My next rite of passage was to get my driver license. When I was ten, Dad took me to the empty parking lot of Cottonwood High School and let me drive the car around. After that he never let me because that same parking lot was always full. The year I was fifteen, I would sometime get permission to practice backing the car in and out of the driveway. I took driver’s education my first semester of high school. The class was huge! The teachers had it figured out so that every student would rotate through several different activities. One was to go out on the driving range. A local car dealer had donated cars for this purpose. Cottonwood High School had an area reserved for this, although, during football games it was used as overflow parking for the stadium. It had lines painted on the black top that made it look like roads and parking stalls. The next station was the simulator. This was a long trailer that looked like a mobile home, but when you went in it was really a two-aisle row of consoles. Each console had a steering wheel. They showed a movie that was like driving on the road. You had to react to those simulated road conditions. When you left, the teacher handed you a print-out of all the mistakes you made. Another item on the rotation list was to stay in class and study. This was one class room where the teachers didn’t want you to be all the time. They realized that any real learning was by necessity going to take place outside the class room. One good thing about the class room was that we watched horror movies. These were movies that were designed to scare us into knowing the destructive force of the automobile. Scenes of what could happen if we got the least bit careless behind the wheel. They were pretty gory!
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