Jiminy Cricket

My father raced cars without using his feet. He couldn’t reach the pedals. That he drove at all, that he loved driving all his adult life, is a small story in itself.

Born with extremely brittle bones and eventually diagnosed with Osteogenesis Imperfecta, he had at first not been expected to live. Then his parents were encouraged to institutionalize him, which they didn’t but only after they almost did. Various futile surgeries followed. Pictures of him look elfin as a little kid, his tall, handsome father always carrying him, heavy metal braces on his legs, bright smile on his face. His name was Jim, so “Jiminy Cricket” was what they nicknamed him. 

By all accounts, despite the fractures, he was a cheerful kid. When he later talked about his childhood with us, his own children, the thing he complained about most was that his maternal grandmother, a strict disciplinarian, sometimes pulled his hair to punish him, since she didn’t dare slap his fragile face. He said he’d been lonely as an invalid, but I can’t recall him ever carrying on about the surgeries or the myriad breaks. They happened. That was it.

A few years after Franklin Roosevelt died, my father’s family made a pilgrimage to the former Roosevelt estate, recently opened to the public, up in Hyde Park, New York. I can’t be certain, but I believe it likely that the reason for the visit had as much to do with FDR’s heroic narrative of triumph over polio as with his lengthy presidency or any family preference for his politics. In any case, what changed my father’s life was not the inspirational tale of FDR’s heroics but one of Roosevelt’s motorcars on display. Peeping into the car from his own wheelchair, my teenaged father saw how the wheelchair-using FDR had managed to drive: the steering wheel and foot pedals were fitted with a custom-tooled set of metal hand controls that allowed braking, steering, and even changing of gears without needing to use one’s feet.

My father, excited, sketched the mechanism on the spot. He was mechanically and artistically inclined, and on the drive home, the construction of those hand controls was all he could talk about. He was too young yet to drive, and my grandmother was alarmed, but my grandfather had already made up his mind to help Jim out. 

Grandpa had built my father a specially fitted work bench, set to wheelchair height. This was the late 1940s and there were no accessibility guidelines or items then. Disabled family members were still largely hidden away from view, even among the wealthiest and most powerful families, as the Kennedys well knew. But it had occurred to my grandfather that his Jim might master some small but useful trade, analogous to a that of a blind piano tuner, if only he had the chance to use his hands. And anyway, making things was one fascination that my grandfather and his crippled son shared.

After the trip to Hyde Park, Grandpa added a vise and metalworking tools to my father’s workbench, and the two of them began scheming on a hand-control design. The problem was that my father’s arms were also brittle and distorted by healed fractures. It became clear that it would be extremely difficult for him to manage any complex shifting of gears. FDR’s system had one floor-mounted lever on the left to operate the brake and the clutch, plus a wheel-mounted handle to depress the accelerator. My father’s short arms couldn’t span both such levers, plus a gear shift, and still steer.

The solution was to buy a car already outfitted with a “hydramatic” shift. Not a full automatic, these transmissions featured gear shifts operated without a clutch pedal and were popular options on American cars in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. (Volkswagen Beetles still featured them into the 1970s. I tried one once and promptly stalled.) 

The hand controls that my father and grandfather eventually created consisted of a single metal lever with a rubber handle, mounted on the left-hand side of the steering column and angled so that it didn’t interfere with the feet of anyone who wished to use the pedals instead. Putting the handle just under the wheel and using good Archimedean principles to maximize leverage, they made it possible to keep one’s left hand on the wheel, thumb and index finger hooked over the rim, while holding the lever lightly with the other three fingers. A gentle tug generated smooth acceleration; a slight push applied the brakes. The right hand was then free to quickly shift without having to long leave the wheel. It required a delicate touch to not lurch forward or stop abruptly, but my siblings and I would later grow up around the device, by then mated to a fully automatic transmission. Most of us could drive either with Dad’s hand controls or our own feet at the time we earned our first licenses, although only my brother Jimmy, born without legs, used the hand controls exclusively.

By 1950, my father the invalid was freed. It was the heyday of the auto age in North America. New-fangled services based on car culture were springing up everywhere: drive-in movie theaters, drive-in burger joints, even drive-through grocery windows. (One of my earliest memories is of a winter evening drive with my father to pick up milk and bread at just such a drive-through.) Soon the Eisenhower Interstate System’s vast construction would be underway. Increasingly, my father could run his own errands, seek his own entertainment, go for long drives with pit stops at full-service gas stations, and never have to struggle from his seat. The same automobile-based living that nature writers, fitness enthusiasts, and urban planners have condemned now for decades opened the whole world for him.

Something in Jim, as a young man, wasn’t content with that freedom alone. I don’t know how he got started doing it, but my father began drag racing. He had a crazy trick. Somehow he would brace the steering wheel in place and then tear off down a short strip, left hand pulling up the accelerator lever hard, right hand smoothly shifting through the gears, short legs dangling placidly over the seat, far from touching the floor.

He won often enough for it to become a gratifying compulsion. He and his friends and rivals would meet frequently to drag illegally, usually at night on secretly selected streets. With the help of an auto-mechanic pal of his named Howie, Dad had modified his mother’s Caddy into a roaring beast, even though on the outside it looked unchanged. Despite a few near-disasters, he kept up this nonsense into his early twenties, becoming something of a local legend, until one night he was caught and arrested with several buddies of his. The police already knew his name, and the officer who arrested him was mightily pleased. Dad himself liked telling the story of the night he got caught so much, and told it so often, that, years and years after he was deceased, I wrote the incident into a poem that quoted his favorite part of the story as its title, "Mr. Jeffreys, I've Fnally Caught You".

After that night, he made an agreement with his parents only to drag race in legal events. He got his own souped-up Cadillac with the money he made from his fledgling cabinetry shop and began competing in NASCAR races in the “stock drag” division, roaring down quarter-mile strips. He placed as high as second in the eastern nationals in 1955 and 1956.

I grew up with those two trophies in the house, always prominently displayed. My father had given up competing in his late twenties, as he grew bored with it and more involved with work. Then he met and married my mother, who persuaded him to toss all the lesser trophies and keep only those two best. They were both heavy chunks of white and black marble, topped with a bronze car and fronted with a brass plaque bearing the crossed flags of NASCAR, along with my father’s accomplishment and name. They grew dusty and neglected in later decades, the plaques tarnished, and by the 1990s they were relegated to some obscurer office shelves, no longer given pride of place.

But my father never ceased to relish driving,  as long as he lived. He religiously subscribed to Car & Driver. He took the family out for long Sunday afternoon drives and two-week road-trip vacations. He prided himself on knowing every twist and turn of every New Jersey street. The year I turned ten, he drove us all around the Lower 48 for two months straight. He ate out at drive-throughs into his sixties and mourned the death of the drive-ins. He kept one wheelchair in the back seat so he could leave his house wheelchair parked in the carport, waiting for him. (An insanely loyal cocker spaniel usually guarded it in his absence and would growl at any of us if we got too near.) Whenever he could afford them, and sometimes when he couldn’t, he favored ragtop Cadillac coupes, even as they fell far from fashion. 

And if our mother wasn’t in the car with us and the mood happened to take him, he would often aim the vehicle at a tempting hill, gunning the engine until we hit 90 or more, his hand-control holding the pedal to the floor. When we hit the hilltop, he’d release the lever and let us soar out and drop, our stomachs momentarily sinking as we levitated, before the Caddy came back to ground on the asphalt with a squish of its cushy shocks. “Do it again, Dad,” we’d shriek in unison. “Do it again!”