My Grandpa had many run-ins with motor vehicles over his life. Here’s the first of them:
(I’ve updated this post to add a few paragraphs to the original.)
Now I think I should neglect more of the more joyous experiences and pass to the more mundane. It was in the middle of the hot summer of 1911 in Nebraska that my father agreed to buy a car of the local garage. Three brothers owned the garage, and the agreement was that they were to teach me to drive. Every one as well as the horses knew well the meaning of “Gee and Haw”, but which was “Gee and Haw” on the driving wheel of a car? I was to go with one of the brothers to Omaha to pick up the car. I got to Tekamah well before train time; so one of the brothers agreed to take me out for a lesson in the demonstration car. It was one of those heavy lumbering Maxwells. The top was down and I was getting along famously, and the brother was paying no attention to me. When I neared a bridge, I could not remember which way was “Gee”. I soon found out and was proceeding to cross the bridge when the brother grabbed the wheel from me and tried to drive the car up a side road beside the creek. He got so close to the bank that the bank caved off and we rolled down the embankment. When it lighted bottom side up, I for some reason, was lying in the back seat, so the car did not touch me. When it rolled over right side up, I discovered I was lying on my back with the hind wheel sitting lengthwise on my stomach. I called to the brother and said “How are you, Bart?”. He said he thought that he was all right if I would come and help him. I told him that I did not think I was in a position to help anybody. I discovered that the car was leaning heavily to the opposite side from where I lay, and that the ground was muddy and soft above me. I dug a trench beside me, and wiggled out into it from under the wheel. When I got around to the other side, Bart was lying on his back with his head sticking out from under the front fender. He had dammed up the creek and the water was coming up around his head. In another minute he would have drowned. He had jumped out and tried to beat the car, but it had caught him in the bottom of the creek. I dug and ditched around him and crawled up on the bank and called for help. We got some logs and pried the car up, and took him to the hospital. He said that I had hurt him so badly that he was never able to work after that. He only had two broken ribs and some bruises. It was a good excuse for him. The car was not damaged in the least.
I called father on the phone and told father what had happened. He said for me to not get a car if I could not drive it. I bought a pair of overalls and a shirt and cleaned the mud off my shoes, and was ready by train time to go to Omaha. Another of the brothers went with me to Omaha. By night I was driving the new car alone. The brothers had three similar accidents that week. Neither of the other cars were worth hauling away.
The next day after I got the car home, father wanted me to teach him to drive. He said, “Take it over in the oat stubble and teach me to drive”. I told him that the road was the place to learn to drive. He insisted. He wanted to be sure and not run off into a creek. The ground was soft and the car would barely go except in low gear. It was a hot day, and after many attempts, and me getting out many times to crank it after it had stalled, and he was wringing wet with sweat, he said, “Take this thing out of here and get it home if you can”.
That was the last of his driving till nearly fall when I would leave for school. I had to take him every place he went with it. Sabbath was an especially boring day to me, as he would nearly always want me to take him some place to visit some of his buddies. He finally consented to me teaching him to drive on the road. Three times he would have run off from a bridge if I had not been watching and grabbed the wheel. That sounds crazy as any boy now knows how to turn the wheel. But then it was a hard split-second decision as to which was to turn the wheel.
Tuples and Attributes 