White Knuckles and Knuckleheads: Tales of Terror From Driver's Ed

Stories of learning to drive:

In October 1945, Bernard Katz waited with his engineer battalion on the beach of Lingayen Gulf in the Philippines for their landing ship to take them and their equipment to the occupation of southern Japan.

"I was 19 at the time and had never learned to drive," wrote Bernard, of Leesburg.

As a lark, he learned to operate a bulldozer, which had gearshifts but no clutch. Then he persuaded one of the motor pool guys to let him drive a Jeep on the beach. "The fun began when he instructed me about the clutch."

When Bernard came to Washington, all he had to do to get his D.C. license was show his Army driver's license -- "even though I'd never parallel parked -- and in Japan, we drove on the left."

Ah, parallel parking. The bane of new drivers everywhere. Sally Pfoutz of Purcellville said her father developed a systematic approach to teaching the skill. It involved flags fore and aft on the car, which was fitting, given that he was a former naval officer.

"He also had a sailor's propensity for cussing," she wrote. "The whole neighborhood could hear him bellow: 'G-dammit, it's just like steering a G-damn ship!' "

Things were not quite so colorful when Sally's daughters learned to drive in the '90s. Wrote Sally: "My job then was to merely accompany them as they drove, not correcting them as much as gasping and squeezing my eyes shut and clutching the passenger side door so tightly that I developed tendinitis in my arm."

It was popsicle sticks that did the trick for my former colleague Mary Lou White. "My father mostly taught me to drive," she wrote, "but there came a point when we were getting on each other's nerves." An instructor was hired, and he affixed popsicle sticks to the car for Mary Lou to line up to the poles used in the parking test.

"Well, I aced the test, which was a good thing because my mother was depending on me passing so that I could drive my two younger sisters to vacation Bible school, which was starting the next week."

When Roberta Poling was learning to drive in 1968, her dad came up with a way to put a brake pedal on the passenger side of the car.

"It was pretty creative, made with plumbing pipes. However, when he would take me out driving and he thought I was going too fast, he would slam on the brake on his side of the car. This would sometimes make me skid to a stop right in the middle of town, and everyone would stare at me. I eventually was able to convince him to take it out."

Roberta's mother had a different method. A constant stream of instructions: There is a curve coming up; slow down. . . . There is a truck coming in the opposite direction; watch out. . . . There is a parked car on the left; be careful.

"One day when I was in the car riding with her, I started doing it to her," wrote Roberta, of Ellicott City. "Finally, she said, 'Be quiet; I can't drive with you doing that.' I said, 'See what it is like? I can't drive when you are doing that, either.'

"She never did it again."

When she was in 10th grade, Carol Griffith took a summer driver's-ed course at Parkdale High from a buzz-cut ex-Marine who made no attempt to hide his contempt for female drivers -- of which Carol was the only one.

On the second or third day of behind-the-wheel driving, one of the boys was driving when the instructor told him to turn onto the narrow, winding roads of Greenbelt Park. Wrote Carol: "For reasons I will never understand, we came around a curve and were suddenly facing a Greyhound bus coming in the other direction. The boy driving screamed and threw his hands over his face, and Mr. Marine struggled to control the car from his side. The other boy and I in the back seat were terrified by our brush with death.

"But I don't think that after that day I ever heard the instructor say anything more about female drivers."

Rockville's Cheryl Peirce said her best memory of learning to drive is also one of her favorite memories of her father. She was 18 and trying to drive a stick shift in a big church parking lot in the Pittsburgh suburb where she grew up.

"It was more complicated than I thought, and I was busy following all the directions to use the clutch, apply the gas, shift. I was looking down into the car at all I had to remember. My dad said, 'Stop. Stop. Stop!' We were in the grass, front bumper against a bush, a few feet from the church wall. I was horrified: 'Dad, Dad! I almost hit a church!'

"My dad said, 'Well, yes, but you didn't. Now would be a good time to learn reverse.' "

E-mail: kellyj@washpost.com