Eight mishaps. Continue reading
I received my driver’s license on August 17, 1964, my sixteenth birthday. From then until May of 2025 I was involved as the driver in nine accidents. One accident occurred when the car was unoccupied.
I was somewhat shocked when I constructed the list that the number was so large. Have I been a terrible driver? I have never thought so. The total damage from the accidents was not very great. I have never received a ticket from the police for any kind of moving violation. No one was ever injured in any of them. Furthermore, I have driven a large number of miles in rental cars throughout the country, and I never had an accident in any of them.
The first accident on the list occurred within the first month or so of my legal driving. My mother let me take her white Oldsmobile 88 to a dental appointment. I don’t know what she was thinking. The office was about two miles from our house, but I was probably the youngest legal driver in the county, and I had no experience at entering and exiting narrow parking spaces. While I was maneuvering the Olds from the parking space its right bumper scraped the car in the adjoining space and caused a little damage to the other car but none on the Olds.
I drove very little for the next eight years. I did not have a car of my own, and I seldom borrowed my mother’s car. After I got out of the army in April of 1972 I purchased a Datsun 1200 that I called Greenie. I drove it to Connecticut.
I had two accidents with Greenie. The first one happened with my dad in the car a month or two after I arrived in Connecticut. I had stopped at a gasoline station in East Hartford. As Greenie pulled out of the station it ran into a car that I did not see. There was a little damage to both cars. Although I was clearly at fault, the policeman declined to give me a ticket. The damage was repaired, but the paint never quite matched, and the repairman did not notice that the tie rod on one wheel had been bent. That prevented Greenie from passing the safety inspection until a different repairman had bent it back while I waited as the only other person in the shop in the late hours of Christmas eve.
The other accident was a spinout in the snow on I-91 just south of the I-84 interchange in Hartford in the winter of 1972. Sue was in Greenie with me when I lost control of the vehicle. Its progress was terminated when it struck a guide rail. The guide rail had a small dent, but Greenie was not damaged. This was the scariest of all of the accidents.
Greenie later executed an impromptu 180-degree turn on an ice sheet on what was subsequently labeled I-384. On that occasion the car came to rest in the breakdown lane facing the wrong direction. Fortunately there was little traffic, and Greenie boasted a very tight turning radius.
There was only one accident during the time that we lived in Michigan. After Greenie and Sue’s Dodge Colt expired, Sue purchased a Plymouth Duster that was nearly as large as Greenie and the Colt put together. I called it “the tank”. We shared it until the early eighties.
The accident occurred on New Year’s morning, within an hour of midnight. The tank was parked directly outside of our house in Detroit. Sue and I were watching television. The people on TV were getting prepared to celebrate with Midwesterners when we heard a loud crash coming from the street. We hurried to the door and went outside. The young man who lived across the street also heard the crash. He identified a car slowly heading east on Chelsea as the culprit.
We found the Duster undamaged in some bushes in our neighbor’s front yard. I jogged after it and took note of its license plate number and the house into which the occupants had entered.
We called the police of course. The officer who responded to the call eventually went to the house that I identified. When he came back he told us that they had told him that our car had jumped out in front of them while they were peacefully driving on Chelsea. This was, of course, complete bullsh*t, and he knew it. However, although most of the people in the house were inebriated, but he said that he could not tell who was driving. This was typical of our encounters with the Detroit Police Department.
I also had a trivial accident while driving the tank across the Bulkeley (pronounced “Buckley” by the natives) Bridge after we moved back to Connecticut. In heavy traffic the Duster was stopped on the bridge. I felt a bump coming from the rear. I got out of the car and cautiously looked at the rear of my car. I told the other driver that there was no damage. Steam was pouring out of his vehicle’s engine, however. I just drove off and let him deal with it.
Sue and I were happy to replace the Duster with a pair of Toyota Celicas in the eighties. I did not trade blows with any other vehicles, but I did cause some damage to mine in a parking lot at Keiler Advertising in Farmington, CT. The incident has been described here.
In the nineties Sue and I traded in our Celicas for Saturns. I had an accident in mine in the parking lot of the Geissler’s grocery store in East Windsor, CT. Its current configuration is shown at the right.
The store is in the upper left corner of the image. I had finished shopping and was driving on the exit toward Bridge Street. Unbeknownst to me the lane in the lot that runs parallel to Bridge Street continued into the exit lane where it was later blocked by a tree. There should have at least been a stop sign there, but there wasn’t. I had been to Geissler’s many times; I had never seen anyone exit the parking lot from that lane. My attention was on the Bridge Street traffic, which sometimes makes the required left turn a little difficult.
On this occasion a Lincoln Continental suddenly appeared in front of me, and the front of my car struck its front panel. The driver was not injured, but his car definitely was. It was not drivable. Mine was not seriously damaged, but the hood was bent enough that it needed replacement. Once again the policeman opted not to give me a ticket. He said that there were often accidents at this spot because the visibility was not good, and there were no traffic signs.
Honda on Mass Pike returning from tournament
Honda 2 in 2019
Honda2 in 2025