By John Grindrod
Guest Columnist
Surely, I feel blessed, at 72, to be well enough and motivated enough to work. While it does mystify some of my retired friends that seem to find no trouble filling up their days with daily golf, trips to the Y and stops at the Beer Barrel, truth be told, one of my greatest mortal fears is how I would fill my days if I didn’t work. Fortunately for me, the world in which we live seems to embrace the reliability and experience that senior workers provide, especially after COVID, when so many of those who used to work found so many other things to do rather than work.
At any rate, in my job as a customer service rep for Mid-American Cleaning Contractors, I do a great deal of driving, covering accounts in large swaths of both Ohio and Indiana. I’m often reminded of my younger days when I observe what’s around me. Recently, I’ve been seeing a lot of cars with black stenciled letters on the bumpers that spell “Student Driver.”
I’ve always been quite respectful of those young learners behind the wheel as I ease past them in the passing lane. One is kind of easy to spot, since he or she is often the only driver in a cluster actually driving the exact speed limit. Adding those extra five miles per hour tends to come later in life for most. Whenever I see these student drivers, I often withdraw a few memories from my First National Bank of Hippocampus. Unlike the driver’s training I see today, where the instruction is coming from private companies, I came from an era where such training came from high schools that provided a driver’s ed teacher.
I remember for my mates and me, destined to leave our T-Bird nest in May of 1969, we gathered on Saturday mornings in the spring and took our required hours of classroom instruction and our required hours behind the wheel during our run-up to the big day at the DMV, then located north of town on North West Street.
I have so many fond memories of my LCC teachers from the second half of the 1960s, both the religious and the lay teachers, many of whom modeled the very best of what teachers should be. They, in many ways, provided the templates that I could use later in my life when I followed that career path following my college days at Miami University.
One of those memorable teachers was Bill Clark, who possessed an innate ability to communicate effectively with young people, often employing a highly developed sense of humor. Years later, I got to know him on a far more personal level. He remains the greatest joke teller I’ve ever known.
He also happened to be LCC’s driver’s ed teacher during my learning days behind the wheel. It was on those Saturday mornings when a couple of my classmates and I would pile into that driver’s ed car, one provided by Timmerman Ford or by El Par Motors, dealerships once upon a 1960s time that were happy to provide cars in exchange, perhaps, for some future business by those who would remember their first driving experiences in their steel chariots fondly.
With one of us behind the wheel and the other two in the back seat nervously awaiting their turn, Mr. Clark would occupy the passenger’s seat. Below him was his own brake pedal that would override the driver’s side accelerator should there be a need for such action during our vehicular treks through the streets of Lima and occasionally out onto the highways for higher-speed driving practice.
The one memory that has remained with me of my Saturday mornings with Mr. Clark is when he would instruct whoever was behind the wheel first to pull into the Dog ‘n Suds, just down from the main entry into the original Lima Senior on North Shore Drive.
Returning with a large steaming Styrofoam cup of black coffee with no lid, he would gingerly slide back into the passenger’s seat, look at whoever was behind the wheel and say, “Do you realize how much I don’t want what’s in this cup to wind up in my lap?” Talk about pressure!
And, of course, there was the angst involved in trying to avoid those cones when practicing something that Ohio and many other states phased out, starting in 1990. While we all ran over plenty of those cones learning to park in parallel fashion, I remember it was Mr. Clark’s knowledge, patience and sense of humor that guided all of us through. To this day, parallel parking remains one of my fortes.
Yes, every time nowadays I see one of those bumpers with “Student Driver” stenciled on it, I think of cool spring mornings, Mr. Clark and that steaming hot Styrofoam cup of Joe.
John Grindrod is a regular columnist for The Lima News, a freelance writer and editor and the author of two books. Reach him at [email protected].
