The way we were when we were car crazy...

Heffernan's 40 Ford

Written by Jim Heffernan for the DuluthNewsTribune/10-5-24

One of my grandsons recently passed his driver’s license test upon turning age 16. He’s very happy to be able to legally drive a car, just as his older brothers and cousins were before him.

But this milestone seems more routine these days compared to when I got my driver’s license many long years ago, at mid-20th century. Being able to drive was a huge deal in the lives of teenage boys of my generation.

 Back then we were able to get a permit and take the driver’s test at age 15, and most of us promptly did so. The reason is we were what was referred to as “car crazy.” I don’t think many of today’s teens, including my progeny, are car crazy, even though they are pleased to have passed this D.L. milestone and sometimes speak of Lamborghinis.

 

Passing the driver’s test for me and some of my friends was considered the overarching achievement of our lives then and forevermore, amen. It was everything we wanted to achieve in life. Crazy? Of course. Car crazy.

 

In those days, the tests were headquartered at the National Guard Armory on London Road where Bob Dylan saw Buddy Holly perform a few years later. You can’t mention the Armory without including that. Never mind that world renowned composer-pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff once performed there too. 

 

A Minnesota highway patrolman known as Officer Blinn (maybe not his exact name, but close) gave the tests, with dreaded parallel parking roped off on Jefferson Street alongside the north face of the Armory.

 

A close friend, a few months older than I, passed the test before me with an almost perfect score — 98 of a possible, flawless, 100. Whew, that was daunting for me when my turn came around a few months later. And I didn’t achieve it but I did OK with an 87. Seventy was passing.

 

Why do I recall all this so vividly lo these many decades later? Because it was so important to most boys of my generation. It opened the door to possibly getting a car of one’s own, and “customizing” it into something akin to a “hot rod.”

 

Customizing involved altering the outside of the car by removing such things as hood ornaments and trunk handles, filling the remaining holes with lead and repainting. Lowering the rear end was also de rigueur.

 

Possibly the most important alteration (other than huge fuzzy dice dangling from the inside rear-view mirror), was installing dual exhausts with “Smitty” steel-packed mufflers that rumbled loudly through chromium echo cans on the tail pipes when the engine was revved. These were called “twin pipes.” (Later, after I got car of my own, I was pulled over and ticketed by a Duluth cop for having those loud mufflers on my twin pipes.)

 

Mechanically minded kids “souped up” their engines so they could beat the drag race competition at downtown traffic signals.

 

But back to the state driver’s test at the Duluth Armory, where, about a week after I passed the test, I almost lost my license.

 

I was allowed to take the family car — no twin pipes — to school on the day of a city-wide high school music festival at the Armory, which I attended with other Denfeld kids. On a lunchtime break from the festival, a friend lined up a trio of girls from another high school to join us for a noontime joyride in my family’s car. Fun.

 

With the girls in the back seat and my friend riding shotgun, I “peeled” out of my parking place on London Road and began roaring through the neighborhood, “scratching” in second gear when I shifted. Scratching meant making the tires squeal by popping the clutch and “goosing” the engine when shifting a manual transmission from low to second gear. Peeling out was also known as “burning rubber.”

 

Just about every 15-year-old driver tried it, and my dad’s car always responded well, even if he wouldn’t have. Ford V-8.

 

Anyway, after tearing around the Armory neighborhood for several minutes we arrived back outside the festival where I screeched to a stop, a uniformed law officer waving me down. Yikes, it was Officer Blinn who had passed me in the road test barely a week before.

 

He strode over to my side window and sternly said something like, “Any more driving like that and I’ll take that license away from you.”

 

I was chagrined, the passengers in the car cowed, and I never drove that way again until the next time I got the family car a few days later. There was something about peeling out and scratching in second that couldn’t be resisted…when you were 15.

 

But don’t tell my grandchildren.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.

Crime and punishment in Duluth’s long past...

Jim Heffernan's 40 Ford received a ticket for mufflers

Written by By Jim Heffernan for the Duluth News Tribune on June 12, 2021

These are difficult times to be a police officer, we all know — especially the cops themselves. They’ve come under fire throughout the country due to the horrible killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. We all know that, too.

