The Trauma of the Driver’s Test

Long before GPS and backup cameras, one nervous teenager, one silent examiner, and one parallel parking space stood between us and freedom.

Part of The American Time Capsule — preserving the people, places, products, traditions, and everyday moments that shaped growing up in America before the digital age. This article explores the cars, highways, road trips, and adventures that made the open road part of the American dream.

There were few birthdays more exciting than turning sixteen.

A driver’s license wasn’t just another piece of plastic.

It was freedom.

Freedom from asking your parents for rides.

Freedom to pick up your friends.

Freedom to take your girlfriend to the movies.

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The Longest Ride of Your Life

It was just Mom and me on the drive to the licensing office.

I was driving.

Mom kept saying,

“You’ll do fine.”

I was actually pretty confident.

I think Mom was more nervous than I was.

Then again, she probably had another reason for wanting me to pass.

With six kids in the family, Mom had spent years squiring us around—to school, appointments, activities, friends’ houses, and all the other places six kids somehow needed to be.

A newly licensed driver in the family didn’t just mean freedom for me.

It meant relief for Mom.

Still, every traffic signal and every turn reminded me of what was about to happen.

The written test didn’t worry me much.

Like any school exam, you studied the handbook, memorized the rules, circled the obvious answers, and hoped for the best.

After all, it was multiple choice.

Then came the real test.

The one where a complete stranger climbed into the passenger seat with a clipboard and the power to decide your immediate future.

No matter how confident you were, everything you knew about driving could suddenly disappear beneath sweaty palms and a pounding heart.

I’d seen it happen.

Not long before my own test, I’d been riding with a friend who had recently gotten his license. We were taking his sister to the licensing office for her road test.

She was so nervous that she ran the stop sign at the entrance to the testing center and nearly hit an examiner who was walking across the driveway on his way to another test.

She was horrified.

And absolutely convinced that if the examiner recognized her, she’d failed the test before she’d even taken it.

There was only one solution.

She insisted we drive across town to another testing facility.

We did.

She passed.

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I Had Already Been Driving for Years

The strange thing was that I wasn’t particularly inexperienced behind the wheel.

Dad had been teaching me to drive since I was a little kid.

When I was maybe eight, he’d sit me on his lap behind the wheel. I steered while he worked the pedals.

He taught me how to make those small adjustments to the steering wheel to keep us going straight.

As I got older, he taught me to look several cars ahead, constantly check the rearview mirror, leave enough distance between cars, use my turn signals, dim my bright lights for oncoming traffic, and keep an eye on the gauges—or what Dad called the “idiot lights.”

By fifteen, Dad trusted me enough to let me drive long stretches of Route 66 on a trip from St. Louis to California while he slept beside me.

So I knew how to drive.

There was just one problem.

Now I had to prove it to a complete stranger holding a clipboard.

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The Dreaded Drivers Test

To this day, I can still remember thinking that the familiarity of our family car helped ease my nerves.

It was a green 1964 Chevy Nova—six-cylinder, three-on-the-tree manual transmission—and I’d already spent plenty of time behind the wheel.

That little green Nova came from an era when cars had distinctive looks, sounds, quirks, and personalities of their own, something I remember in Every Car Had a Personality

After passing the written test, I’d gotten my learner’s permit, which allowed me to drive as long as a licensed driver was beside me.

Usually that was Mom.

So at least I knew the car.

The examiner was another matter.

He never smiled.

He climbed into the passenger seat wearing a frown that made me think he’d already decided our little Chevy Nova was beneath him.

Clipboard.

Pencil.

Expressionless face.

Please, Lord, I’m thinking. Don’t let me stall.

Looking back, maybe I should have scheduled my test for his last appointment of the day.

Maybe he’d have been happier knowing he was almost finished instead of looking for another reason to fail a nervous teenager.

He could enjoy his three martinis after work.

But at that age, you don’t think about those kinds of strategies yet.

Every time he wrote something on that clipboard…

my heart skipped a beat.

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The Worst Part of the Test–For Almost Everybody

Nothing struck fear into the heart of a sixteen-year-old quite like hearing:

“Now I’d like you to parallel park.”

It didn’t matter that you’d practiced.

It didn’t matter that your father had shown you twenty times.

For a lot of teenagers, the moment the examiner said those words, their hands suddenly forgot what a steering wheel was for.

Too close.

Too far.

Too fast.

Too slow.

Hit the curb and you were convinced it was all over.

But not me.

Parallel parking was the one part of the driver’s test I wasn’t worried about.

In fact, I was counting on it.

Every time I caught that examiner’s pencil moving out of the corner of my eye, making another mysterious check mark on his clipboard, I figured my parallel-parking skills might convince him to overlook whatever little sins he thought I’d committed along the way.

I’d practiced that maneuver until I had it down to a formula.

