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Diverse Ed

The Source

Fred got in the seat across from me and said, “Let’s go to Jacksonville, Kenny.” Fred Witham was our basketball and baseball coach which in the 1960’s meant you taught driver’s education. I think it was a requirement. At Perry we tended to call teachers by their first names since chances are they were somehow related to us. Today’s drivers’ ed students must go through a more complicated process of driving so many hours with a parent then with the teacher, then testing, then a period of driving only with certain people until the Halleluiah Day when they get their no-restrictions license. In 1965 you got into the car with Fred and took off driving. I don’t remember how many hours were required behind the wheel but Fred and I fudged a bit. He’d have me drive him to Jacksonville’s Lincoln Square Shopping Center, drop him off at Penney’s, and say, “Drive around a while and come pick me up in an hour.” That was pretty much it. Most of Fred’s driving students were farm kids who’d spend hundreds of hours driving our dad’s grain trucks and tractors before we reached the age of 16. If you lived on a farm, vehicles had to be moved from one place to another whether you were old enough or not. It was not at all unusual to drive down a country road and meet nothing but 10-year-olds on their Internationals, Allis Chalmers, and Fords. The sight of an 8000-pound grain truck coming at them with no driver visible has startled more than one visitor to the country. He was there, he just couldn’t see over the steering wheel. My first driving experience was on the seat of a John Deere 50 tractor in the pasture behind our house. Dad showed me how to start it, shift it, stop it and steer it, then went up town to sell more John Deere’s while I became king of my domain, cruising back and forth on the area that is now the Perry/Griggsville ball diamond. I must modestly admit that I was really something. My putt-putt John Deere alternately became a Sherman Tank, an aircraft carrier, a Mack truck, and an Indianapolis racecar. Of course all of these things could move faster than a John Deere 50, but my imagination was always taking me at top speed instead of the seven miles an hour produced by the tractor. When I began teaching at Triopia I met another drivers’ ed teacher, the legendary Don Kemp. His approach to teaching young drivers was much like Fred’s. If he needed something in Beardstown that’s where the car would head. If it came lunchtime he’d stop and buy the meal for the carload. Rumor has it that when he’d had a late-night game the night before the students drove on their merry way as Coach Kemp took a nap. And his instruction also became legendary. “Man! Didn’t you see that sign! It said S-P-O-T, Stop!” “Don’t ride that clutch! You’re ruin the transfusion!” and “Slow down! Can’t you see that speed thermometer!” Bottom line, kids learned to drive and they didn’t even have to pay an entertainment tax. One Kemp tale took on folklore status, and it occurred when he was driving with carload of kids. The so-called “deer whistles” had just come out and Kemp was among the first to glue them to his front bumper. When the students asked what they were for, Kemp said, “Man! Those are deer deflectors! Those deer hear the whistle and wheee. . .they get out of the way!” Just then a possum ran in front of Kemp’s car and he smashed it flat. “Man!” he said. “Deaf possum!” We farm kids were lucky in that in those long-gone days there was such a thing as an Agricultural Permit, a piece of paper that stated if you were 15-years-old and you helped on your father’s farm you could drive from your house to the farm. In fact, you were given a radius. Our furthest farm was fifteen miles distant from our house (okay, closer than that, but who’s counting?) so I was given a 30-mile circle in which to drive while my fellow 15-year-olds were stuck to riding their bikes. One summer I fudged things a bit and talked my dad into letting me drive to my summer job as a lifeguard at Monticello, Illinois. Okay, Google maps now tell me that that’s a distance of 134 miles from Perry, but I didn’t have a GPS. How was I to know? For some reason the JHS drivers’ education car stops in front of my house frequently. It must be a good spot to check out something with the carload of kids. I have a strong suspicion that their instructor is saying, “Okay, we’ll part here for a bit to see if he comes out of his driveway. I want to show you how they taught them to drive in the old days.” I wish I still had that John Deere.