No left turns in life
By BILL DUNCAN
The View From Here
I learned to drive a car on the old airport road in Panama City, Fla. It was a hardpacked dirt road and it was rare for a driver to meet another car coming or going. I never bothered with such things as getting a driver’s license.
After a stint in the Marine Corps in the 1940s, I ended up in Los Angeles, Calif. to attend journalism school and begin my newspaper career. It was actually on the mean streets of Los Angeles that I really learned to drive and got my first driver’s license.
There was a driver’s test connected to the license and one of the requirements was to make a left turn against traffic. What a frightening experience, so much so that for years I would make three right turns to avoid having to turn left on the busy streets of Los Angeles.
Soon, however, I became just another daring LA driver scooting in and out of traffic with ease. It was the best defensive driving course around.
Occasionally when LA traffic was heavy, I would revert to the three rights method of turning left.
That was years ago, but recently when one of my readers, Charles Becherer of Roseburg, e-mailed me a story written by Pulizter Prize winner Michael Gartner in USA Today, it revived those old memories. Gartner remininsced about his father, a newspaper writer in Des Moines, Iowa who took the streetcar to work and, "often as not, walked the three miles home. My brother, David and I sometimes would ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had none. My father would say, ‘as soon as one of you boys turns 16, we’ll get one.’"
Gartner wrote that his brother, David turned 16 first, "so in 1951 my parents bought a used 1950 Chevrolet a four-door, white model, stick shift, fender skirts, loaded with everything."
His mother eventually learned to drive at age 43. "Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage."
Gartner said that his father retired when he was 70, and "nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with my mother to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the two parish priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church. He called the priests ‘Father Fast’ and ‘Father Slow.’"
A lovely, sentimental story about Gartner’s father, but what peaked my interest was what the father once said to Gartner, "Do you want to know the secret of a long life?"
Well here it comes folks a confirmation of my three rights make a left. His father’s secret was: "No left turns."
He died in September in 2004 at age 102.
"I’ve wondered now and then if it was because he walked through life or because he quit taking left turns," was how Gartner concluded his story.
I have done a lot of walking in my life and I seldom make left turns, even against the moderate traffic flow in Roseburg, Oregon.
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470, or by e-mail at elderstatesmansblog@yahoo.com)