Richmond History
The Car You Could Start with a Spoon
- By Joy Lewis
-This event took place at my childhood home in Hemlock in the spring of 1963.
“Everyone has a guardian angel,” I was told as a kid. I knew it to be truth, for on the wall over my bed hung a picture of two small children, presumably lost in a dark and scary forest. Towering behind the boy and girl hovered a beautiful angel guiding them on their way to safety. I was not the kind of kid who went out and got herself lost in the woods. Nor was I any kind of malicious trouble-maker: not even the aspiring kind. I got into hot water on a daily basis without half trying. In retrospect I see that my guardian angel saved me from harm on more than one occasion.
The petty mishaps I engineered between the ages of four and fifteen were not life threatening, though they might have been. That’s what my guardian angel saved me from. I ice skated in late March (though I’d been told not to), played with a paper boat in a flooded storm drain (another forbidden activity), and waded in a torrential rain-swollen creek in spite of all warnings. You hear all the time about kids who fall through the ice, who get stuck in culverts, who disappear while crossing a washed-out ford. Yet I walked away from those watery experiences with no more trouble than a soaking and a scolding, thanks to my ever-vigilant guardian angel.
My usual accomplice in those tentative forays into forbidden exploits was my best friend Ellen. In elementary school Ellen and I both won citizenship awards: how wayward could we have been? The minor acts of mischief we perpetrated hardly deserve to be mentioned. As a matter of course, against the strongly-worded cautions of both our mothers, we climbed to the topmost branches of the elms and maples in our yards. We walked barefoot along the ridge or the eave of any barn, house, or garage whose roof we were able to scale.
We were not naughty girls; rather we were independent thinkers, having to learn for ourselves the lessons we heard preached from our parents. We smoked a couple of cigarettes, chucked rock-laden snowballs at cars — but only after they’d passed our range — and shoved our little brothers and sisters around without mercy.
The string of youthful misdemeanors we two girls committed led inevitably to the day Ellen and I, aged ten, took Mom’s car for a drive. At the time, my mother’s car was a peach-colored station wagon that could be started with a spoon handle. Dad was a mechanic; an expert at toggling together a near-junker, he could rig anything. If he didn’t have the money for a needed part, Dad would come up with a temporary solution to get a car running. The old car needed a starter, but with the sixth new baby in the house money was tight. So Dad, using leftover parts, figured out how to fix the starter and in the process bypassed the need for a key. To start this car you stuck the end of a spoon into the key slot and gave it a turn. My siblings and I had seen it done dozens of times and were always warned against trying it. We took that advice seriously.
Then one afternoon Ellen came over to get a look at my newest sister. Mom was napping and Shelly, sleeping in her basinet, did not hold our interest for long so we went outside. One of our favorite games, at her house or at mine, was to get into the front seat of a car and pretend to take a drive. In our imaginations we went to Niagara Falls and Roseland, to school or church, or across the country to the Grand Canyon. This afternoon, as we made our pretend way to the home of Ellen’s married sister in Lima, I mentioned that this car could be started with a spoon. Naturally she didn’t believe me. Mom was still asleep when I tiptoed into the kitchen and came out with a spoon.
To my credit, I can say I was having second thoughts as I got back into the car on the passenger side. Not so, Ellen. Her older sister had recently gotten her driver’s license and in the process had given Ellen a few rudimentary lessons behind the wheel. She was eager to show off what she’d learned and pressed me to hand over the spoon.
I made her promise she wouldn’t take the car out on the road. We had a U-shaped driveway that circled the house. She agreed to just go around the driveway once and come back. I gave her the spoon. Ellen, already seated behind the wheel, inserted the spoon into the ignition. That car started on the first crank! There we sat with the motor purring and considered. Did we dare, really, to take her for a spin?
Ellen declared her confidence in her ability to drive by slipping the gear into reverse. With a kick that flung me into the dash the car jumped backward. And stalled. Ellen shifted into park; I grabbed the spoon out of the ignition. We were both shaking. And there, behind the car, stood two guardian angels, their feet braced and their powerful hands splayed against the rear bumper. We couldn’t see them, but I know they were there.
