did learn how to drive a car!
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