On Stop Signs and Safety in 1969

Little brother in his Airplane Letter days

I’ve written before about my youngest brother learning his alphabet—how we sent him on reconnoitering missions around the card table to find where the Airplane letters were. That was the summer of 1969, shortly before he turned two.

By the time little brother’s second birthday rolled around in November 1969, he was beginning to put those letters into words. The first word I remember him spelling out was “S T O P,” which he learned from the stop signs on drives with our mother.

During 1969, I was a ninth grader at Chief Joseph Junior High School, the brother right behind me was in 7th grade at Christ the King Catholic Church, our sister was five years old and in October had been moved from kindergarten into first grade (as I had done many years earlier), and she also was at Christ the King, but on a different schedule than the seventh graders.

So this youngest brother was the only child in the family not yet in school.

A Ford Falcon station wagon from the late ’60s

Our mother drove hither and yon getting kids to their various schools and other activities. I was taking piano and guitar lessons that year. I don’t remember what the other kids were doing—Boy Scouts, maybe swimming, maybe something else. Mother was always in the car, a little Ford Falcon station wagon that my parents still owned when I learned to drive a few years later.

Little brother used to stand upright on the front passenger seat of that Falcon station wagon while Mother did her errands and chauffeuring. There were no child safety seat laws in those days. And no seat belt laws for drivers or passengers, children or adults. It’s amazing we all grew up without being maimed.

The year before, when I’d been in the 8th grade at Christ the King, Mother had been part of a maternal carpool. The mothers of Catholic school 8th graders taking Algebra at the public school had to drive their kids from first period Algebra to Christ the King every morning. When it was my mother’s turn, I sat in the front seat with her and little brother, the three other girls in the group sat in the back seat, and the two boys squeezed themselves into the back cargo area of the station wagon. No seatbelts.

During that carpool and on Mother’s other errands and chauffeuring trips, little brother stood on that front seat and pointed at all the traffic signs. Mother would read the letters and the words on the signs to him, and soon he could do it by himself.

“S . . . T . . .  O . . . P — Stop!” he crowed.

And Mother would stop. Because she was a very law-abiding and careful driver. Maybe that’s how we all survived without being maimed.

This week, that little brother turns fifty-one. He still knows his letters and traffic signs. But now he wears a seatbelt.

What do you remember about your siblings as toddlers?