graynation: check out THIS 14th birthday

You can credit Mason Bell, a grandson of mine, just turned 14, as the inspiration for this new Sunday blog called graynation. He asked me, "Gpa, what was it like when you were 14?" That's the same kind of question most children eventually ask their elders.
Children/grandchildren become very curious about the world in which their parents/grandparents, the graynation, lived. They receive short, intensely interesting, verbal reminiscences, but nothing ever written down, nothing to keep, and read again, or actually shape into the annals of a civilization. So every Sunday morning, I, a resident of graynation, am going to write stories for Mason, and all my grandchildren and children, stories from a planet even I can hardly believe existed, and I was THERE.

Mason, your 14th birthday was July 24, a little over a week ago. I hope you had a great birthday. My 14th birthday was March 6, 1957, and my birthday celebration was different from yours. On my 14th birthday, I got my driver's license.

This was in Abilene, Texas, where I grew up. The driver's test office was on Butternut Street, around South 16th Street, which in those days was almost on the edge of town. My mother drove me to the office, I took the written test, and then the driving test, and I walked out licensed to drive my mother home. I was in the eighth grade. In Texas, in the early-to-mid-20th century, the legal driving age was set at 14, because so many farm and ranch families, and city families as well, after the Great Depression, put their children to work as soon as they could, and driving a vehicle was a regular part of work. My first job, in fact, in the summer of 1954, required a vehicle: a bicycle. I delivered blueprints for Abilene Blueprint Company.

I learned to drive in a 1951 Chevrolet just like this one. The hardest part was dealing with the clutch. Like most cars back then, the Chevy had a three-speed manual transmission (called a "three-speed stick"), with first, or "low," gear, second gear, and third, or "high," gear. Low gear was powerful, as it had to be to get the car under way. The shift lever was on the right side of the steering column: you pulled toward you and down to get into first, then up and away from you to get into second, and straight down for third. When shifting gears, you had to disengage the transmission from the drive train, and to do this you pushed in the clutch pedal with your left foot. When you were in the gear you wanted, you let out the clutch, and power went to the rear wheels.

Low was so powerful because it turned a lot of times per second. If you knew how to "pop" the clutch and hit the gas just right, low was so powerful that it would make the rear wheels screech against the pavement; that was called "getting rubber." For beginners, the trick was to let the clutch out smoothly with your left foot as you pressed on the gas pedal with your right. That was called "engaging" the clutch. The pressure, as they say, was on. If you let the clutch out too slowly, the engine would scream. Let it out too fast, and the car would "buck." If it started to buck, you had to push the clutch back in and start over. There was no "play" in that clutch at all. As soon as you started to let it out, you were in peril of starting a buck.

And that, of course, was mortifying. Other drivers laughed at me, including (you would have to be a boy reared in West Texas to truly appreciate this) a couple of high school girls one day at the corner of South 7th and Elmwood. But my desire to drive was far greater than my fear of mortification, so I bucked that Chevrolet all over town, as my mother hung on. (Actually, teaching your kids to drive is one of the grandest experiences of parenthood, something you have to look forward to.)

By driver's test day, my 14th birthday, I was good to go. And, sure enough, in the summer of 1957 I got a job that required driving. I worked at Lucile's Flowers and delivered arrangements all over town in a 1957 Chevy panel truck, pale green with a three-speed stick. By then, I was so good with the clutch that I could get rubber in all three gears. That's why, Mason, looking at you and the great, responsible, 14-year-old that you are, that I am so thankful you have to wait until 18.

Kids of mine, your personal graynation connection welcomes more questions.