![]() She tore up her learners permit and 65 years later she still doesn’t have her driver’s license. He had lost his temper and yelled at my sister when he tried to teach her. My mother wouldn’t let him teach me how to drive. He drove fast and he drove hard but never had an accident. He had been a truck driver in the late 1930’s and loved to tell stories of his days on the road. My dad loved to drive and took pride in his skills behind the wheel. I credit my dad for teaching me how to handle a car in the winter. ![]() I was always able to regain control of the car before it required any bodywork. I did have a few adrenaline pumping moments when my car decided to fishtail or spin out. A good part of my working years was spent as a salesperson on the road, in all those years I never needed to be towed out of a ditch or slid into another car on the ice. I often was able to ascend our hill when some of our neighbors got stuck in their SUVs. Ironically, I never owned a four wheel drive vehicle until after I retired and could roll over and stay in bed on snowy mornings.įortunately, I am a good winter driver. There were times when I came within inches of going over the hillside or into a tree. Going to work on winter mornings before the borough snow plows did the secondary streets could be very exciting. For many years, I kept a ski pole in the car to help me climb our hill like Sir Edmund Hillary when the car couldn’t make it. It can be a challenge to get home when the roads are icy. I live on one of the highest hills in the Mon Valley, the road to my house is steep with many twists and turns. The only thing I don’t like about winter is driving in the snow. When I was a young man I took up cross country skiing and snowshoeing and still enjoy walking in the winter woods. I outgrew my sled but not my love of the snow. I kept riding that sled until I got too big for it. In a few minutes, the goo hardened like plastic, my sled was almost as good as new. Once mixed, he smeared the goo over the crack on my sled. Using a Popsicle stick to scoop out an equal amount of the goo from each jar, and then mixing them on the metal lid of a coffee can. This was the first time that I had ever seen epoxy at my dad’s work it was used to seal the coils of copper wire on the generators they made. He brought home two pickle jars full of “goo” from Westinghouse in his lunchbox. I was heartbroken but my dad saved the day by fixing it with a piece of angle iron bolted over the crack. This ended in tragedy when I sideswiped a tree and cracked my sled the fiberglass was brittle in the cold. The old style sleds had a steering bar but steering my sled required shifting my weight. The only downside of my sled was that it was difficult to steer. When it finally did snow, it was “love at first slide.” My sled was super-fast leaving the old style runner sleds far behind. Of course, it was one of the rare Christmases in those days when we didn’t have snow so I had to wait a few days to give it a try. It was made of red fiberglass and had a glass smooth bottom. It wasn’t like the other kids’ sleds, it was a shaped like a rectangular tray with low sides and an upswept tub. One year, I found a new sled under the Christmas tree. My first sled was one of these, it was a “hand me down” from my sister and was a little beat up. In those days, all of the kids had American Flyer type sleds with wooden decks and steel runners. I can picture my sled like it was right in front of me. I have the usual recollections of building snowmen and snow forts, of snowball fights and sledriding. Like everyone else that grew up in Western Pennsylvania, I have a suitcase full of memories involving snow. The woods around my home looked like the Irish lace doilies my grandmother used to crochet. This was a “sticky” snow, wet and heavy covering every twig, branch, weed and blade of grass. Though it has been a while since we had a significant snow fall, the old girl managed to spread a beautiful frosting of snow over everything. It was like Mother Nature looked at the calendar, saw that it was December 1 and said to herself, “Oh crap, I’d better make some snow!” We received our first covering of snow for the winter.
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