Chapter 14: Junior Year

September 1971

In the Seventies, it was a lot simpler getting a driver’s license as a teen than it is nowadays. You could get your learner’s permit when you were still fifteen, and then get your license when you were sixteen, as long as you had taken Driver’s Ed classes and passed the tests at DMV. Now you get different grades of license, all depending on how old you are, but back then, if you had a license, you could drive. I was going to be sixteen in another couple of months, and I wanted my license.

On the first trip through, Hamilton and I weren’t even allowed to get our learner’s permits until we were seventeen. By the time we went through driver’s ed and took the tests, it was the spring of our senior years before we got our licenses, and we weren’t allowed our own cars. Well, fair is fair, neither of us had any money to buy a car. We could only drive Mom’s old 67 Dodge Dart, and we ran that sucker into the ground!

I raised the subject at dinner after school started in September. “Dad, what does your company do with the company cars when you turn them in?” Dad had driven a company car for years, mostly station wagons, but had now started to drive sedans. He always had some work gloves and steel toe boots and a hard hat in the back, for going to quarries and job sites.

He shrugged. “They sell them. Harry T. Campbell’s doesn’t actually own the cars. They’re owned by a leasing company. Why?”

“What’s a leasing company?” asked Hamilton.

I didn’t look at him and we all just ignored him. “How’s that work? After so many years you give it to them, and they give you a new one?”

“What’s a leasing company?” pressed my brother. He hated being left out of a conversation. If it wasn’t about him, nobody else should talk.

I looked over at him. “I’m talking to Dad, not you.” and then turned back to Dad.

Dad was on the verge of answering when Ham started complaining. Mom cuffed him on the back of the head and told him to be quiet, which he did grudgingly. Dad waited for this little Hamilton drama to finish before answering. “Pretty much. They’re typically three-year leases, so every three years I give them back my car and they give me a list of three or four new cars I can get, and I pick one. Why?”

I didn’t answer directly. “What do they do with the old cars?”

“Sell them. Why?” he continued.

“Give me a moment. Can anyone buy one?”

He looked at me very curiously. “I suppose. I know they offer them to the employees first, but then I suppose they auction them off. Where are you going with this?”

“Is it only when you turn them in, or can you buy one at other times?”

He crossed his arms and stared at me. It was obvious he had figured out what I was up to. “It’s a big leasing company. Every month they send out a list of cars and prices. Tell me why you’re asking.”

“I’m going to need to buy a car, and I figured a corporate model might be better than going to Honest Abe’s Used Car Emporium out in Timonium.”

As expected, the room erupted in nonsense. Mom said I wasn’t old enough to drive, and besides, I didn’t have a license or money. Hamilton protested I wasn’t allowed to - I guess it was in the rules somewhere. Suzie thought it was a great idea. Nana didn’t understand. Dad just sat there staring at me.

This was not at all a crazy idea. Way back when, Hamilton and I had driven that poor Dodge Dart to death, and it finally gave up the ghost in 1976. When that happened and Mom needed another car, Dad bought one from the leasing company. It was located in Youngstown, Ohio, so he loaded me on a shuttle to Pittsburgh and then on to Youngstown and had me drive it home. Why couldn’t we do the same thing now?

Dad silenced the room and then said, “Everybody be quiet and give him a chance to talk.”

“I will not! This is ridiculous and I won’t stand for it!” replied Mom.

Dad gave her an aggrieved look and said, “Shirley, let the boy talk. You’ll get a chance later.” Mom huffed but crossed her own arms and waited in a bad mood. Dad looked back at me and motioned for me to continue.

I took a deep breath. “Okay. First, I am going to need a car by January. I will be starting to take college courses over at Towson State then. I will need to get back and forth between Towson High and Towson State. There is no bus service. I could take a bus from Towson State to here, but it would take at least one transfer and then it dumps me up on York Road. Unless of course one of you wants to leave work and drive me back and forth.”

Dad lifted an eyebrow at that but didn’t stop me. “There’s no reason I can’t buy a car. I will pay for the car, gas, and insurance. It won’t cost you anything.” I glanced over at Mom and her face was getting red. “Finally, as long as you sign off on it, I can take driver’s ed now, before I turn 16, and then can take the tests in November. If we time it right, I can get it all done that first week in November.”

“Shirley?” Dad said, inviting her response.

“No. We’re not buying you a car. That’s the end of it.”

“Mother, you wouldn’t be buying me anything. I already have the money to pay for a car. It’s like I said, I’ll buy the car and pay for gas and insurance.”

