Four on the Floor

The telephone poles were taller than the trees in the new West Orange neighborhood my family moved to in 1963.

   The neighborhood sprang up almost as fast as the woods could be cleared. Street after street of Identical split levels, given an ersatz air of class with names like Devonshire, Westminster and (ours) Cheshire Terrace.

People had no problem saying Westminster or the names of the streets around the corner---Nottingham and Buckingham and Wedgewood. (Several mothers in the neighborhood, mine included, collected Wedgwood--one 'e'--cups and saucers, those dusky blue emblems of English, pinky-in-the-air refinement, with their pale friezes around the edges.)

But Cheshire you had to pronounce very carefully or people would look at you like you had marbles in your mouth, especially if you gave it the New Jersey pronounciation of Cheshr. But drawing out the final syllable with a long 'i' felt even more dorky.

Such were the trivial anxieties of moving to a neighborhood as bare and exposed and rootless as this newer part of West Orange, after growing up in East Orange, a town full of old buildings and bluestone sidewalks whose cracks you could count as your fat-tired two-wheeler jounced along towards the corner candy store where old Mister Ruby hung in the shadows behind the glass counter and took your nickels and almost resentfully placed a candy bar in your little hand and shooed you out the door.

East Orange had nooks and crannies and secret passages between buildings and crabapple trees you could climb in the remaining vacant lots.

On Cheshire Terrace, our house stood out, which was not a plus to an insecure 14-year-old. You can't see our house in this picture. It was a tall center hall  "colonial," except there was nothing colonial about it. It looked as if someone had placed one of the split levels in a vise and meanly squished it  into a narrower taller shape. I was in ninth grade. For various reason I didn't enjoy living in the only house on the block that looked different than all the rest.

But my father was proud to pose in front of his new red Volvo P-1800S sport coupe, and rightly so. He was a man of artistic temperament, a talented sculptor, who nonetheless made his living as a furniture manufacturer's representative in the years when my sister and I were growing up. He had driven big boxy Plymouths most of his working life--he considered Chrysler Corp cars better engineered than Fords or GM models, but he couldn't afford a car he really liked..

When my mother relented and out of sympathy or pity let him buy the sports car he had always dreamed of, my sister and I rejoiced as much as my father did. Because a sports car was cool, and my father always had a submerged cool streak.

The big event of 1964 was the New York World's Fair, and we piled into the car and went out there to experience Belgian waffles and the future of the planet.

My younger sister, Amy, and I had to beg and plead and wheedle to get my parents to take the Volvo instead of my mother's sensible car. The thought of arriving at the World's Fair, where we would be riding monorails and visitng pavilions of all nations, in my mother's dowdy Valiant, was hideously embarassing to my 14-year-old self---and my sister backed me up, even though she was into strumming simperingly sincere folk songs on an acoustic guitar and did not pore over every issue of Mad, which was as cool then as Wired is today, and the then-new and totally entrancing Car and Driver.

We won my parents over by promising not to utter a peep of protest during the long hot schlep to Flushing Meadows in the cramped back seat of the Volvo, whose rear windows did not roll down. Air conditioners were bolt-ons back then, at least in foreign cars like the Volvo, and they were anemic at best.

But we kept our promise and cheerfully waved out the back window at bored motorists as we crept along Route 46 in bumper to bumper traffic, edging ever closer to the George Washington Bridge. This was years before the advent of Route 80. Route 46, with its stoplights and used car lots and diners was the gauntlet you had to pass through to cross the king of bridges.

But back to this photograph of my father with his new car. The photograph is scraped--that is the white streak going right across my father's face. Wasn't it his luck to be obliterated so arbitrarily like that. Or so my teenage self would have seen it. I can Photoshop this insult right out of the photo in about five minutes, but the scar contains a certain truth.

The Volvo had a four on the floor. That's what stick shifts were called then. On the floor, as opposed to on the steering column. That was a big deal. And four forward speeds was a big deal, too. My father loved cars, and this red two-door sports coupe with stick shift was his salesman's dream come true.

My dream came true when he taught me to drive in the Volvo. I insisted, and my mother went along with it, barely, and my father showed me how to shift and use the clutch and never lost his patience no matter how many times I stalled his precious car or spiked the little four-cylinder past redline by not using enough clutch.

Thirty five years later I insisted on teaching my son to drive the same way, in a stick shift. But he came of driving age on September 11, 2001, his 16th birthday. We got his permit a week or so later, then drove around to various corporate campuses in our area looking for a place where he could practice shifting.

Prior to September 11, driving slowly and jerkily around and around a vast corporate parking lot on a Sunday would not have atttracted any attention. But within minutes we had security guards flagging us down, asking for my license and registration and wanting to know what I was doing on their premises and finally escorting us off the property after messaging their superiors on squawky two-way radios.

In the end, my son, Michael, learned to drive on a stick, and today, at 21, the skill is in his blood, in his genes, as it is in mine. I think of him as the third generation of Levin men to have this vanishing skill, and I hope some day he passes it on to his child, male or female. I still think it's the best way to drive, the most interesting, the most engaging, the most precise.

I once dislocated my right shoulder on a ski slope, and was told not to drive. But I was 22 and damned if I would sit in my studio apartment in Palisade Park with my right arm in a sling. So while I was excused from work because I couldn't type, I drove around on a three-week vacation, steering and shifting with my left hand.

And you know what? I pulled it off without a hitch. Maybe even sipping a cup of coffee and eating a Danish. There were no cup holders in those days. And probably lucky for me, no cell phones, either.

Tags: Mad Magazine | photography | 1964 New York World's Fair | West Orange | Levin, Amy | Levin, Mel | Car and Driver