Three weeks after I met my future husband, he asked me if I
would like to come with him to his hometown to meet his married
brother and sister and their spouses.
Three weeks after I met my future husband, he asked me if I would like to come with him to his hometown to meet his married brother and sister and their spouses. (His parents had died when he was very young.) We were attending Washington State University in Pullman and he lived in Colville, 180 miles north of there. I was given permission by my sorority president to go and planned to stay with my roommate from the year before, who had introduced George and me.
We left early on a Friday afternoon at just about this time of year 59 years ago. As we drove from Pullman to Spokane, the roads were bare but there was snow along the sides and in the wheat fields of eastern Washington. We talked and sang all the way to Spokane. One of our favorites was “Let It Snow” and we sang that several times.
We had driven through Spokane and were just north of town when George asked me, “Would you like to drive?” I didn’t expect him to ask me that and didn’t want to tell him I didn’t know how. Since I was in high school and college during all of World War II, most people either didn’t have cars or didn’t have the gasoline stamps to waste on teaching a teenager to drive. My Grandpa had showed me how to shift gears, but he didn’t take me driving because he needed the gasoline stamps to get back and forth to work as chief engineer on one of the Puget Sound ferries. My stepfather wouldn’t even let me ride in his car, let alone drive it.
I was too embarrassed to tell George I didn’t know how to drive a car, so I said “Okay, I’ll drive!” He pulled over and we traded places. I remembered I had to put the clutch in to shift gears and shifted into “low” and then “second” and then “high” like my Grandpa had showed me and began to drive. I felt pretty proud of myself for not grinding the gears and took off at a fairly rapid pace. I had noticed that George had been driving from 55 to 60 mph so I didn’t want him to think I was inexperienced. The only problem was that on the north side of Spokane, there was snow and ice on the roads.
George noticed I was going a little fast but decided I must know what I was doing. However, when I started down a long hill north of the city, he got a little nervous. The hill was about a mile long and ended in a sharp turn to the left as the road came to the Spokane River. After about a block, it made another sharp turn to the right to go over a bridge. He was in a state of shock by that time but didn’t want to tell me to brake for fear we’d end up skidding into the river. I just steered to the right when we came to the bridge and whipped over it going about 50 mph and started up the hill on the other side. He told me later his whole life flashed before his eyes during those two turns. I wasn’t nervous at all because I was too naive to know that my driving was life-threatening.
As we got to the top of the hill, George said to me “I’ll drive now, if it’s okay with you. I’m not tired anymore!” I said “Okay,” but didn’t pull over because I knew there was something I had to do before stopping so that I didn’t kill the engine but couldn’t remember what it was. So I just kept going.
He again said “It’s okay for you to pull over now – I can drive!” I kept going until we came to a town and there was a wide spot to pull over. I finally had to admit that I didn’t know how to stop (without killing the engine – but I left that part out and said “I’m not sure how to stop!”). At that point George looked very pale, kind of like he did when we went over the bridge.
He said “You put in the clutch and the brake at the same time.” I did so, and he got out and walked weakly around to his side of the car. He didn’t say a word to me about my driving, but just drove through the snowy roads the almost 80 miles to Colville and was very sweet as we continued singing and talking. He never asked me to drive again until after we were married and he let me practice on dry roads that next fall out in the country. He also had a new car by then with an automatic shift.
However, he has told the story of driving around those two turns and across the river to everyone we’ve ever met for the past almost 60 years.
If the Lord hadn’t gotten us around those sharp corners, I know of four kids and their families who wouldn’t have existed.
