Eleven days after July 1, 1968, Canada Day, I turned 19. I had legally been driving a car in the province for three years. And either by sheer worry or good luck, I had a perfect driving record. My true baptism of fire came that July, however, when I got a summer job as a copy boy at the then Toronto Telegram daily newspaper. A few weeks into my day shifts, the head copy boy told me they were moving me to the night shift, which involved driving the Tely station wagon.
“You know how to drive a standard, right?” the guy asked rhetorically.
“Ah, sure,” I said, lying through my teeth.
I spent the next couple of days searching for a friend who could teach me how to drive anything with a three-speed standard transmission. As I recall, my parents had recently moved to California (my father’s talent as a TV script writer was suddenly in great demand) and I needed the Tely job to raise my tuition for university.
Fortunately, Dick Dee, a neighbour, had taught his teenaged daughter to drive standard, so he volunteered to take me on. After hours, on the big A&P grocery store parking lot and along lightly travelled country roads, he showed me how three-speeds work. He taught me how to press and release a clutch with my left foot while guiding a stick shift on the steering column through three forward gears, and with the right timing how to apply the gas through each change on the accelerator with my right foot.
“It’s easy. You’ll get the hang of it,” Dee told me, lying through his teeth.
A bit of back story here. Acquiring a driver’s licence has always delivered its teenage recipients pretty decent status among peers. In the early-to-mid-1960s, guys wanted licences in order to drive muscle cars – ’Stangs and ’Vets. Gals liked having them for the independence of getting to and from school and parties.
But that’s not why I wanted/needed a driver’s licence. You see, about 1965 my musical friends invited me to join a rock band. No, the Wizards (five high-school
chums covering Rolling Stones hits) didn’t admire my musical chops. They knew, at 16, that I was the first and only one in the group to get my driver’s licence; consequently, I could be their manager – a.k.a. roadie, agent and chauffeur.
And because my mom regularly allowed me to borrow her Plymouth Valiant, I was “the most important member of the band.” The Valiant accommodated a small drum kit, amplifiers and speakers in the trunk, and guitars and microphone stands laid across the laps of the five band members in the car seats. I hasten to add, the Valiant had an automatic transmission.
Not until the head copy boy at the Tely told me in 1968 that I’d have to drive the company station wagon around Toronto at night picking up the newspaper columns of regular contributors, did I realize I’d have to cope with a standard transmission. Well, learning a standard at night in Toronto was both a blessing and a curse. Traffic was lighter. Parking spots were more plentiful.
But my grinding those gears on that poor old Tely car could be heard for blocks and earned me dirty looks from nighthawks. Nevertheless, I got through my dusk-to-dawn gear-stripping without a single ticket, without any accidents, and, what’s more, having fallen in love with the three-speed.
“A standard transmission lets you feel like you’re actually driving the car,” my erstwhile standard instructor Dick Dee told me.
And I drove my fair share of them. After my Tely job, the next summer I hosted an all-night radio show at CKLY Radio in Lindsay, Ont. I bought a ’64 VW bug and delighted in its quirky stick-shift transmission on my way to and from work.
In the summer of 1972, while living in Saskatchewan, I helped a friend bring in his wheat harvest. I drove the hopper truck, which hauled his combined grain from the fields to his granary; it was so old that it had almost no brakes, so I naturally had to gear down to make the corners and bring it to a full stop in his farmyard. Piece of cake by that time.
Imagine my delight, last month, when J.P. at Broadway, said he’d found a newer used car for me. “It’s a Civic,” he said, quickly adding, “but it’s a standard.”
“Sold!”