During my dad’s career, he wrote thousands of columns on every subject imaginable – from the mundane to the lofty. He wrote about anything that interested him, and everything interested him. Here is one of his columns from March 24, 1983.
JACK M. AZEVEDO faces his day of reckoning in court soon. 1 hope the jury will deal gently with him. Azevedo is an unemployed Sacramento resident who drove his pickup truck backward for 50 miles along Interstate 80 in February and got ticketed in the process.
As an incompetent backer of motor vehicles, I have to admire a person who could go that far in reverse without hitting the guard-rail or anything else, as he apparently did.
Azevedo has what he considers a good excuse, which he hopes the jury will accept and acquit him. The penalty if he loses is $30.
He had driven, forward, in his 1956 vehicle to Reno, Nevada to pick up a clothes dryer that a friend was willing to lend to replace the Azevedos dryer, which had broken down.
Accompanying him on the journey were his wife, Linda, and their two small sons.
On the way back to Sacramento, they made a rest stop in a place called Nyack. At this point, the forward speeds in the pickup’s automatic transmission gave out.
The proprietor of Nyack’s only garage said such a repair job was beyond him. A tow to Sacramento would be $85, and Azevedo had only half of his last unemployment check left.
So, he decided to start backing. I have to think that was a courageous decision.
Sometimes, in the morning, I will start out for the office, get a few hundred feet down the street, and realize that I forgot something.
I COULD pull into a driveway, turn around, and drive back to the house.
But often I elect to just back up.
I do that more now that I have a car, a small station wagon really, with a wiper on the rear window to remove the dew and fog.
Almost as soon as I start backing, I seem to develop the beginnings of a crick in my neck from glancing over my shoulder out the back window.
For some reason, I never know which way to turn the steering wheel, when backing up, to get the car to respond in the way I want.
I have a similar problem trying to tie a necktie while looking in the mirror. I can do it as long as I don’t look.
Unfortunately, one cannot drive without looking.
The result is a process of almost continuous compensation on the steering wheel, and a wandering path up the street. I have never hit anything, though.
Tring to back with a two-wheel trailer affixed to the car is even more hopeless. On the few occasions when I have rented one, I roll it into the driveway by hand, then back the car in and hook it up.
I should possibly blame my driving school teacher for this failure. Except for brief instruction in parallel parking, which involves a minor amount of reverse gear, I was never taught to handle the car in this mode.
There are, as far as I know, no quoted mileage figures for backing, either in country or city driving.
Azevedo averaged a solid seven miles an hour for the 50 miles he covered, but his gasoline consumption is not stated in the account of his adventure that I read.
Unstated, too, is whether the pickup overheated.
HE WAS ticketed in a place called Newcastle in Placer County. He told officers that he had no choice in making the journey. One of his boys, he said, had a broken leg in a cast, and he had been advised by the doctor who set it to keep the boy warm.
It gets mighty chilly in that part of the state on February evenings.
Azevedo has one further defense, of a technical nature. His ticket accuses him of going westbound on the eastbound side of the freeway. He was actually going westbound on the westbound side.
After he got back to Sacramento, he had the transmission replaced. A couple of weeks later, the differential gave out.
He blames the unaccustomed strain of 50 miles of backing for that.
