Lee High School - Huntsville Alabama Alumni

Typical Morris 850

Learning to Drive

by Barbara Teeter Kennamer

Butler High School

Class of ‘66

Growing into adolescence in the early 1960s and being part of what would later be dubbed the Baby Boomer generation provided some extraordinary opportunities and advantages. But, as with most generations, I suppose, we were misunderstood and feared by our parents. Our thought processes and radical ideas about what we wanted to do and what we thought we had a right to do was mystifying to our parent’s generation. They were the generation that went through the great depression and World War II. The generation of structure and guidelines, of definite ideas about how things should be done and how we as their children should think and act.

We on the other hand had different ideas about how things should be done or how we should think and act. In our minds, there were too many rules! Our parents thought boys should act a certain way and girls should act another. We on the other hand said phuuuuut to all these strict guidelines that were archaic and too stringent and tended to pigeon hole us. We wanted the freedom to decide for ourselves what we would do and become in the world. We were free spirits willing to spread our wings and find out what the world had for us. We certainly weren’t going to let a little thing like our parents telling us we couldn’t do something get in our way. We did it anyway, and worried about the consequences when and if we got caught. Of course the tricky part was not to get caught.

The situation that occurred the summer of 1961 was typical of me trying to spread my wings to find out what the world had waiting for me. I was not yet 15 years old and at that time in Alabama, the legal age to drive a car was 16, but you could get a permit to learn to drive when you were 15. A learner’s permit meant you could drive a car if a licensed driver (preferably an adult) was in the car with you. I wasn’t even old enough to get a learner's permit when I had my first driving lesson. But I did have a friend who was almost 16 and she drove whenever she got the chance. She had learned to drive from various sources (boyfriend and parents) and she did have a learner’s permit, so sometimes she drove the car with an adult riding with her and other times she drove after the adults went to bed. This latter condition afforded me the opportunity to learn to drive without the hassle of parental oversight, consent or those bothersome legal restrictions.

Early one morning, about 2 AM, I crawled out the window of my bedroom and met my friend Jan who had “borrowed” her parent’s car after they went to bed. This is the same friend who wasn’t yet 16 but could drive quite well, or at least I thought she could drive well. As was our habit during these escapades, we found a couple of guys to go along with us to keep us company. I didn’t know these guys, but they looked friendly enough and seemed agreeable to our suggestion to go for a drive at 2 AM, so off we went with boy and girl in the front seat and boy and girl in the back seat. Seemed reasonable to me. I shiver every time I think of this. What were we thinking? Of course we weren’t thinking we were just out for an adventure with too young and too naïve to imagine that anything bad could happen to us. We could have been in serious trouble if someone higher up wasn’t watching over our stupid selves. But times were different then, calmer and safer. Well, at least that’s what I thought at my ripe old age of 14.

That night we decided to take a drive up to Monte Sano because there were places on the side of the road where we could pull off the road and admire the beautiful lights of the city. On our way up the winding two-lane road, my friend asked if I wanted to learn how to drive. At only 14 years old, I had several months to go before I could legally obtain a learner’s permit, but who needs a learner’s permit? This sounded exciting and a little dangerous and well, I’ll do what I want to and worry about the consequences when and if I get caught.

As soon as I said I’d love to learn how to drive, the guys with us started protesting loudly. I couldn’t imagine what the big fuss was about. How hard could it be? I got behind the wheel and Jan was in the front passenger seat. Now I should explain that this was the first time I had even sat in the driver’s seat of a car, but I wasn’t about to admit that to anyone. I also should explain that this particular car was a Morris 850, which was a very tiny car with two seats in the front and a very small bench seat in the back. It could barely hold four people and unlike most of the cars today, it didn’t have power anything. It had manual steering, manual brakes and a manual transmission which meant I had to work a clutch, which meant I first had to figure out what a clutch was and then figure out where it was and how to use it. Both of the guys were in the back seat by now with me behind the wheel and Jan riding shotgun and giving directions, we were set for my first driving lesson.

Jan asked me if I knew how to steer a car and I lied and told her I did. I wasn’t going to look totally stupid in front of these guys that I had just met. What would they think of me? The plan was that I would steer the car and work the accelerator, brake and clutch. Jan would tell me when to push in the clutch and when to let it out and she would shift the gears. I said that sounded great and the guys in the back seat said they wanted to walk.

