Early in my junior year of high school, my dad bought a new 1955 Ford Fairlane. It was a nice car and he was quite proud of it. On rare occasions, he even let me drive it.
One day, I somehow got hold of his keys and had a copy made of the ignition key. When my parents retired that night, I quietly raised the garage door, pushed the car down the driveway to the street, disconnected the speedometer, drove over to my buddy’s house just up the street, and off we went.
It was the first year Chevrolet made a V-8 engine, so we wound up on downtown’s main street where all the kids would go cruising, looking to try out racing against one of the new Chevys. We soon found one and were soundly trounced, mostly because my shifting to second gear was very slow. A few more drag races and my speed shifts improved somewhat, but frequently the gears wouldn’t mesh and the transmission made a terrible sound.
It was soon time to get back home before my dad (an early riser) got up for work. We ended up pushing the car back into the garage, reconnecting the speedometer and quietly closing the garage door.
We did this several times a week that summer, but my speed shifts and clutch work were far from perfect and my dad ended up having the clutch replaced several times — all the time grumbling about these cheaply made new cars. I was very lucky he never suspected what was going on after hours.
Fast forward 30 years and, in a weak moment, I mentioned these escapades to my 15-year-old daughter, not thinking I would take them seriously — until, one day, a neighbor called to tell me he had been at the shopping center where I always left my car to take a bus to my office. He said he thought he had seen my daughter with a load of kids, driving off in my car. Her school was only 2 miles away from my office, so I had a friend drive me over.
Sure enough, there was my new Oldsmobile. I got in, drove back to the office and later back home, where I waited to see how my daughter would handle this situation when she finally made it back.
She didn’t say a word when she walked in, and I waited until dinner before I mentioned our car had been stolen. She acted surprised at this news and tried to excuse herself from the table. That’s when I let her know she and her friends had been seen in the car. What followed was a severe chewing out, a forfeiting of the key she had made and a long-term grounding.
But more importantly, it was also a lesson to me to keep my mouth shut about all the stupid things I did when I was her age.
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