Elderly drivers in old-time Phoenix


In my lifetime, which now spans over six decades, cars have been easy to drive. Very easy. In fact, the car I learned to drive on, a '73 Torino, which I believe weighed several hundred tons, could be steered with one finger. To drive it, you simply selected "D", and to stop it, you touched the brake gently (it had power brakes). So, if you follow me here, the physical effort was absolutely minimal, which I didn't even realize until years later when a friend of mine lent me a vehicle without those things, and it took some serious muscle to turn the wheel at slow speeds. And today, while I was enjoying some coffee in the wonderful sunshine of a January day in Glendale (a suburb of Phoenix), as I was watching someone backing out of a parking spot who had just gone past me looking as if they could barely walk, I got to thinking about elderly drivers in old-time Phoenix.

I enjoy going to the classic cars shows, and I often wonder how elderly people, who barely had the strength to walk, could have driven those cars? The answer is that they didn't.

I'm far from being any kind of an expert on old-time cars, but I know that those old cars in that pic up there, at 7th Avenue and Van Buren, didn't have power steering, they didn't have power brakes, and most of them didn't have automatic transmissions. When I see a movie that shows someone driving a car like that effortlessly, I know that it's just a movie. With my wobbly left ankle, I know that there would have been no way that I could have used a clutch on an old Rolls-McNardly, or whatever that car is. I still have good arm strength, but I'm thinking that it would take quite a bit of it to muscle that car into a parking spot.

Like I say, in my lifetime driving a car has never required athletic ability or strength, just the ability to pass a simple eye test. I can remember driving my parents' car, when they were about the age I am now, and while it was a gigantic "living room on wheels", it was absolutely effortless to drive. So my best guess at when people in old-time Phoenix decided that it was time to stop driving, it had more to do with effort than simply eyesight.
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