Fr. T's Wild Ride

It would have been 1923, I suppose. Linda’s father told the story of when he was 18, he and a friend set out and drove across America in a Model T Ford. Roads would have been rough and risky, but not especially so, since that was the way it was and what they knew. Pete first told me the story when I was 18, his drive from Birmingham to the Grand Canyon, exciting adventure of a lifetime.

My father’s story was of the late afternoon or evening he and his family, Mom, Pop, Evalyn, Ruth, Marguerite and himself, loaded up the cars with what they could, including Mom’s chickens in cages strapped to the fenders, left the house that a century later is my house, and headed away from St. Andrews for a new life in Ocilla, Georgia. I reckon that was 1920. The two cars were a Hudson touring car and a Model T Ford, also a touring. I’ve told this story here before so won’t again, except to recall the reason for the move, my grandparents desolation after the January 1918 death of Alfred at age 18, and their finally moving far from here to get away forever. Pop was the Ford dealer in Ocilla for two or three years, and my father said the new cars, Model T’s all, arrived by boxcar, “knocked down” was the term. He and another boy or two would walk to the train depot, put on the wheels and fenders, bolt the cars together, crank them up, and drive them a couple blocks to the Ford garage. That 1920 evening that they left St. Andrews my father would have been eight or nine. Mom and Marguerite the baby rode in the Hudson with Pop driving (Mom never learned to drive a car). My father rode in the Model T with EG and Ruth driving. They told me years later, that the roads were dirt ruts up and down through the woods, signs nailed to trees. When they moved from Ocilla down to central Florida a few years later, my father was eleven and drove one of the cars.

Life still offers adventure. Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, I was invited to visit again a family’s antique car collection. I was there one other time, just before going to Cleveland four years ago. Since then, they added several cars, including the 1941 Plymouth woody wagon that was written up in a local magazine recently: yesterday I sat behind its wheel and returned for a few minutes to the days through the 1950s when we had our Plymouth woody wagon.

I sat in a 1951 Studebaker Commander Starlight coupe with 33 thousand original miles, one of the most beautiful cars of its time, and had forgotten that Studebaker offered a V8 that year. A little car in its day, my day, it seemed enormous with its hood up front and the long trunk, boot, jutting out behind, and cavernously roomy inside.

Then another recent acquisition, the 1926 Model T Ford. It’s black with green wire wheels, a touring car. More than sixty years ago, my father told me that you could tell a 1926 because that was the first year Ford offered wire wheels. Other options were a front bumper and a vacuum powered windshield wiper, neither of which this car has: you sweep the windshield wiper back and forth by hand with the lever just above the driver's eye. How the original owner managed to wipe the windshield, steer the car, and mind the gas lever I can't visualize unless the front passenger worked the wiper. I took off my shoes so as not to scratch the running board, climbed into the back seat, and sat there in heaven. No, really. If heaven isn’t like this,

I don’t care to go, I’m staying here.

In a little while, Bill came over, cranked and cranked until the engine sputtered for a moment and died. Making sure the spark lever was all the way up and the gas lever all the way down, he cranked again and it roared to life. He adjusted the spark to seven o'clock and set the gas lever for a healthy roar, moved the gas lever up to slow, moved the handbrake forward halfway, stepped on the left pedal, and the car moved forward toward the door. I got out of the back seat, picked up my shoes from the garage floor, put them on the floor in the back seat in case we had to walk back, and climbed into the front passenger seat. Bill first, because it’s no fun squeezing past the tall handbrake that takes up the space inside the driver’s door. Away we went. Halfway, he stopped the car, got out, and told me to move over and drive back. He gave me a quick instruction and reminder about the levers, handbrake, and three pedals, and I started moving things.

For one not accustomed to driving a Model T, stopping it is an interesting exercise in handwork and footwork. At the end of one road, I actually drove it up into a driveway, stopped it, pulled up the handbrake halfway, pressed the center, reverse, pedal, backed it out and turned it around, and away we went, heading back to the garage. What came to mind each time I had to stop the car was Alice Parlin Hodges, my hundred year old parishioner at Trinity, Apalachicola. Not long after her hundredth birthday, I called at her house to visit her son John, a friend who had grown up in Apalachicola and at Trinity. Judge John Hodges who at seventy was still sitting on the bench in Tampa, and he and his wife were up for the weekend. I marveled that afternoon as we sat talking on the front porch, as Alice served us coffee and cookies that she had just baked and kept urging me to have more cookies. The story, told by all three of Alice's children, John, Alice, and Junie, was that when their father had bought their first car and Alice learned to drive it, she never could remember how to brake it, so she always found a bush to crash the car into to bring it to a halt. Driving the Model T Ford yesterday, trying to remember which foot to use on which of the three pedals, to pull the handbrake halfway then all the way, watch the road and steer while adjusting the gas lever with my right fingers, I found myself thinking of Alice Hodges and finally understanding her looking around for a bush.

It was as exciting an afternoon as I remember ever, so exciting looking at the cars, sitting in them, and finally driving a Model T Ford, that it never occurred to me to photograph the Plymouth woody or the Starlight coupe. Or to get a picture of the Model T speeding down the road with old Father T at the wheel.