Halloween 1953

 

October 31^st, 1953, a Saturday night   I was only fifteen years old.  I could sort of drive, but a license was six months off yet.  I think I did possess a learner's permit.  My parents had gone to the mid-peninsula home of a customer where they would celebrate Halloween and play bridge for the evening.  Their estimated return time back home was well after midnight.  My little sister was doing something with her girlfriends that involved giggling.  My parents' friends, Rod and Eula, had met up with them, here at our Glen Dell house, to share the ride to San Carlos.  Rod parked his car in our garage for "safe keeping," in case Halloween pranksters came by with rotten eggs.  Rod also left the keys in the ignition, saying, "In case there is a fire.  That way the authorities would be able to move it out of the garage."

My friends, Bill Young and Gerry Ashe, were over visiting; our plan gelled, I took the car out of the garage, me driving.

In my mind's eye, it was a brand new 1953 Studebaker 4 door sedan, a Commander.  Rod had loved Studebakers.  His family and ours had each purchased a new '48 Studebaker to use coming across the country from Detroit to San Jose after the War.  He had just traded it in on this '53.  It was a stick shift, and that is what my father had been training me on.  But the clutch possessed a much longer and softer throw to it.  I struggled trying to shift gears smoothly.  But as it turns out, I have always been unafraid of handling strange cars, - - and in strange cities all over the world.

We stuck to the side streets, and somehow got to downtown San Jose.  We dragged up First Street and down Second Street twice, as though we knew what we were doing.  Where had we learned how to do all this?  The movie, American Graffitti, was twenty years in the future.  I guess it was just from the older guys at school, whose bragging we listened to, and with whom we had ridden along with on their trips.

Other carloads of teenagers saw that we were young and challenged us.  Costumes and trick-or-treating were for the "little kids," like my sister, two weeks away from being 13.  What the older teenagers did was throw water balloons or raw eggs and squirted us with soapy water.  We worried about Clorox because we heard that kids did that too.  The girls laughed at us and the guys chased us, daring us to drag race, but we paid no heed.  This was a major high; it was Saturday night and we had wheels!

I can't remember how we cleaned the car, after we finished our one-hour's circuit of downtown.  Other cars hit us with dozens of water balloons and two or three eggs.  I don't know how we got the car back into the garage without Rod or my parents realizing the car was different.  Parents were so trusting of their little angels back in those days.  I remember that we thought the engine would still be too hot by the time they came home.  We opened the back door to the garage and left the big garage door open to get a cross wind, cooling things off more quickly.  I don't know what I must have bribed my sister Patty with, to keep her mouth shut, if she even knew what had happened.  But I think to this day, it is an unacknowledged event, Halloween 1953.