“Where did you get money to buy a car? Answer me that!” she demanded.

“From the lawsuit three years ago, remember?”

“That’s for college. You can’t have that.”

Mom was really pissing me off, because even after three years, she still thought of that money as her own. It was a damn good thing I had Dad’s name on the account with me instead of hers. “Mom, I have already tripled the money I kept in the brokerage account. I can afford just about anything this side of Harvard already. In two years, I’ll be able to afford that.” Even including room and board, you could go to Harvard for about ten grand a year in the early Seventies. This was before tuition increases began to rival the increases in health care costs. “Would you like me to write a check, or do you prefer cash?”

“You tripled it?” interjected Dad incredulously.

I turned to face him. “Large cap stocks such as ITT and LTV are changing growth modes from stock acquisitions to cash, increasing market volatility. Volatility is opportunity.” My Advanced Finance professor at Fairleigh Dickinson had taken us through the conglomerate formations and breakups in the Sixties and Seventies, and as I worked at ITT at the time, I had followed it keenly.

Dad shook his head in amazement. “What about driver’s ed?”

“I can go to a night school in Towson. They advertise in the Yellow Pages. I need ten hours instruction and another ten hours of practice, and then I take the written test at DMV and the driving test. We do that the week I turn sixteen. I’ll pay for the classes and the cost at the DMV.”

“Darn right you will,” he replied.

“Charlie! This is ridiculous! We’re not letting him have a car! The next thing you know, Hamilton will be demanding a car, too!” Mom said. Hamilton perked up at this, an eager look to his face.

“Yeah, well when Hamilton can pay for his own car, we’ll talk about that. Besides, he’s only thirteen.” Hamilton’s shoulders slumped at this, and he looked daggers at me. Like I cared. “Besides, you know he’ll need a car at Towson State. I can’t drive him back and forth and neither can you. Be realistic!”

“No!”

Dad rubbed his face and excused the rest of us. Suzie helped Nana up to her room. Nana was in the early stages of senility and needed a fair bit of help. Nobody had invented Alzheimer’s yet, so we were all ignorant and called it dementia or senility or natural causes or old age. Within a year, Nana would be in an old folk’s home. Hamilton and I went downstairs, although I stayed in the family room, so I didn’t have to put up with his horseshit. He was already fuming about how I was getting a car and he wasn’t. Jesus Christ, he couldn’t even see over the steering wheel yet!

Mom and Dad argued over this for the rest of the night. Mom’s biggest problem was that this didn’t fit her neat and tidy plans for the lives of her children. She was very proud that I was going to college, but otherwise I was still a little boy. She couldn’t have it both ways but wouldn’t accept that. This was just like my quitting band, taking aikido, or taking home economics. You did what the school and society told you to do and nothing more and nothing less.

On the other hand, the logic was relentless. I needed to be able to drive if I was going to go to Towson State, and I needed my own car. I wouldn’t be able to get away with driving her to work and using her car, when I might have morning classes that would mess this up. By the end of the week, Dad brought home a list of cars available from the leasing company. “This is this month’s list. It changes every month, so we’ll have a new list in October. Sometimes the list is good and sometimes it isn’t.”

“What do I do if I see one I want?”

“You make a bid. It has to be at least as much as the figure on the list. If somebody else beats you, you can try for a different car. This just gives you a figure on how much they will run.”

“Do I do this now, or do I wait until I get my license?” I asked.

“Probably be easier to wait. You won’t have to horse around getting it in my name first and then yours. That would be the November list.”

I nodded. “Then that’s what we’ll do. I’ll do the driver’s ed and tests with Mom’s car, and then buy this as soon as I pass.”

He smiled. “You sound awfully sure of yourself.”

I grinned. “If Pop-Pop could get a license, so can I.” Mom’s father had been a notoriously poor driver.

He rolled his eyes. “I think he started driving before they even had licenses. You’d better just hope you drive better than he did.”

“Maybe he learned driving a horse.”

Dad laughed. “That was my side of the family, not his!”

Maryland had DMV offices that were open on Saturday mornings, so we went over that weekend and picked up the paperwork and applied for my permit. I also went into town and registered with a driver’s ed school. Classes would be twice a week, an hour a night, for five weeks. I also signed up for the live training, where a driving instructor would come out to the house after school, and I would get behind the wheel of his car.

