September 4, 2014 (Thursday)
As I have related several times in the blogs, my parents divorced in 1941 and both remarried around 1944. Until our parents remarried, my sisters and I lived with my mother’s parents. In 1944 I turned 13 and was in the 8th grade. My twin sisters and I lived with our father and stepmother that year, and from then on to high school graduation, alternated living in each of those homes.
At 13, I became obsessed with the idea of driving a car. I wanted to drive. I wanted to learn how to drive. I was living with my father and stepmother at the time. I kept badgering my father but he was not for the idea. My stepmother, I believe, had a quiet little talk with my father about it, and he relented. So, he began lesson #1: a little private class with me about how a car’s transmission works. Our family car, a 1938 Chevrolet sedan, had a floor shift. Daddy brought a little diagram of the gears and how they shifted from first, to second, to third, and also reverse. I had no idea what he was talking about. The conversation ended with my pleading that he just take me in the car and show me.
He was frustrated with me, and dropped the subject for a while. Then, one day, he showed me the car in the driveway, handed me the keys, and told me I could practice driving up and down the driveway. 
Well, I backed up..putting one of the rear wheels into the ditch by the street. That was the end of the entire procedure. Daddy had overestimated my intelligence and ability, a mistake he repeated one day when he asked me to put water in the radiator. I figured out how to open the hood, which had a door on each side of the engine, and proceeded to pour water into the crankcase (where the oil is). After a while, I reported to my father that there must be something wrong because it wouldn’t fill up. After another hour of draining the crankcase and filling it with oil, he never brought up the subject of my driving again. Can’t say that I blame him.
Well, when summer came in 1945, all my father’s brothers and sisters, their spouses and all the kids went to Spring Creek for an overnight outing. We drank water from the creek, and my sister came down with Diphtheria. We were quarantined. My father was permitted to go to work and my stepmother was permitted to go to the store, I think, but all others were confined to our house and yard. No one but the public health nurse could visit us, and our throats were swabbed once a week. No one except my sister was ever infected.
The time came to go back to school, but we were not permitted to do so. Since none of the rest of us were infected, I asked for permission to live with my paternal grandmother, Grandma Fake, so that I could get started in the 9th grade, the first year of high school, even though the classes were still in the Junior High building. Permission was granted, and my grandmother gave me a good home.
I lived with Grandma Fake for a while, and by the time the quarantine ended, my mother and stepfather had moved to a bigger house and instead of moving back with my father and stepmother, I began living with my mother and stepfather, Joe Heim.
He drove a 1938 Plymouth Sedan, and I began begging him to teach me to drive (by this time I was 14). He consented, and let me drive with him in the passenger seat. After several close calls and one stop by a traffic policeman, he had some choice words about his physical well-being, but he kept letting me drive until I knew how to do it. My first time out of the driveway, I backed into a car parked on the street. My next bad experience was running into another car parked on the street. But my stepfather was patient with me, and after a while I was finally considered a driver.
It was my love of driving that took me across town and back to church in 1948. That was a trip worth taking. It changed my life. I rededicated my life to Christ that day and stayed in church, sometimes arriving on the bus and sometimes in the car, but always there.
I moved back with my father and stepmother when my last semester of high school began. My father drove to work each morning and let me drive the car I had put in a ditch several years before, to school each day. In those days, hardly anyone in high school had a car, so, even though it was an old pre-war car, my friends thought it was “cool” (not a word we used back then). After school, I drove to my dad’s workplace, and he drove us home.
Again, as Forrest Gump says, “That’s all I have to say about that.”