Mom had watched me do it so many times that even she complimented me on how good I’d become.

My method was simple.

I’d pull alongside the car in front of the empty space, leaving about two feet between us, with our cars lined up evenly.

Then I’d turn the steering wheel all the way to the right and begin backing slowly, looking over my right shoulder.

At just the right moment, I’d start bringing the wheel back to the left, watching carefully to make sure the front of the Nova cleared the rear of the car ahead.

Keep backing…

Straighten her out…

And there I’d be.

Parallel to the curb and usually about six inches away.

If I needed a little adjustment, I’d pull forward and straighten things out.

No drama.

No curb jumping.

No praying.

I had this.

For once during that driver’s test, I wasn’t worried about what the examiner was writing on his clipboard.

I wanted him to watch.

This was going to be my best event.

I nailed it.

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Driver’s Ed Was Supposed to Help

Remember those classroom simulators?

Before any of us ever dreamed of taking the actual drivers test we sat in these little cubicle-like fake cars in a classroom.

Rows of fake dashboards.

Film strips.

Steering wheels connected to absolutely nothing.

They were supposed to prepare us for real driving.

By the time Driver’s Ed was supposed to teach me to drive, Dad had already done the job.

Most of us left those simulator sessions wondering how pretending to drive was actually going to help us once we got behind the wheel of a real car.

Then came the movies.

Driver’s Ed apparently had another teaching technique:

Scare the hell out of us.

They showed us graphic films of fatal highway accidents—wrecked cars, bodies, blood, and consequences that weren’t softened for a room full of teenagers.

One I remember was called Death on the Highway, associated in my memory with something called the Suicide Club.

Subtle, they weren’t.

The idea was simple enough.

If lectures about speeding and reckless driving didn’t get our attention, perhaps seeing what could happen when several thousand pounds of automobile suddenly stopped at highway speed would.

It got our attention.

Whether those films made us better drivers is another question.

But more than sixty years later…

I still remember watching them.

Then came the actual Driver’s Ed car.

I can still remember the smell of those old drivers ed cars:

hot vinyl

gasoline

dust

ashtrays

And if fear had an odor…

Just like an airplane, the instructor had his own brake pedal and steering wheel.

We always wondered how many lives those things had already saved.

One teacher.

Three terrified students.

And at least one smart aleck in the back seat offering completely useless advice.

Putting three teenage drivers in a car with one instructor and an extra brake pedal somehow seemed like a perfectly reasonable educational system at the time—one more example of the childhood risks I look back on in How Did We Ever Make It to Adulthood?

That’s probably where the phrase “back-seat driver” earned its reputation.

Did I Pass?

After parking the car and wiping the sweat from my face, I tried to read his expression for some kind of tell.

No such luck.

He got out without a word and disappeared into the office.

And disappeared into the office.

Five minutes felt like an hour.

Every mistake replayed in my head.

Did I stop completely?

Did I stop long enough at that stop sign… or too long?

Did I use my signal?

Was I too close to the curb?

Then…

Your my name was called.

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I Can Laugh Now

Looking back now, it’s funny.

That terrifying test lasted maybe fifteen minutes.

But at sixteen, it felt like the most important examination of our lives.

Because once that examiner finally smiled, handed over the paperwork, and told me I’d passed…

The whole world suddenly became a little bit bigger.

The roads I’d ridden on as a passenger my entire life suddenly belonged to me.

And for the first time…

I could drive there myself.

Getting the license was freedom, but eventually having a set of keys to a car of your own took that freedom to another level, something I remember in Everybody Remembers Their First Car

I drove the family car on the way home, stopping to treat us both to a root beer float at A & W.

I thought getting my driver’s license meant freedom.

Freedom to discover that gasoline actually cost money.

And once you started buying it yourself, you discovered that the neighborhood service station was part of driving too, from the ding of the bell hose to the attendant who pumped your gas—a world I remember in Every Gas Station Had a Story.

Mom apparently thought it meant additional transportation staff.

It wouldn’t be long before my eighteen-year-old cousin handed me the keys to her 1965 Mustang and let me drive to a friend’s house alone.

For the first time, there was nobody sitting beside me.

I had officially flown solo.

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Bunker Rule

Passing the driver’s test meant freedom.

But freedom came with rules:

Watch the road. Check your mirrors. Use your turn signals. Don’t tailgate. And for God’s sake…

Don’t stall the three-on-the-tree with the examiner sitting beside you.

Bunker Notice

This is a personal remembrance of taking my driver’s test as a teenager and the rite of passage that earning a license represented for my generation.

Driver education, testing requirements, cars, and safety standards have changed considerably since then.

But one thing probably hasn’t changed.

Put a teenager behind the wheel, place a silent examiner beside him with a clipboard, and say…

“Now I’d like you to parallel park.”