This part actually wasn’t a requirement; you simply had to state you had ten hours behind the wheel. Dad washed his hands of it though. I couldn’t blame him. When Parker went for his permit, I did the first tour of duty in the car and was scared half to death, even though we were barely breaking 20 on deserted country roads. I crawled out of the car white faced and white knuckled, and Marilyn took over all further driving lessons. It got worse - Parker was the serious child, Maggie was the wild and crazy one! I never even attempted teaching her to drive!

Classes started next week. The curriculum was broken into ten one-hour chunks, each on something different, so as long as you hit each of the lessons once, you got your certificate.

The driving itself was amusing. It had been, effectively, about five years since I had driven myself, but it’s just like riding a bike or sex, once you learn, you never forget how. The biggest problem I had was remembering that in 1971 ‘right on red’, the ability to turn right at a red light if the traffic was clear, wasn’t legal yet. It would come about later in the decade, although they were already starting to debate it in the state assembly. Ultimately it would be passed, and then delayed six months while they implemented it. The joke at the time was that the delay was so they could paint enough ‘No Right On Red’ signs.

After the first fifteen minutes of driving, the instructor looked over at me and asked, “Just how much bootleg time do you already have?”

I tried to look innocent and said, “Sir?”

He snorted and pointed me out of the suburbs and onto Dulaney Valley Road. We spent the rest of the hour driving up and around Loch Raven and around some of the busier streets. It felt very good to be back behind the wheel.

The next two months moved along much too slow for my taste. I wanted to get the car under my belt before tackling my next big project, college. This semester I was taking high school physics at an accelerated pace, so I could finish it by the end of the semester. My plan was to take a semester of calculus and a semester of physics in the spring over at Towson State. Then, next year, I would somehow cram in freshman chemistry, another semester or two of physics, and at least another couple of semesters of calculus over at Towson State, and maybe an English or humanities elective as well.

Most colleges require about 120 credits to graduate with a bachelor’s degree. This splits up to about 30 credits a year, or 15 credits a semester. That works out to 4-5 classes each semester, depending on whether they are 3 or 4 credit classes. If I loaded up now, I could conceivably earn 35-40 credits from college and graduate from high school with Towson High footing the college bill. If I were able to overload in college, I could graduate in two years or less.

Or, and this was my plan, stick it out for four full years, overloading all the way, and graduate in four years with a doctorate. This was one of my biggest mistakes back in the day. I had been a chemist and at the end of the four years I knew I wasn’t going to go to grad school for chemistry. I got an MBA instead. Great for business, but only a master’s degree. If I ever wanted to teach at the university level, I would need a PhD; the master’s only allowed me to teach at a community college level (which I had done.) I wanted to get my doctorate in either math or computers, and I figured I should be able to do it easily, if not in another four years at my final destination, then in five.

Both Mom and Hamilton were still sulking about my driving. Mom wasn’t happy that I was upsetting her carefully made plans for me to be Dad Junior, but Dad just shook his head and rolled his eyes and kept her under control. Hamilton was simply pissed that I was doing something he wasn’t allowed to do, like drive a car at thirteen. He decided to retaliate by putting epoxy on the locks on my footlocker and my steel cabinet. I showed them to Dad. Ham denied everything, but never bothered to dump his garbage can with the epoxy kit in it. He really got his ass whipped that night! I went out and bought another couple of locks and used a bolt cutter to take off the old locks. As a master criminal he left much to be desired. What an asshole!

It was all anticlimactic when my birthday rolled around. November 5 was a Friday, so I cut class and Dad skipped work and we went out to the DMV office in Westminster. This was a much smaller and quieter office than the main branch down in Glen Burnie. I aced the written test and then drove around the block and aced the driving test. I mean I drove around the block - that was the driving test!

This was pretty much the way it went previously. The funny part was when Hamilton did this two years later, he flunked the driving test and had to repeat it a month later. When he passed it, he thought his shit didn’t stink and basically told everyone at dinner that night. I almost died laughing when Dad told him, ‘Of course you passed! The examiner was your second cousin!”

By then, the November list of cars came out, and I got lucky. That month a lot of 1968 Ford Galaxie 500s came off lease and were available. If I didn’t get the first one I picked, there were a whole slew of them available. The Galaxie was Ford’s full-size sedan, designed to compete with the Chevy Impala. These were all business class models, four door sedans with a decent size V8 and a back seat big enough to put a bed inside. This was the type of car we bought when the Dodge Dart died. It drove like a tank, guzzled gas like you owned an oil well, and had a soft and comfy ride. You’ve got to love that big Detroit iron! They just don’t make them like that anymore! I put in a bid of $2,250 and within a week had one reserved in my name. I wrote Dad a series of checks to cover the car, the insurance, and the title fees.