I don’t know if these happen today. For our family it was an integral part of what we did as a family. The Sunday drive only included my parents, my sister Mary and me. My sister and I never had the opportunity to miss the weekly Sunday drive. It was something that we were expected to go on… like it or not. Generally, I think, we liked it. I mean what was the alternative? There really wasn’t one. The one attraction to the Sunday drive was that eventually we would end up at the A&W and have a mug of Root Beer or something. Knowing that, made the event tolerable for me. At that time there were no seat belts. Mary and I were free to move around in the back seat. Cars then were pretty big and we had a lot of room to move around. We would drive through small towns in the surrounding areas near Wichita. I don’t remember stopping and getting out of the car, although we must have done that at some point. I do remember that my dad would drive through some really nice areas with big houses. My mother would always say when we were passing a really fancy house. “You know that is a big house but do you think they are really happy?” Her premise was that it was mutually exclusive that you could have money and be happy at the same time. We had no money but we were “Happy”. I think she believed that such was not the case for anyone with money. I don’t think that she was right. I used to joke with our kids when we might pass a large fancy house and pose the question… “Nice house, but do you think they are really happy?” The argument held no water and honestly I don’t think I believed it either. I mean you can be poor and happy and rich and happy. Right? Today it almost seems impossible to go on a Sunday drive with the family. The first problem would be getting everyone to be in the car for the ride. The next problem would be cell phones and we all know about that distraction. Another problem would be the cars with TV’s in them. The other thing is seat belts which preclude any movement. Also where do you go on a Sunday drive? No, those days are long gone. Which begs the question, “With all of this technology, can we truly be happy?” Of course we can. I mean we haven’t really changed that much. We still put our pants on one leg at a time and even though the final stop may not be A&W as long as food is involved I am on board. I doubt that I am successfully selling any of you on the idea of a Sunday drive. I just have to resign myself to the fact that it is unlikely to happen.
Jumper Cables
My dad was a “master mechanic”. He could repair any problem associated with an automobile: engine, transmission, ignition, brakes, the radiator, the battery, the alternator or generator… you name it and he could fix it. Unfortunately, at our house he was like the doctor whose kids are always sick. In our case our cars were always sick. In the first place we had old or used cars for the most part. Our vehicles were never reliable and most of the time it was uncertain when we would go out to start one of our cars that it would actually start. At least on the first try. It could be any number of things. Faulty ignition, dead or low battery, car not “tuned up”, did I say faulty ignition? Are you familiar with the term “popping the clutch”? In addition to popping the clutch, you could pump the gas and continue to try and get the engine to start. You could push the car with another vehicle. The other thing was the use of jumper cables. Don’t leave home without them. I don’t ever remember one of our cars not having a set of jumper cables in the trunk. If there was ever a staple for us it was those cables. We were all trained to use them. I was always nervous about clipping those clamps to the battery terminals of each vehicle involved. Also getting the sequence right… like when you hook up the cables. Make sure you never touch the positive to a negative and that they are grounded… ungrounded could be hazardous to your health but putting the cables on the proper terminals, ie… positive and negative in proper sequence is necessary to your success. The other thing that we had at our house was a battery charger. It was important to have a back up battery being charged at all times. You never knew when one of your other batteries would die or crap out so there needed to be one ready to take its place. I cannot believe that we were able to get where we needed to go as frequently as we did. I think it is a credit to the knowledge that you could not expect to just take your keys and go out to the car and expect that it would start. When it did, it was a rush, and a relief. When it didn’t it was pretty much expected and then you would immediately go into problem solving mode and reach for the jumper cables, or take the break off and turn the key on and roll backwards and “pop the clutch” and hope.
Look at where we are today. Most of the time you don’t even use a key. All the transmissions are automatics. You can’t pop the clutch in an automatic. You can still use jumper cables but that would be for AAA or some other towing company, not you. The world has changed quite a bit. Even my dad’s expertise would be lost to the technological automobiles today that can only be repaired electronically. Now they run a diagnostic test on your automobile. In the past my dad would be providing the “diagnosis” and the person getting the “bad news” would hang on every word. I cannot remember in my adult life after leaving home ever really using any of these remedies to get a car started. I may have, in a moment of weakness or desperation, but only on rare occasions would I revert back to any of those solutions that I used at home. I do, however, carry jumper cables to this day. It gives me a sense of security. There have been occasions when some unfortunate driver asks if I have jumper cables and I am extremely happy to help him or her out of a jam.
I want to move onto tires for just a bit. One of the things that my dad made sure of was that my sister and I knew how to change a tire. This knowledge served me well over the years. You never know when you will need to change a tire. Of course, in those days, a lot of our tires were “thread bare” using tire vernacular. I don’t know if you have had a tire that was in that condition but when you don’t have money you try to make do, which includes some tough decisions about the quality of your spare tire. I know that changing a tire and putting the “spare” on, didn’t insure that you would get where you needed to go. When you have a tire that is thread bare it is a scary proposition. When you made it home you would pull out the flat tire and go through the tires in our garage. My dad always had extra spare tires in our garage… seems crazy, but when you need a spare tire there is no substitute and for us it all seemed pretty normal. We didn’t realize that our cache of extra spare tires was unusual. Now the flat that you returned had to be repaired or tossed. Bottom line, that was a job for my dad. Kind of like packing a parachute. You hope that the guy packing the chute (repairing the tire) knows what he is doing. I am here to tell about it, so I guess dad knew what he was doing.
A Different Way To Exit A Vehicle
This story has to be told. I am not going to get into a rehash of all of the vehicles that we had over the years. Let’s just say it was quite a diverse mix. We never knew from one day to the next what dad would bring home. Sometimes it was a car that he took in trade for work that he did on someone’s car or simply the result of a trade of one of our cars for another car. We won’t go there, but we did at one point own a woody station wagon. The kind that you see that surfers have. Don’t elevate this particular one to anything you have seen on TV. This one was in pretty bad shape. Actually, it was even in worse shape than I thought. One day the family is in the “woody” and we are going to the store. My mother is in the passenger seat up front. We turn on Central Avenue only a block from our house. As we turned the corner, the door on the passenger side where my mom was sitting falls off. To be totally accurate it almost fell off, it was still attached by the bottom hinge. Not easy to do. It was a bit shocking to us but especially shocking to my mother. My dad stopped the car and without any hesitation, positioned the fallen door so that my mother could step on it and exit the vehicle. The car stayed there for a while and my Dad walked my mother home. He came back, unscrewed the bottom hinge and put the door in the back of the vehicle and drove it back home. I guess if we are keeping score. The woody started that day on the first try. Started after he returned, also on the first try. Did not get a flat tire and once home he reinstalled the door. Needless to say my mother refused to ride in that car again. Eventually, my dad got rid of the woody. No one missed that car. My sister Mary and I have laughed about that incident for many years. Something we will never forget and cherish forever. No one got hurt, and the quiet response by my dad, like this was something normal, sets this one apart as a truly special moment.
