Be Afraid-Do It Anyway by Erna Morgan McReynolds
Overcoming a Fear of Driving
Do you remember learning to drive? Were you excited? Dying to learn to drive? To get that independence? Freedom?
Not me. I was terrified. I definitely didn’t want to go hurtling down a road in a multi thousand pound tin can at 50 or 60 or even 70 miles per hour. The « what ifs » sped through my mind faster than any race car. What if I ran over someone? Or crashed into another car? Or hit a deer? Or simply couldn’t learn to drive well enough to pass the test?
Then, to make it worse, I worked in the summers when our school offered driver ed. That meant my super anxious and volatile mother would teach me. Why not my father? A calm man and an excellent driver. He had done this once before. He taught my mother to drive. And he swore he would never teach anyone to drive after he taught Mom to drive. I still don’t know how their marriage survived her learning to drive a grey 1948 standard-shift Chevrolet.
Then I came of age. Absolutely terrified of driving, I clung to the steering wheel next to my white-knuckled Mom who gasped and shrieked with every move.
What lunacy was this? I had no choice. I was working my way through college. I had to get between my jobs and my classes.
Was there any way to make this adventure even scarier? Yes, of course. My step was to buy a car. My parents couldn’t give me one, lend me one or lend me money to buy one.
So I went to see the bank manager to borrow the money. I figured that I could pay for college, my room and make monthly car payments. But only if I had the car so I could work.
And I had thought learning to drive was scary? I could hardly keep my fingers on the dial on that old rotary phone to call for an appointment to see the bank manager. I put on my Sunday go-to-meeting church clothes. Mom took me to the bank. Dripping sweat from the palms of my hands, I clutched my checkbook and savings passbook. Yes, I did have enough money to buy a car for cash but that didn’t fit my plan.
Was my plan backward? Shouldn’t I get a job first? Learn to drive and then get a car? Definitely.
But I figured that if I owed all of that money I would have to get my driver’s license. And I knew I would make myself pay off that loan. This meant I would not only have to work to get Dean’s List grades but I would have to earn enough at my jobs to pay off that loan and car insurance and registration. And gas and oil and insurance and car registration and licensing, plus all of those other little things that crop up. Tires, chains back then, all those endless repairs you need on a car that is several years old.
Borrowing money to buy a car before I learned to drive sounds crazy to me as an adult—the sort of thing I would tell anyone “don’t doooo it.”
But, I was still a teenager. With all the bravado that went with it.
Once I bought my car with the bank’s money and my parents’ signatures, I took my first step to getting my license. I went to The Motor Vehicle Department, where they had prominently displayed the booklets to study to get a learner’s permit. No problem there. That test was “book learning.” I could do that. I read the book and got a perfect score.
If everything about driving had worked that way I would have had no worries. But driving wasn’t that easy. I had to start the car with my foot on the brake while depressing the clutch. Then I had to shift that lever on the steering wheel at the same time I gradually released the clutch, pushed on the gas pedal and released the brake. All of this without stalling my parents’ enormous 1961 Chevrolet Impala.
You might wonder what that lever on the steering wheel was. Well, those big, distinctive models of the 50s and 60s were quite different from your car today. Ours was a 1961 Chevrolet Impala, maroon on the bottom and white on the top. No bucket seats but instead what looked like couches in both the front and back seats. Those “couches” could seat three people and maybe a small child, too. When I slid that bench forward so I could touch the pedals with my short legs, everyone went forward with me. And most of my passengers sat with their knees tightly wedged between the dashboard and the car seat.
Back to that lever on the steering wheel. That was the gear shift. That’s how cars came then. And the clutch? Ours was a standard shift, which meant using three pedals—the clutch, the brake and the gas pedal. The automatic cars cost too much for ordinary people, and especially for people like my family, who could barely afford the car we had.
We lived on a farm with enough space between the house and the barn for tractors and milk and grain and other trucks to turn around. I could have learned basic driving there.
But neither Mom nor Dad wanted the other to watch Mom teaching me how to drive. So Mom took me to the coal yard parking lot a few miles from our house. There I could lurch around in the car. Stall it. Sometimes jerk forward. Once in a while drive a few feet without running into a pile of coal or a tank of heating oil.
How would I turn this four-wheeled ship? White knuckled with my knees banging together.
And scariest of all? My Mom. Shrieking with every lurch forward. At the end of lesson one I was sobbing, screaming in fear and frustration, too.
Fortunately, I had an older sister who rescued me. Betty had a bright orange VW Beetle and offered to get me through the driving test. After a few trips straight up the steep hill opposite our house, she thought I was ready to tackle the test.
We made an appointment in a small nearby city. At the appointed time, on the appointed day, I pulled up into a designated parking space on one side of the square set aside for driving test candidates.
The man who gave the tests was infamous in the region—both for his bad humor as well as the number of candidates he failed. When he got into the car, my knees began to bang together in earnest. On his first barked command the banging got even worse.
My first couple of attempts to get my foot on the gas pedal failed. It slid off like a greased pig on a pole. Eventually I got my feet in the right positions on the right pedals—held together by my banging knee caps. I was ready for that examiner’s snapped command to move into the street. I had my turning signal prepped, my feet poised to manipulate the pedals so I could glide off with a “super smooth start”—none of that sputtering, chugging and finally stalling. A brilliant beginning? Even worse to come.
Parallel parking was easy. I taught myself to do this from the pictures in the learners’ permit book. But next? Three-point turns. Turning around in the middle of the road? More illustrations!
How did I blow myself up? Can you start a standard shift car on a hill? With a stranger yelling “you stupid idiot” plus a few less polite words?
You know what happened. I failed. My sister screamed at me. My Mom told me I would go bankrupt. Now what?
I did it. Ground my teeth together. Learned how to do “a super smooth” start. Tackled DMV. Got a tester who would pass me.
Got two jobs and earned enough to pay for my blue Chevelle. But yet trial. How would I get insurance to repair my car after that deer ran straight at me!
After triumphing over all of those hurdles, I still had to get two jobs and a place to live with a parking space which was near to college and both of my jobs…
Erna Morgan McReynolds, raised in Gilbertsville, is retired managing director/financial adviser at Morgan Stanley’s Oneonta office, and an inductee in the “Barron’s” magazine National Adviser Hall of Fame. She and her husband, author Tom Morgan, live in Franklin.