Technology, Innovation & Telecomm

Lately, I’ve been feeling the need to post some stories from my youth (if you ask my wife, she’d insist that I never left it).

Anyhow, I mentioned in an earlier post (”You just covered your eyes and went with it…”) that I helped my dad in his body shop behind our house when I was a kid. My sister and I grew up not knowing for sure just what car we’d be riding in next whenever the family went out, so it was fairly natural that I learned to handle a car at a pretty young age. I was about 8 or so when my dad taught me to drive a 1950 three speed, column-shift Chrysler. I was fairly tall and so reaching the pedals wasn’t too much of a stretch (groan if you must).

So, one Saturday afternoon my dad threw me the keys to one of the cars that he owned (a 1960’s vintage Mustang) and told me to move it out of the way of my mom’s side of the garage. I couldn’t have been more than about 9 or maybe 10 years old and I was in a hurry. I slapped the keys in the ignition and proceeded to turn ‘em. It was a standard-shift… Notice that I didn’t mention pushing in the clutch first?

The car not only lurched forward, but it actually somehow started. Don’t ask me how, but trust me it did (you’d have to guess that the neutral switch wasn’t functioning, huh?). The lurch led the front of the Mustang to end up just in front of my mom’s car…after first passing (not cleanly) through the garage door. Somehow I had the presence of mind to jam on the brake and kill the ignition in time to prevent actually hitting my mother’s Oldsmobile…barely. If the two cars were separated by 6 inches, it was a lot.

Of course, the garage door was smashed up pretty badly and my dad was more than just a little surprised, since he’d been standing there watching the whole thing. I did a Road Runner “scram-in-a-cloud-of-dust” act and ended up in the safety of the space beneath my bed. When my mother found me a bit later, she says that I was praying out loud that my dad wouldn’t be mad and punish me. Personally, I don’t remember that part but given my tender youth and quite possibly hysterical amnesia, I’ll go with what she says.

In the end, my mother was mad at my dad and my dad was mad at himself, but no one was mad at me. I guess they kinda figured that perhaps someone my age shouldn’t have been entrusted with quite that much responsibility. Not sure. Either way, I didn’t end up in trouble and my parents were cool.

When I finally came out of hiding and went out to survey the damage, I remember pretty clearly my father piecing the garage door back together like some kind of puzzle and also his bending the track back into some semblance of its original form. He was a body man after all…

Ultimately, he got it back together ok and I did a little less driving until I was a bit older. But that poor garage door not only wasn’t ever quite the same, it suffered further indignities later on. I’ll reserve that story for a future post.