I guess I learned driving by driving the tractor on our small ranch. I never had any formal training by my parents or school teacher. We didn't have driver training in our high school at that time, but I hadn't started there yet anyway. We later had "book learning", but I had been driving long before that. I remember my first experience driving a "car" was one night after pruning season of our almond orchard, my parents had friends over & were playing cards, probably Canasta, & the fire burning the pruning needed to be checked, so I drove our car at that time, my grandmother's 1941 Oldsmobile sedan around the corner to where the fire was burning & using the tractor with the "buckrake" on it to put more brush on the fire. That summer, when I was 13, I drove my sister & myself across a ferry on the Sacramento River, which was very steep on the west side, to Chico to work on my uncle's almond huller. My sister, 5 years older, had her driver's permit, but she was very timid about driving. I have no memory of the experience of taking my first driver's test for my license, so I guess it was uneventful & I don't remember what car I was driving at the time. I have never received a traffic ticket, but that's not to say I shouldn't have. Can you imagine nowadays a 13 yr. old driving daily & with no insurance to boot? We never had any car insurance until my dad bought a 1957 Ford station wagon. They took the train out of Oroville on Jan. 1 back to Detroit & drove their very first new car back home to Glenn Co., CA. On the way back, they stopped briefly in the town in Texas where my mother was born & somewhere in Texas bought me a pair of Elvis Presley earrings, which I still have. =^..^= In a message dated 5/30/2010 11:10:15 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, edrieanne@gmail.com writes: Mr McCann of Lincoln High School of Stockton and my father taught me to drive. Can't remember the school's car, but I got my license in a 1955 Dodge Station Wagon...a real tank. That was back when you had to parallel park. Dad set up Clorox bottles filled with sand and old broom handles. He started out with a huge parking space in front of the house and made the space smaller and smaller until I could park in about 3/4 of the standard space. I can still parallel park left or right side of the street. I parallel parked a 3/4 ton pickup with a cab over camper in downtown Vacaville in the mid-1970s in one try, got out and people on the sidewalk were applauding. I got my first license in 1964, a year behind my contemporaries due to a knee injury. I received my first traffic ticket in Texas seven years ago...almost to the day. EdrieAnne ----------------------------------------- NORCAL ARCHIVES: http://archiver.rootsweb.com/ Enter NORCAL. Browse by month. Or click the "Search all archives" link to search by keyword. ----------------------------------------- To post a message to the NORCAL mailing list, send an email to NORCAL@rootsweb.com ------------------------------- To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to NORCAL-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message