The Home Board

What did you learn in when you learn to drive make model and year?
I'll start with my first driving lesson in my dad's 1950 Ford half ton pick up.
My mother's De Soto that could be shifted like a three speed or just left and drive and driven like an automatic. If my memory serves me correct I think the back doors were suicide doors. I start driving at age 13. I took the free high school summer class for drivers education when I was 15 and got my driving permit. When I turn 16 I got my drivers license and was a legal driver. During the drivers educational class I took through the high school I pretty much spent the entire class in the backseat because the instructor already knew that I knew how to drive. At 16 and 17 I own my own cars. The first one being a 1952 Chevy and the second one being a 1952 Ford coupe with overdrive.

What was your drivers education like?

Was driving farm tractors since I was 9 or 10 years old. Started driving my Dad's 54 Chevy around 13 years old. I took drivers Ed in high school after I had my license just to get the insurance break that came with it.

Like you, I spent most of Drivers Ed in the backseat holding on tight while a couple girls were learning to not hit the trash cans along the street. One of them put us in somebody's front yard once when she forgot to straighten up after a turn. Bought my first car at 17, a 63 Buick Special.

Yep, a Farmall H at age 9 or 10. About then I started driving the pickup which was a new 1962 Chevy short bed. And since my mom had a bad leg and had trouble with a clutch, it was an automatic transmission.

Gene

I learned the gear positions on a “3 on a tree” stick shift when I was about four or five with my Mom driving our ‘54 Ford sedan— she’d clutch and I would shift. When I was 8 or 9, I could reach the pedals and started driving up and down our driveway, in our ’63 Dodge. All our vehicles had 3 speed sticks, except for the VW Bug which had 4 on the floor. I still drive a stick in the family car, didn’t buy my first automatic until we bought an RV about 15 years ago…because they didn’t make them in stick.

My very first experience was on a hand-clutch John Deere B, so engaging a clutch was learned early on.

I don't recall for sure, but I suspect my first experience with an automotive-style clutch was probably the neighbors 50-ish Ford pickup. "Neighbors" rented my grandparent's place across the road from us and he and Dad had some sort of "sharecropping" arrangement where he helped with the farming and ran some critters in with ours.

We used his pickup to go hand-cut green corn with a corn knife to feed to the cows. Used to be quite a contest between me and his kids as to who got to drive...