Avocado Green Pinto and Whac-A-Mole: How I Survived 1970’s Driver’s Ed.

Imagine, if you will, a Ford Pinto, green, but not just any green - avocado green, and packed to the brim with children. In the front, my parents sat, white-knuckled. My mother gripped the emergency brake handle in the center console while my father strangled the steering wheel as they begged, prayed, and bargained with God for that little Pinto to summon enough horsepower to reach fifty-five miles an hour before the on-ramp ran out.

In the back, there was not a care in the world  - except for the unlucky soul condemned to the middle seat. Perched over the transmission hump, legs splayed around it, knees somewhere near their ears, it wasn’t your bum or your legs that took the punishment. It was your head. Unless you were young, and I mean really young, you were destined to spend the trip to K-Mart with your neck bent sideways, your head pressed against the roof, wondering how thirty minutes could possibly take three hours.  It was a seating position universally understood by children of the seventies as punishment for simply being the last one in the car.

But the Pinto - later recalled because apparently bursting into flames when rear-ended was considered a design flaw - was merely my introduction to questionable automotive engineering.

Enter the International Harvester Travelall.

Imagine a bench seat with so much bounce that if I tried, my feet would come off the floor, stretching from door to door as if designed to accommodate six children - or ten - or however many you could fit before somebody’s mother finally said, “That’s enough.”

The headroom was cavernous; I could crane my neck, stretch my arms as high as they would go, and still barely scrape the steel roof with the tips of my fingers. And feet? No, the Travelall would have none of that knees-to-your-chest nonsense. The footwells were so vast we could curl two kids into each one, throw a blanket over them, and roll innocently into the drive-in looking like a respectable family of four - only to open the doors and disgorge what appeared to be half the neighborhood.

And no, it wasn’t the avocado-green Pinto I learned to drive in. I learned in the International Travelall.

The stick shift rose from the floor like a fence post. The clutch was somewhere in the next county and required that I inch my rear off the seat enough to use all my weight just to get it to move.  The steering wheel had more play in it than twenty neighborhood kids after somebody yelled, “ITCH-BOMB FIGHT!” Driving straight was less a matter of steering than making a series of gentle suggestions.

At fourteen, my father handed me the keys and told me to go learn. What? No instructions, no sitting beside me to help me figure out how to orchestrate a vehicle that was more like a house on wheels than a car. Nope. My older brother had been brave enough to crawl onto the bench seat beside me, though the look on his face suggested he would rather remove a toenail with a pair of pliers than spend the next hour teaching his fourteen-year-old sister to drive. To those of you with older brothers, I can feel your eye roll from here. Technically, he was supervision. Emotionally, he was just another hazard.

For those who have never experienced the absolute art of driving a stick, it is an orchestration. A delicate ballet of clutch rising, gas pressing, gears catching, all of it coming together in a harmony. Eventually, you gain enough muscle memory to perform without thought. Until then, your orchestra is like a roomful of five-year-olds who have just been given violins for the first time.

There is only grinding, lurching, stalling - and an older brother laughing so hard that every time the Travelall bucked, that enormous bench seat launched him toward the steel roof like a human Whac-A-Mole.

To this day, whenever someone tells me they can’t drive a stick shift, some small part of me is genuinely baffled. How can you not? Then I remember: not everyone learned at fourteen, with no instruction, an older brother bouncing off the ceiling, and several tons of International Travelall bucking beneath them.

Some people actually had driving lessons. I had a Travelall.