Drive back to the good old days
Driving behind Judge Jessee was always an exercise in patience
and tolerance.
Drive back to the good old days
Driving behind Judge Jessee was always an exercise in patience and tolerance.
Not that there was really any great hurry, or there was anywhere important to go. Hwy. 3 through Hayfork is maybe four miles long. On the upside, there is no stop light. There is only one light in the entire town actually, and that’s right before the one-lane bridge. It was installed in the early ’80s amid grumbling about “city slickers” and their big city ways.
Judge Jessee was an old, retired judge who drove around in this huge, early-model behemoth of Detroit-made metal. He would be safe in any collision, not that there was any danger of that, since he only drove 11 miles per hour all through town, anyway.
He was a “blinders driver,” never seeing anything to the side or the line of cars in the rear. If there was a parade procession of cars on any given day, you could be assured that the Judge was leading the pack at his standard 11 miles per hour.
My mother, the born and raised Brooklynite, would get upset getting stuck behind poor old Judge Jessee. She was always in a hurry. Even when going down Hwy. 3 in Hayfork in the pickup, on the way to Wiley’s Grocery store, which was the only “big” store in town.
Being a kid, whenever I saw Judge Jessee, I was in awe. He was really old. Maybe 105 (In actuality, he was probably 85 ). He couldn’t see very well, but he still had this presence of being a powerful man. He still wore his gray fedora wherever he went.
Hayfork has always been a safe place. The kind of place you want to raise your kids. Open fields and thick forests, too. Everyone knows each other and watches out for each other’s kids. That could also be bad, if Mrs.Hogan from down the road bumps into your mom at the bank and tells her about the time you and your friends nearly plowed over her on the sidewalk while running down the street to the community pool.
It was almost like Andy Griffith’s “Mayberry” since Suzie and I were known as “The Mulry Girls” around town.
It was a safe place for kids to learn to drive, too, since there were so many country roads. You only had to share them with the occasional piece of farm equipment or horseback rider.
I’m not so lucky to get to live in a place like that anymore. The edge of Silicon Valley is a scary place for some experienced drivers, too. I’d love to be able to teach The Girl to drive in relative safety.
She’s on the Permit Path and eyeing a certain black VW Beetle in a car lot on Monterey Street. She’s done very well in her online courses that she’s supposed to take, before she hits the open road with an accredited, actual driving instructor. Driving instructor?
Whatever happened to the good old days of your best pal turning you lose in their car in the empty High School parking lot? Or your Dad screaming at you to “Look out for the trash cans!” as you backed out of the driveway, narrowly missing an oncoming car, while trying not to drop his unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarette.
In a way, it’s a good thing, having an instructor teach her, but I can’t help wondering, by default, how many Hayfork teenagers were taught how to drive at 11 miles per hour.
