The first time I drove

[dbigtex56]

Not even your first car - do you remember the first time you drove anything?

When I was about five, my father let me drive the tractor. It was a 1945 Farmall A, and he had to hand-crank it to start it.

For such a primitive machine, there was a lot to remember; the hand throttle, the clutch, the gearshift, clutch, left and right brake pedals. I was allowed to drive it about 30 feet.

Next year, he let me take the wheel on his '63 F-100 Ford pickup on a back road. What a thrill!

When I was about 10, I was permitted to back the car out of the garage. Being handed the keys and starting the engine felt so empowering.

Being from a rural area, we had (as did many of our neighbors) a few acres of vacant land. When I was 13, I bought a '58 Chevy for $15 dollars. This was a rite of passage'; they were called 'lot cars' (because they were driven on vacant lots.) It was a stick shift, with no syncromesh between 1st and 2nd gears, so learning to double-clutch was vital.

So how did YOU learn to drive?

[20thStDad]

Let's see, several things come to mind. The tractor at my grandparent's house in rural Mississippi (when it's described as outside of Brookhaven it's rural) - I couldn't tell you what kind but I can find out next weekend. I remember my grandfather getting annoyed at me because I didn't quite understand the concept of the clutch and was just chucking it in gear, happy for it to go. I was 11.

Around 12 I got a new friend who had a pretty long driveway, and his parents didn't mind him going up and down the driveway in the 1989 acura integra. He also had a go cart, and of course the main purpose of that was to see how violently we could flip it and where we would end up relative to the go cart when everything came to a stop.

Official learning took place in either a 1989 gold Jeep Cherokee or a 1988 white Astro van. I much preferred the Cherokee, not just due to the bonus coolness it had, but because the Astro van seemed to have a hair-trigger gas pedal. If it was even just a little wet, the damn thing peeled out all over the place. And it didn't have the foot-width brake pedal either, it was a 3 inch wide nub pedal. Not enough. I always felt like I was going to die in that thing.

More fun than all of that was letting my little sister drive to/from school once she started high school at the same school as me (2 yrs younger). I really didn't care much and thought it was fun to give her a chance, but it was dangerous. Swerving all over. I remember one rainy day, starting off from a red light turning left, when it went green she was a bit heavy on the gas and pretty much spun us around 180 degrees and we were facing the people behind us. She flipped out a bit, but I just pointed to the right and said "that way".

[crunchtastic]

I got a 100cc Suzuki dirt bike for my 11th birthday. In 2 months I was riding enduro trails with my dad. To this day my little brother resents the fact that I got a motorcycle and he didn't. Sucka!

Since I could clutch, a car was easy except for learning the sight lines. I learned to drive a car on a '76 Fiat. No power steering, no power brakes. The crappiest car ever, excepting maybe a Yugo.

[TheNiche]

So how did YOU learn to drive?

I started driving when I was about six or seven years old. Like yourself, there were country back roads to work with (not to far from the other Buffalo Speedway). The first car was a brown late-eighties Honda Accord with a cat-pee-stained hood. The second car (within days or weeks) was a 1991 Mazda Miata, which had stiffer steering than I could reasonably handle at the time. I also couldn't reach the pedals, so it didn't matter that they were both manual transmission.

The State-approved driving instruction was in a Ford Probe, I think, with brakes on both the driver and passenger side. It was an automatic.

And the third time I learned to drive, was with a manual transmission that I was physically capable of using. It was in a 1981 Chevy C-10 pickup truck that I'd bought for $400. But it drove so much like a tank, I'm scared to test drive cars like a Honda S2000 or a Mazda RX-8. I'd probably embarrass myself on something so easy.

[Subdude]

So how did YOU learn to drive?

Fitfully. Lacking any semblance of hand-eye coordination, learning to drive for me was a dodgy undertaking at best. Our school's driver's ed teacher was a true bastard who would yell and scream at the students, and he despaired of my ever getting the hang of it. To this day I'm amazed they ever let me loose on the roads.

[mkultra25]

So how did YOU learn to drive?

Practicing on Houston's roads with cars belonging to indulgent friends. I didn't take Driver's Ed in school, and didn't have a driver's license until after I turned 18 and took the test. But when I was about 16, I'd occasionally convince one of my friends to let me drive his beater Cutlass Supreme around North Shepherd and the neighborhoods we lived in. I also have a fond memory around the same time of exercising the big German V-8 under the hood of a Mercedes 450SEL late one night on Stuebner-Airline to the tune of 90+ MPH.

Aside from that, I was strictly two-wheeled until sophomore year in college. I started out with a ten-speed, and in short order progressed to a Vespa P125, then a Suzuki 400 single that was a real POS. I had quite a bit of experience riding motorcycles before I ever became nearly as proficient driving a car.

Finally mastered driving a stick in a Pontiac Sunturd with a cracked exhaust manifold that belonged to the girl I was living with at the time - to this day one of the three worst cars I've ever driven (the other two being a Chevette and a Vega).