A youthful experience before the bar of justice
At this point, my father, who had been silent throughout, asked if he might be permitted to say something, and the judge told him to go ahead.
I’ve already told this story here before, but I’m not feeling well and I’m very tired, and I thought that I could maybe smooth out the retelling of it for eventual inclusion in my personal history:
I received my California driver’s license when I was sixteen, and I graduated from high school when I was seventeen. Between those two events, I managed to garner two driving tickets.
In the wake of the first ticket, my license was suspended for a month. And strictly speaking, although Innocence is virtually my middle name, I deserved it.
I was coming home from the local public library (of all places) on a Wednesday night. I was minding my own business, happy with the books and records that I’d snared, when a carload of idiots presumably from my high school roared by, hanging out their windows, yelling my name, and waving. Curious what they were yelling about and who they were, I foolishly sped up to catch them. (I was a sixteen-year-old male, and I was thinking like one.) As might have been predicted, I didn’t catch them, and in fact I never found out exactly who they were, though the policeman who turned on his lights and directed me to pull over and stay put apparently went on to get them before returning to me. In any event, I was given a speeding ticket very shortly after my acceleration to warp speed.
The judge suspended my license for a month. My parents weren’t especially pleased, and the next several weeks passed very slowly..
Finally, though, my license was returned to me.
Shortly after I received my driving privileges back, though, I was out on a Saturday night date with my principal high school flame. Still chastened from my recent suspension, I was driving (I thought) quite carefully. We were headed home, and were roughly in the vicinity of Dodger Stadium. She was sitting close to me, and I changed lanes in preparation for getting off of the Golden State Freeway and onto the San Bernardino Freeway. (In those days, we — or, at least, my family and I — didn’t typically use freeway numbers. We used names. But to translate it into current vernacular, I was preparing to leave the southbound I-5 for the eastbound I-10.)
I had looked to my right and into the rear-view mirror and had seen no problem, so I flipped on my turn-signal. Unfortunately, though, presumably because he was in my blind spot and because, with my girlfriend cozied very gratifyingly up to my side, I didn’t turn around to look as well as I should have, I changed lanes right in front of a California Highway Patrol car, which I hadn’t seen. I was given a ticket for an unsafe lane change.
This, I knew, would be serious. I might lose the right to drive for a significant length of time. And it would definitely not play well with the parental units.
I was given a court date for a venue right downtown, in, as I recall, the Los Angeles County Courthouse. (It wasn’t far, after all, from the junction of the I-5 and the I-10.) When the appointed day of doom arrived – it was a weekday and, therefore, a workday for him — my father went with me, no doubt anticipating (as I did) that he would be obliged to drive me home after my meeting with the traffic judge.
We met with the judge privately, in his office. He was an impressive fellow with an appropriately stern demeanor who looked — and this will mean something to older folks who lived in Los Angeles during the appropriate era — almost exactly like the already quasi-legendary Los Angeles news broadcaster Jerry Dunphy (d. 2002), distinguished white hair included. Mr. Dunphy’s locally-famous nightly intro (“From the desert to the sea, to all of Southern California, a good evening”) was instantly recognizable to everybody in the area; he regularly appeared in television shows and movies playing a news anchorman (because he just simply looked perfect for the part).
The judge stressed how dangerous my lane-change on the freeway had been, and how bad my driving must have been to have merited not one but two tickets in such a short space of time.
I could say little in return. I had no real defense. I had definitely deserved my first ticket, though it seemed really bad luck. As for the second, I had genuinely been trying to drive well. I guess I just hadn’t understood how big my car’s blind spot was, nor how well most of a black and white Highway Patrol vehicle might blend into the nighttime darkness.
After we had spoken for a while, he asked me whether I could think of any reason why he shouldn’t take my license away. I expressed sincere remorse. But I also meekly responded that, no, I really couldn’t think of any good reason why he shouldn’t take it away. I told him that I wasn’t actually a bad or careless driver but that, well, if that’s what he had to do, I would have to find a way to live with it. (Inwardly, of course, I was agonizing about how this was going to cripple my social life, which revolved around my girlfriend, and my musical life, which involved several specific nightclubs, mostly in Pasadena and in Westwood, where I was a frequent visitor along with some of my musically-inclined friends. How long might a second suspension last?)
At this point, my father, who had been silent throughout, asked if he might be permitted to say something, and the judge told him to go ahead.
My father – who, at this point, was still a non-practicing Lutheran — explained that I attended a daily early morning church class before going to my high school, and that, if I couldn’t drive, either I would have to drop out of attendance or else one or the other of my parents would have to pick me up and take me there. He said that, although they could probably manage it, this would be awkward and significantly inconvenient. He didn’t mention the name of the church.
The judge sat back in his chair, smiled, and said that he thought that maybe an exception could be made for a good Mormon boy. He told me that he would expunge this latest offense from my record, but that he expected me to drive more carefully in the future, not to repeat such nonsense, and not to be back in front of him ever again.
I don’t know the judge’s name. I assume, but I don’t actually know, that he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In any case, I floated out of the judge’s office with the thought going through my ecstatic adolescent mind over and over again, “The Church is true!”
