By Robin C. Harris
The week I turned 14, life was different.
I mean, really, really different from life today.
Fourteen marked a rite of passage for my friends and me. We could get a driver’s license. We had arrived.
I guess it was not the same for girls. I can’t remember one single girl in Colusa who was driving a car at 14. They had their own rites of passage, I guess. Cheerleading, maybe.
We always knew who turned 14 that week, because we were lined up at the DMV on Saturday morning, our parents had dropped us off with the family sedan and, pretending not to know us, had sauntered over to Market Street to wait. The man in the DMV, and our license examiner, was our local scoutmaster. This was our little world in 1947.
Of course we all passed. Why would we not? We were masters of the art, because most of us had been driving for a year or two.
My own initiation into this August group came at the beginning of my eighth-grade year when I moved into town having just turned 13. My two new best friends had just bought a Model T Ford for $5. It didn’t run, and they had no place to work on it. Their parents had beautifully landscaped properties. And because my parents had bought a new cottage a couple of blocks away with an unfinished back yard, I came into the deal with zero fiscal outlay. The Model T would sit out there, actually right outside my bedroom window, while we all worked on it after school and on weekends — a stellar introduction to my new hometown.
No one worried. A far as our parents were concerned, the Model T was harmless— a hopeless case, a derelict far beyond rejuvenation. So imagine my mother’s consternation when she looked up from the kitchen window one fall day and saw (and heard) the Model T explode into life and disappear down the alley belching fumes and smoke of incredible proportions. She called the mothers of my two friends and — to put a literary spin on it — their aprons flying, they chased us though the streets of Colusa.
However, we were already on Bridge Street on the opposite side of town.
Over the ensuing year, I acquired my own car—a 1935 DeSoto convertible that set me back the princely sum of $150. Some kids in those days, perhaps you know, painted catchy sayings on their vehicles. “Don’t laugh, lady; your daughter may be in here”, or merely “23 Skidoo,” which was pretty benign.
Although this column fails thus far to espouse any wisdom on the subject of parenting, it provides an interesting contrast to what we would consider “bad” kids of today. Many of us were crazy kids, but I don’t recall a single boy from that halcyon eighth-grade year whom we would call bad even then.
Unless you would count my own personal foray onto the path of the ungodly, the fateful Saturday morning I painted “Bitch Wagon” on the passenger door of the DeSoto. While this in itself was in unquestionably poor taste, it was exacerbated by the fact that my mother needed to go grocery shopping, my father had the family Plymouth at his office in town, and she asked to borrow the DeSoto. The passenger door and its unfortunate epithet was on the side of the car away from the house. She didn’t notice it, and I had already forgotten it was there.
So there was my now -sainted mother, the local Kindergarten teacher, motoring proudly through town, blissfully unaware of the advertising on the door. Unaware, that is, until she came out of the grocery store, spotted the offending message, and the two bags of groceries dropped to the ground. She called my father, described the hideous scenario, and asked to be taken home. To say that the air was blue in our home would be… well, understatement comes to mind. A few people there still talk about it.
Only once before in my life, perhaps a year prior to that, was I an embarrassment to my parents. It was Halloween, and when the elderly couple a couple of doors away failed to respond to my bellowed “trick or treat,” I reached into their open bedroom window, pulled the bedding off their bed, and threw it onto the roof. The unwritten rules surrounding Halloween, in my primitive thinking, made this okay. The next morning I was sternly informed that the couple was in the bed at the time.
I missed the most egregious scenario of all, however, because I had moved out of town. My three best friends, one of whom was the mayor’s son, swiped a can of enamel from the mayor’s garage, and scaled the ladders on the two giant water towers overlooking town, painting in giant letters, “HOT” on one and “COLD” on the other. I guess it stayed that way for the better part of a year.
So, were we bad? By today’s standards of behavior, almost six decades later, these sojourns into sin probably pale into insignificant, harmless pranks of the “boys will be boys” variety. Perhaps parents of today would shake their heads and say, “Well, there are worse things they could be doing.”
It’s a matter of perspective All things are relative.
Robin C. Harris, an 18-year resident of Lake County, is the author of “Journeys out of Darkness, Adventures in Foster Care.” A retired educator, he is a substitute teacher in Lake County schools and has recently completed two works of fiction for children and teens. He is available for tutoring in first through eighth grades. Harris can be contacted at harris.tke@att.net.
