2021/2022
Collection 17

Driving Lessons

late 1940s; between Norbeck and Wecota, Faulk County, South Dakota, USA

In the late 1940s my grandmother Judy was nine years old in a town called Norbeck, South Dakota. Her family owned a small-acreage farm and grew wheat. They also had an old International pickup truck. Every few weeks Judy’s dad would load up that old pickup with wheat. Then he would drive about five miles to the town Wecota to load the grain into the elevator.(1) One day he was busy and asked my grandmother to drive the truck to the elevator! She was only nine!

It was common in the country for people to drive without licenses. As long as you could push the pedals and steer the wheel, you were good to go. So there was my nine-year-old grandmother standing in front of the big old pickup while her father told her the basics: to put her feet on both the brake and the clutch, and to keep driving down the road until she got to Wecota. But her father also had one rule, which he said was the most important thing of all: Don’t pass anybody. Keep on the road to Wecota.

Judy sat down in the pickup and started to push her feet on the pedals just like her father had told her. Before she knew it, she was driving! It was all going well until about halfway to Wecota, when she came up behind a car that was about as old as the pyramids in Egypt and was moving about as fast as they do, too. In the car was an elderly couple that Judy knew — Mr. and Mrs. Penfield. They were driving much too slow for Judy’s liking, so after following them for a little while, she decided just to pass them. She knew she shouldn’t, and she should follow the rule, but how much harm could it do?

She made sure no one was coming before she changed lanes and sped up a little bit. Then she went to slide back into the correct lane, but she had barely made it past the car she was passing. The back of her pickup almost hit the front of the elderly couple’s car. She heard a lot of screeching and honking. Judy looked over her shoulder and out the window, and all that she could see was Mr. and Mrs. Penfield bumping across the country field. She had forced them to drive into the ditch at the side of the road, and they had just kept on going!

Judy never stopped to check on the Penfields and was able to deliver the wheat. When she got home, she acted like everything had gone perfectly. She pretended she had obeyed her father’s every rule. But evidently somebody had witnessed her driving, because her father questioned her.

That day my grandmother learned her lesson about passing people while driving a pickup truck. That was the first time her father ever let her drive that old pickup truck. It was also the last time.

August Eversman; Missouri, USA

1. An elevator is a tall structure, often cylindrical, for storing a large amount of grain.

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