Gears

  My parents had cars with automatic transmissions.  Almost every car I had ridden in growing up had an automatic transmission.  The only exception was one of my mother's friends who had a VW Beetle.  We were in Stamford, CT in 1964.  She wanted to show us around her city in that car.  I got really carsick from all the stops and starts from a manual transmission.  Because of that experience, I wasn't very keen on getting into another straight shift car.   When I got my driver's license, I learned on cars with automatic transmission.  It just seemed like the right thing to do.

 During the summer of 1971, our church's youth group decided to do a car wash in a field at the church on a Saturday morning.  Most of the kids wanted to wash or dry the cars, because they could get wet in the heat of the day.  I had a driver's license, so my job was to bring the cars into the field from the street.  It was a short drive of maybe 100 feet.  Some of the drivers wanted to bring them into the field themselves, but that wasn't the plan.  It was my job.  

 A church member brought his car to me and told me the gear shift was on the steering column.  Of course, it was.  Where else would it be?  I got in to put the car into drive, but nothing happened.  I jiggled the arm, and it was very loose.  I tried again and stepped on the gas pedal.  The worst noise I had ever heard came out of the motor.  A grinding noise.  The man came running over to me and screamed that it was a straight shift.  I had stripped his gears.  He wasn't pleased.  I was taken off of driving duty.  The church had to pay for a new transmission for his car.  The other kids thought it was funny.  I was embarrassed.

 A couple of years later, I was riding with a friend who had a straight shift.  I told him that story, and he said he would teach me how to drive his car.  I was reluctant at first, but he told me how easy it was to do it.  Just to interject here, don't tell me that anything is easy to do.  That's one of the reasons I can't cook.  So, my friend and I went out onto a highway, and he taught me how to use the clutch and shift gears.  It did seem kind of easy, once I got the hang of it.  That afternoon was the first and only time I actually drove a manual transmission.  All of the cars I have owned were automatics.  I know that manuals save on gas, but I was willing to get worse gas mileage than to deal with a stick.  Easy vs. Easier.  It was a no brainer.