The ongoing controversy has caused me to reflect on how policing here in Duluth and around the country has changed over the years.

 

For one thing, there were no cops in Duluth schools back when I was a student. The faculty and administration could handle problems on their own, thank you very much. Sure, there were problems, but nothing to warrant police stationed in the high school buildings. Occasional fights had to be broken up, but the faculty handled it. Guns in school? Preposterous.

 

Police here used to be involved in more issues that really weren’t serious crimes. The first time a cop scared the daylights out of me, he jumped out of a squad car and confiscated the slingshot of a nearby friend, about 10 years old. He grabbed it out of my friend’s hand and broke it apart, got back into the squad and disappeared down the block.

 

Jim Heffernan's School Patrol certificate
from Duluth police

Whew. We were relieved not to be arrested. We thought you could get sent to Red Wing for owning a slingshot. Red Wing was a famous reform school in Southern Minnesota where some kids we’d heard of actually were sentenced, further preparing them for a life of crime once they got out.

 

A lot of police activity in those days seemed to involve traffic issues. For one thing, they’d set up radar on main drags and ticket drivers for going over 30. And the newspaper published the names of those offenders, along with how fast they were going, their ages and addresses. Oh, the humiliation.

 

Cops also pulled over cars with loud mufflers and handed out tickets. That happened to me once as a teenager in my coupe with a sweet sounding, rumbling set of dual exhausts. I’d say my pipes were about half as loud as today’s motorcycles. 

 

I was just sick when I was issued a ticket and ordered to report to police headquarters in a few days to demonstrate that I’d had the mufflers replaced. I took a chance and stuffed the tailpipes with steel wool, which muffled the sound, and passed my review at headquarters, after which I blew the steel wool out and was back to disturbing the peace with the sound of my car. I felt like an outlaw.

 

And woe betide any driver whose vehicle didn’t have a bumper either in front or back or both. Siren, lights, ticket. Now most cars don’t even come with bumpers.

 

The cops were also quite active in the city’s lovers’ lanes at night — places were boy teenagers of driving age would park with their girlfriends for harmless necking or whatever. The cops would sneak up on the parked cars on foot and shine flashlights in to make sure nothing illegal was going on. Nobody knew what was legal or not. Move on, the cops would demand, having invaded the privacy of young people in the early stages of fulfilling their biological destiny. 

 

These were some of the crimes that tried cops’ souls in that long-past era, although, of course, there were offenses of the more serious variety, even murder, robbery, burglary and so forth. There just didn’t seem to be as much as we hear about today. Now, in our time, many of the difficulties nationally have been initiated by police themselves, such as in the Floyd case.  

 

Later, when I became a reporter for this newspaper covering the police beat, I came to know quite a few cops, and liked most of them. Some, I felt, didn’t like me, or what I did to interfere with their jobs by writing stories about them. That’s always a problem between law enforcement and news media, even back then.

 

By then things were changing on the street. The drug culture hit, and policing got a lot more challenging.

 

In some cities — Minneapolis, for one — police are under scrutiny for perceived or actual racism. Those stories are compelling and give rise to proper criticism of law enforcement.

 

So far, police racial relations in Duluth seem to be pretty positive. Maybe that reflects a tradition in the Duluth Police Department. I hope so.

 

For most of my life I have been acquainted with a former Duluth police chief — through family, church as youngsters and cordial relations through our adult years whenever we have crossed paths.

 

Back when he was chief in the ‘90s (he retired in 2002), on one sunny summer Sunday, I was in my yard mowing my lawn when he pulled over in his vehicle to say hello. Our homes were in the same neighborhood. We had a nice chat during which I asked him where he’d been all alone on this beautiful Sunday afternoon. He said he was returning from a meeting of the Duluth Chapter of the NAACP.

 

That Duluth police chief was Scott Lyons.

 

I’m not aware of any change in that general attitude toward race relations by Duluth police leadership in the intervening years. Let’s hope not.

 

Jim Heffernan is a former Duluth News Tribune news and opinion writer and continues as a columnist. He can be reached at jimheffernan@jimheffernan.org and maintains a blog at www.jimheffernan.org.