I pushed the clutch in and let off the brake and Jan said let out the clutch. Unfortunately what she didn’t explain was that when she said “let out the clutch”, she didn’t mean that I should pop my foot off the side of it, which is what I did. The car lurched forward and stalled. So I started it up again, I pushed in the clutch and she put the car in 1st gear again and I popped my foot off the clutch again, but this time even though we lurched forward again, I managed to keep it from stalling by pumping the gas peddle and we drove down the road a little ways. Again she said push in the clutch. I pushed in the clutch and she shifted the car into second gear. She said “let out the clutch” and I slid my foot off the side of the clutch and we lurched forward again and the car stalled again. This scenario went on for several minutes before someone figured out what I was doing wrong. Finally, after several comments from the guys in the back seat (who hadn’t gotten out of the car after all), I realized what I was doing wrong, and we continued down the road without too many more lurches. After I got the hang of easing off the clutch I was really quite pleased with my first driving lesson.

Again someone was surely watching over us that night because during all this lurching and stalling and restarting the car, there was absolutely no traffic on the road. Of course it was about 2:30 in the morning.

All was going well until we started down the back side of the mountain and I came to a part of the road that was a horse shoe bend. Not only was it a horse shoe bend, but it was on a steep down grade. I wasn’t about to try to traverse that part of the road when this was my first time behind the wheel. So my solution was to stop in the middle of the road and get out. Everyone got out of the car and changed places in the middle of the road in the middle of the night in the middle of a horse shoe curve in the middle of a road with no street lights. Did I mention that someone was looking out for us that night?

Jan drove us down the back side of the mountain and we continued on with our little adventure the way we started out, boy and girl in the front seat and boy and girl in the back seat. Someone, I don’t actually remember who but most likely it was one of the boys with us, suggested that we go up on top of Green Mountain which was much less populated. There was also an area on top that was a popular parking spot for local teenagers who wanted to get into some mischief without too many spectators. This sounded like a good idea to me – yeah right! I had no idea what to expect and after all there were four of us and we were in a very tiny car, so what could happen?

The road up to the summit of Green Mountain was very steep and very winding and as we neared the top, the fog started setting in and the windows of the car started to fog up. To get to the spot we wanted to go to, we had to drive through a small subdivision that had cars parked on both sides of the street. Jan was trying to get the windshield cleared up while driving through the car lined streets. I was otherwise engaged in some innocent mischief with the boy in the back seat and wasn’t paying any attention to what was going on in the front seat until I heard a loud bang and felt the car hit something hard.

This got everyone’s attention. Because the windows were so fogged up, we couldn’t see what had happened. Jan finally found the controls for the windshield defogger and turned it on which eventually cleared up the foggy windows so we could see where we were going. We stopped the car, again in the middle of the street and got out to see what had happened. As we walked around the tiny car, we found the front right fender was bashed in and crumpled against the wheel. The boys pulled the fender away from the tire and we got back in the car and turned around to find what we had hit.

As we drove back down the street it became very obvious very quickly what we had hit. There it was on the side of the road, a blue and white 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air with the front left fender bashed in. I can still see that car in my minds eye today. There was beige paint all over the dent in the fender and guess what color the paint was on the car we were driving? You got it, beige. We stopped the car and we all got out looking at the damage we had done.

Oh dear, what was our philosophy again? We would do what we wanted to do and worry about the consequences when and if we got caught? This wasn’t exactly what we meant about doing what we wanted to. But here we were. Now was the time to figure out how not to get caught. We looked around and there were no lights on in any of the houses, we didn’t hear any noises, not even dogs barking. The quiet was deafening and terrifying. We didn’t try to write a note to leave on the car. Nor did we try to notify anyone of what had happened. Who were we going to tell? What were we going to tell? We were underage, out for a joy ride in the middle of the night driving without a license, with a couple of boys we didn’t know and in a stolen car that we had just wrecked. We stood there for a couple of minutes looking at each other. It was very quiet, very dark and very spooky and because we were young and stupid, we got back into the car and left as quickly and quietly as possible.

We dropped off the boys where we had picked them up and we drove to my house. I climbed back in my bedroom window and went to bed. Jan drove home and parked the car in the driveway so the side of the car with the dent was not visible to someone getting in to drive it.

The next morning, a friend of Jan’s parents used the car to drive to work. At the end of the day when he left work to go home, he found the dent in the fender and reported it as happening in the parking lot of the place where he worked. We never told anyone what really happened, until now.

I would like to say that this experience changed my attitude toward doing what I wanted to and worrying about the consequences when and if I got caught, but the reality is, we didn’t get caught, so my attitude didn’t change for many many years.

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