Driving Sideways….
The summer after I turned 15, my father put me to work as a delivery truck driver at the small community lumber yard he managed. The company truck was a 1957 Chevrolet 1.5-ton flatbed with an inline six cylinder motor, and a 3-speed gearbox. I was not yet permitted to drive the family’s 1958 Chevrolet Del Rey on my own. My father was well aware of my aggressive driving intentions.
Perhaps he believed it was safe to send me all over the countryside in a delivery truck, but his thinking about that was flawed. If it was drivable, I was willing to try anything.
One summer day, my younger brother and I were sent on a delivery run to a farm property a few miles southwest of our town. Off the highway, the four mile route to the customer’s house was a loose gravel covered road. I had made this trip several times because the customer’s building project was large and ongoing. I already knew that gravel roads were perfect playgrounds for learning how to do four wheel drifts. There was no concern about traffic, because it was possible to see a full mile in every direction. I couldn’t wait to demonstrate my secretly acquired driving dexterity to my brother. Of course, these driving antics were necessarily limited to return trips when the truck was completely unloaded.
“Watch this, Doyle!” I warned him. I cranked the steering wheel hard to the left to throw the tail end of the truck into a slide. I had done it perfectly several times before at this particular corner. But this time, my execution wasn’t so flawless. I accidentally dropped the front left wheel off the edge of the road and squarely hit a protruding culvert pipe causing the truck to fly into the air and off the road into a ditch on the other side. We were traveling with enough speed to bounce back out of the ditch and straddle a barbed wire fence as we proceeded to mow it down along with a few small trees. We bounced and jostled so much inside the cabin that we had no control of anything. Somehow I apparently managed to keep my right foot firmly planted on the throttle causing us to power our way through as we bounced back through the ditch and upon the road as if none of this ever happened. We stopped to assess damage, and found that the only evidence of my errant driving was the big star in the right side of the windshield where my brother’s hard head had made impact. He was unfazed by it.
When we sheepishly returned to the store, we half-heartedly served up a story we made up. I’m sure Dad didn’t believe any of it. He was just glad we, and the truck, survived.
That is a true story from my youth in the year of 1961. But I am certain many versions of it could be told by Midwest farm boys. The roadways in the countryside around small communities whose primary economy was farming were mostly gravel surfaced. This made for a perfect condition to learn how to control a vehicle while it is sliding instead of maintaining traction on the road surface.
Today, there is a very popular automotive sport called formula drifting. There are race courses built just for this event, and existing road racing tracks are also used for this class of motorsports. Many people today, especially anyone younger than 50 years of age, believe the sport of drifting is a relatively new concept. This is not so. Anyone of my generation who grew up on or near a family farm, is probably very familiar with that style of driving even though we did not call it drifting in our day.
You can be certain of the following. If a teenage boy was given any vehicle to drive alone on an open country gravel surfaced road, he could not resist the temptation to learn what it feels like to intentionally put that vehicle into a sideways attitude while going around a curve or corner. Any kind of vehicle would do. Four wheels, a steering wheel and an engine power enough to get out of its own way. It could be the farm truck or the family sedan. Whatever the vehicle, it was going to get sideways.
Furthermore, brakes were junk, and tires were worse in those days. Blowouts were common events on all cars and types of roadways. All vehicles had poor, if not dangerous handling characteristics. They displayed all of the agility of a rowboat.
Little did we know back then that there would eventually be a time when that skill could become a career option, and a very lucrative one at that. I have watched modern day drifting competition and I am impressed with the remarkable skill of the young drivers who excel at the sport. And their vehicles are amazing feats of engineering and innovation. I wonder what they would have to say about an old wheat truck sliding around a curve at top speed while being driven by a high school boy with a grin reaching from ear to ear?
