Drive with Care(y’s)

There was a lovely article on Boston.com the other day about a local driving school, Cam’s Automobile School of Waltham, that has allegedly scammed $175,000 out of over 500 drivers’ ed students by taking their money, even as the owner – one Frederick Lovely – knew that the outfit was closing down.

Cam’s is now defuncto – it went out of business because it was financially ailing -  so the likelihood that those students will get their “tuition fees” back is not good.

It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Maybe Lovely did know he was about to slam the trunk down on his operation, but still wanted to steer some more driving-around money his own may. Or maybe he honestly thought that by getting all these eager drivers in the making to pay upfront, he was hoping to stave off what it’s now clear was the inevitable demise of his outfit. In car talk, it could be that what Lovely thought was a slow leak turned out to be a loose tire that flew off the axle.

Time will tell.

One thing of note in the article was that drivers’ ed at Cam’s cost $575.

Yowza!

If it had cost that much in my day, I can pretty much guarantee that no one would have taken drivers’ ed.

I can’t remember what it cost to take it over 40 years ago at Carey’s in Worcester. “Drive with Care(y’s)” was their clever motto, and I believe that when you graduated, you got a small, navy blue plastic folder in which you could place your license so that it didn’t get all dog-eared. This was in the dark ages of cardboard, picture-less licenses, and dog-eared they did get.

My vague recollection is that it cost $30 to take the course, of which I had to pay half.

The classroom instructor was a young man named Terrance O’Hara, who was either a real school teacher, or a fireman, or a policeman. I forget which, but the drivers’ ed gig I do know was a moonlighting extra.

Drivers’ ed was held after school, in a classroom in the Care(y’s) office on Main Street.

I took the course in November of 1965. One evening, after class, I had just gotten off the bus and was walking home when I turned back to see that all of the lights in the city of Worcester, except for some emergency lights at St. Vincent’s Hospital, had gone out. It was the night of the great Northeast Blackout of 1965. For years afterward, people would ask “Where were you when the lights went out?” an altogether cheerier question than “Where were you when Kennedy got shot?”

Well, when the lights went out, I had just gotten off the 19 Cherry Valley bus, right after the Sunoco Station on the corner of Winchester and Main, and was heading up the rise next to the Clark Manor Nursing Home to take the shortcut home.

As if learning to drive wasn’t excitement enough.

After the classroom instruction, you got your learner’s permit – I aced the easy-peasy test – and hit the road.

My road instructor was an older fellow named Francis I. Linehan.

As I recall, Mr. Linehan wore bow ties, took his students up the steepest hills in the rattiest sections of Worcester, and spent the entire session yelling 10-2 – the positions on which you kept your hands on the steering wheel. For some reason, I think he was a teacher at Classical High School.

Until I got in the car with Mr. Linehan, I had never been behind the wheel of any vehicle that wasn’t a bicycle, and Mr. L. spent much of each lesson hour berating me for my lack of driving skill. Brutally so.

“You’ll never pass the road test” were his parting words after each excursion.

I finished up the classes with him – you had to in order for your parents’ to get the new-driver discount - but dropped out of the wonderful world of driver’s license pursuit for six months.

While I was getting my license, my mother was, too.

She had quasi-learned to drive in her late teens, but when she asked her father if she’d ever be able to use the car, his answer was, ‘of course not.’ He wanted his oldest child to get her license so that she could move his car from the street to the garage in the alley out in back of the house.

Thanks, but no thanks.

I, on the other hand, was going to be able to get frequent use of the car, competing for it with my mother – who never learned to like to drive – and my sister Kath when she was home on vacation from college.

Just as I had dropped out of driving after my awful experience on the road driving with Care(y’s), my mother dropped out of learning to drive after her awful experience on the road with my father.

In contrast, my experience learning to drive with my father beside me was quite wonderful. I loved logging road time with him. And he sure knew better than to take a new driver up steep hills in the worst sections of Worcester. Most of my early outings with my father were to St. Joseph’s Cemetery, where there were neither cars nor people to hit. A few years later, it was where my father was buried. Anyway, my father was quite patient, and an excellent teacher. With me, that is.

My mother claimed that he yelled at her all the time when she was trying to learn to drive. Come to think of it, given how my mother drove, this is not surprising in the least.

Anyway, my mother decided to go with professional instruction. Probably at Care(y’s). But probably not with Mr. Linehan.

I, on the other hand, managed to master the art of driving at my father’s side.

In May of 1966, I got my license on the first try, nimbly executing a Y-turn and coming to a complete cessation of all forward movement at each stop sign.

I never did develop much of a sense of direction, however.

Before I drove to school for the first time, I made a weekend trial run, and got lost making my way to the school I had attended for nearly 3 years. Yes, I could have taken the longer way and not gotten lost, but that would have been no fun. I tried the short cut, and got bollixed up on Flagg Street or thereabouts.

I note that Care(y’s) is still in business, although it’s now in cahoots with LaPorte’s, which was the other big driving school of my era.

Their motto is:

We were here yesterday, we are here today and will be here tomorrow.

Unlike Cam’s of Waltham, which will likely not be back.

As motto’s go, LaPorte’s is fine, but I do prefer Drive with Care(y’s).