Driving, Part II

In all my years of column writing — I've been doing it since 1971, longer than most folks wait to throw out socks with holes or saggy underwear — I don't think I've ever written a two-parter.

Last week, as faithful readers already know, my column was about getting my driver's license at age 16 pretty much on a whim — and certainly unprepared in the eyes of everyone except the uniformed exam officer who signed off on my right to steer more than 3,000 pounds of metal, glass and chrome down twisting Ozarks roads at speeds considerably faster than a Ferguson tractor in high gear.

Several of you spoke to me or called or sent e-mails after that column, and some of you shared your own stories about getting driver's licenses. A few of them were much more interesting that mine, but the fact is, folks, this is my column, so ... .

One of you astute readers provided a succinct critique. You asked: What was the point? Where was the punchline?

Sometimes readers can be so right.

Which is why, I guess, God created the two-part column.

Not every state goes about licensing drivers the same way Missouri does it. But I didn't know that until I moved out of the state.

In 1967, my wife I were living in Dallas, and we started the process of getting Texas licenses.

As it turned out, there wasn't much to it. All we needed was a valid license from another state and a fingerprint. That's the only time I have ever been fingerprinted.

After Dallas came New York, which had a reciprocal agreement with Missouri but not Texas, so we used our nearly expired Missouri licenses to get up to snuff in New York.

We were there only two years. Our Texas licenses hadn't lapsed. We moved on — to northern Idaho — using a valid Texas license because Idaho didn't accept transfers from New York. Go figure. When we went to get Idaho licenses, no one batted an eye when we listed a former address in New York, presented a driver's license from Texas and talked like Missourians — which, by the way, is the same accent spoken by many residents of northern Idaho, so we fit right in.

After a couple of years, we returned to Missouri to be closer to our son's grandparents. Remembering the cake walk when I got my first Missouri license, I strolled into the exam room at city hall in Nevada one fine afternoon to take the written test. If I passed the test, I would be issued a brand-spanking new driver's license. If I failed, I would have to retake the test and an actual road test as well.

Sometime between my first Missouri exam and my second one, some bureaucrat had dreamed up the point system for penalizing Missouri motorists who get caught speeding or have an accident or drive while drunk. Fully half the questions were about how many points for this and for that — not rules of the road or the shape of a yield sign.

I flunked. Big time. I'll admit it was quite a comedown from my first experience.

Then we moved to Kansas. To get a new license we had to present our Missouri licenses and fill in the answers to 20 questions about rules of the road while referring to the driver's manual. That's right: an open-book test. I think that's the most sensible approach. Kansas thinks reading the manual is as important as passing the test. And you have to do it every time you renew, so you keep up with any changes in the law.

I'm not planning to move anywhere, so my brushes with driving tests are about over. Good. After 645,000 accident-free miles, I think the rest of you are fairly safe. I ought to get a gold-plated license. With oak-leaf clusters.

jsullivan@semissourian.com