Dad didn’t trust automatic shift cars. Too many things to go wrong, he insisted. So even after taking driver’s ed one summer in Earlham, and even passing the written and driving tests (including parallel parking), I couldn’t drive either car at home. (The family car, or the last family car that was now Dad’s “pickup.”)
I’ve already written about learning to shift gears in the farm yard, so here’s what happened after I could finally drive the Chevy well enough:
Mom could stay home to get meals if I’d drive to Dexter (four miles up graveled Old Creamery Road) with no money to shop at Blohm’s (Dad’s relatives’ store, where we charged groceries) and get a quart of nails at the lumber yard (“Are you Bill’s girl or Warrren’s,” Gib asked. “They’re the only two who buy nails by the quart.” He added the nails to Warren’s bill.)
Dad rented acreages in two other counties (Dallas and Guthrie), in addition to our farm in Madison County. That meant government papers that needed to be signed and returned each the county seat. Sometimes I’d have to locate Dad in a field, flag him down for a signature, but then I’d happily head to Guthrie Center or Adel or Winterset to file the documents.
One time Dad needed parts for the combine, so he sent all the way to Grand Junction for them. The farthest I’d driven by myself.
Tire-changer
Being able to drive also freed up the folks from taking us sisters to choir practice in Dexter or band practice in Earlham. I drove Gloria and me and sometimes other neighborhood kids. I also became the family tire changer. Mom, Gloria, and I would find the car in the garage with a flat tire fairly often–country roads and farmsteads.
Mom would be wearing a dress and Gloria was much smaller. So, I learned to change tires. In those days, the jack was fairly straight forward to use (unlike the one we had for a VW bug), and the lug wrench handy. The hardest part was pulling off the hefty flat tire and fitting the spare, which was full-sized in 1960.
We’d take the flat tire with us in the trunk, drop it off at the local gas station for patching, and many times pick it up after shopping It usually had a nail in it.
I vowed I’d never marry a farmer
I never mastered driving a tractor, and the folks steered both of us sisters toward college. I’d already determined I’d marry a farmer after watching Mom, who was not a farm girl before marriage, sew up a baby piggie in the back room after the mother sow stepped on it.
Favorite Guy also grew up on a farm, but both farms (an hour apart) were both too small to make a go of it, and he’d decided he also didn’t want to farm.
But how handy it still is for the whole family when a farm kid is old enough for a driver’s license. I wonder just how difficult it is to change a flat tire these days.