Story by Jon Stalnaker, AKA The Studebaker Dude
As I mentioned before, Alan helped my sister Valerie wet-sand her Studebaker in exchange for her giving him a ride to high school. They were the same age and lived across the street, but they didn’t create carpooling to save money on gas; gasoline was cheap back then, less than 20 cents a gallon. Cars were cheap back then, too. You could buy a decent used car for 50 bucks back then. Add to that, my father (Alan’s uncle) was always buying cars that the insurance companies called “totaled out vehicles.” They were not worth the cost of fixing up. Dad would buy them dirt cheap and fix them up, as parts were cheap and he provided the labor for free.
Most teenagers back in the ’50s got their driver’s license on their 16th birthday, but not Alan. He didn’t like driving, and he was bad at it. Lucky for him, he had an uncle who would gladly fix anything Alan could wreck. He did try, though, and didn’t have a problem with the written exam, but he failed the driving test multiple times.
I was quite young when this was going on, but I remember bits and pieces of this story as it turned out to be the family joke of Alan’s sister Erma. She was the funny one in this branch of our family. Erma could have been a stand-up comedian, as she was hilarious. Back then, you didn’t see many female comics make it big. But she was the funny one, and she wasn’t going to let Alan’s lack of driving skills go unnoticed. So it made an impression on this young cousin. I don’t remember the actual event, but I memorized the Erma version of the story.
Alan reached the point where he had to get a driver’s license. Being a letter carrier, driving is required, and he couldn’t get away with not driving at all. If you notice, in the picture of Alan on his route last week, he is using a pushcart to carry the mail. They were used by carriers who walked their entire route, but those routes were few and far apart. I suspect that his driving skills, or lack thereof, is why he stayed on the same route for so long. But when he was just starting out, he had to be able to drive. He needed to pass the behind-the-wheel driving portion at the DMV. My dad came up with a brilliant plan, and it worked.
It was a very hot day in the Central Valley of California around 1957. Not many vehicles were equipped with air conditioning back then, and my dad’s truck was certainly not one of them. He let Alan use his truck for the driving test. He drove Alan to the DMV and parked the truck in a spot with no shade. He rolled up the windows (there were only two), and then he removed the door cranks so the windows would remain closed. By the time the examiner got into the cab of the truck, the inside temperature was unbearable. The examiner had Alan drive around the block and told him to return to the DMV. He got a passing grade and got his driver’s license that day. Dad put the cranks back on the truck and drove Alan home.
Alan had his driver’s license but still lacked an appropriate skill level. But that was fine, as my dad was there to repair his cars until Alan developed the skills he needed to no longer dent his fenders. He was skilled enough to not run over people and lucky enough to have an uncle who could unbend sheet metal like a master. Besides, that’s about the time that Bondo was invented, and my father loved that stuff. I wish I had a dollar for every Bondo joke that Erma came up with over the years.
All of my dad’s siblings were women, so the Stalnaker name only survived through Dad’s branch. But the Stalnaker sense of humor gets credited to our grandfather (Papa). Humor was alive and well in the whole clan, and I feel so blessed to have grown up with such fun characters.