For Bob Strantz, a drivers` education teacher, terror wears many faces.
Sometimes it looks like his student drivers.
Like the angry student who tried, kamikaze-style, to crash the driving school`s car, with Strantz in it, into another vehicle.
Occasionally it resembles other drivers.
Like the woman who smashed her barge of a station wagon into his side of the driving school`s car.
Then, at times it has taken the form of passersby.
Like the large gang, wielding bats, that he and a student found themselves in the path of after he instructed her to pull into an alley to practice backing up.
Certain jobs are widely known to require nerves of steel: test piloting and neurosurgery, for instance. Teaching drivers` ed in Chicago isn`t quite the same as performing brain surgery or taking an experimental air-
craft supersonic. But assuredly it isn`t for the fainthearted.
Chicago, like New York or Los Angeles, is the fast lane. And teaching driving in the fast lane can be, well, frightening.
The thought of having to sit in a car piloted by some awkward 16-year-old or middle-age Nervous Nellie on her first lesson would probably be troubling enough anywhere. But in Chicago, those concerns are intensified by the heavy traffic, frequently nasty pedestrians and even nastier weather, especially at this time of year.
Then there are the rogue drivers who positively delight in tormenting driving students, easy targets because of the ”geek sign” (as some students scornfully call it) atop the instructional cars.
What it comes down to is, ”You have to get used to being scared out of your mind on a daily basis,” said Strantz, who teaches as many as 500 new drivers a year. Strantz, 39, is chief instructor at the John Hancock Driving School on North Central Avenue on the Northwest Side.
Strantz and his wife, Sandy, bought John Hancock about seven years ago.
”We don`t know why the prior owner named it what he did,” said Bob.
”Either he was in the John Hancock tower when he started or planned to move there one day.” Said Sandy: ”It`s a good, solid name. People are more likely to call John Hancock than Joe Blow.” Hancock`s business card reads:
”Nervous People our Specialty.”
During a recent gray winter`s afternoon, first in his school`s pleasant rehabbed storefront, then on the road with some students, Strantz chatted about the driving instructor`s world.
He began with something that has long puzzled him. ”New students have a tendency to think they`re going to fall into a pothole, destroy the car and get yelled at,” he said. ”I don`t know why they have this intense fear, but they do. They`ll stare at the pavement. I have to tell them, `You watch the cars ahead and the lights and I`ll watch the pavement.` They`re also afraid there`ll be mufflers on the roadway. Sure this happens, but not as much as they think.
”We`ve taught people from 15 all the way to 85,” said Strantz. ”You`re never too old to learn to drive as long as the mind is sharp.”
The chauffeuring stops
His school is in a polyglot neighborhood where a Korean Baptist church stands close by a Polish restaurant. ”We get (immigrants) from all over the world, that`s one of the nice parts of this job,” said Strantz. ”Last month there was a lady from Nigeria and another from Egypt. This month we`ve got students from Jamaica, Greece and Poland.” Strantz said he speaks enough Spanish and Japanese to say, `Turn right,` `Left` or `Stop,` but that`s about it when it comes to foreign languages. So a backseat interpreter isn`t uncommon in his car.
”About 50 percent of the business is widows or recent divorcees,” said Strantz. ”These were women who were chauffeured by their parents as teenagers. Then they got married and were chauffeured by their husbands. They never thought they`d ever have to learn to drive. But the husband passes away or a divorce happens, and suddenly there`s this car just sitting in the garage.”
Teaching someone, especially a family member or friend, how to drive can be difficult without being driven to exasperation, blind fear-or worse.
Strantz remembers instructing one woman whose boyfriend had first tried to teach her to drive. During her lesson the sun began to set, causing her to remove her oversize sunglasses. She had a huge black eye.
”She told me she and her boyfriend got into a fight as he was teaching her and he punched her out right in the car,” said Strantz.
In his job, said Strantz, ”You have to take the attitude that new cooks ruin food. They`re going to make mistakes.”
About 25 percent of his students are teenagers, said Strantz. Illinois requires that before anyone younger than 18 can take the state road test, he or she must complete drivers` ed, either through high school or a commercial establishment that provides at least 30 hours of classroom training and six hours on the road.
”Most good drivers` ed teachers would tell you that six hours behind the wheel isn`t enough time to turn a teenager into a good driver,” said Strantz. But smaller high school districts have resisted more road time for students as too costly, he said.
High schools can have waiting lists. Thus many teens, impatient to begin cruising or driving to malls, prefer to enroll in a course like Hancock`s, which runs $175 on average.
High schoolers tend to be really motivated learners, at least when it comes to driving lessons. ”It`s not like my brother-in-law. He teaches history at Senn and has to just about beat the kids over the head to get them to pay attention,” said Strantz.
Just as he`s bewildered by students` pothole phobia, Strantz is also puzzled by parents who live dangerously by giving their unlicensed children the car keys and allowing them to break the law by driving alone to drivers`
ed classes.
”This blows my mind,” said Strantz. ”A few months ago, this kid drives up in a 1991 Chevy Blazer. He came to class in it. I had to talk with his mother. `Lady, do you realize that if he has an accident the insurance company won`t cover it?` ”
So-called rush hour
Shortly, Strantz, two teenage students and his visitor left the school`s offices to take to the not-so-open road. It was now evening rush hour. ”When I was a kid (evening) rush hour was from 3:30 to 4:30, maybe 5,” said Strantz. ”Now it`s from 2:30 to 7.”
This makes it harder for him to get his students out on the highway when traffic has died down; it never seems to these days.
”I used to be able to plan on taking students out on certain roads between 9:30 and 3. Now I have to drive by first to make sure they`re not backed up. If it isn`t rush hour, road crews are fixing the thing.”
Nikki Hail, 16, and Gabriel Michelsen, 18, took turns at the wheel of the driving school`s late model Ford Escort, plying a circuit around the Northwest Side. Aside from six rearview mirrors, two brake pedals and the geek sign, it was like any other car.
Snow was in the forecast, but Hail and Michelsen hadn`t canceled. ”I tell my students it`s better to drive in the snow with me than to have the first time they drive in the snow be by themselves as new drivers,” said Strantz.
Generally, adults are more fearful about driving than teenagers, he said. ”I`ve had students who, when they see another car coming up the street towards them, take their hands off the wheel and do this,” he said, covering his eyes with his hands.
Whereas adults fear for their lives, teens fear for their egos. They`re afraid of the kidding they`ll get if their buddies spot them under a geek sign. ”Some kids want us to pick them up two blocks away from school or at a friend`s house,” said Strantz.
Playing chicken
Youngsters can indeed be cruel to those operating drivers` ed cars. On a quiet street in progressive and sensitive Oak Park, Michelsen was practicing backing up when one of two teenage passersby, an insensitive lout no doubt from a neighboring suburb, guffawed loud enough to be heard a block away.
”Was that guy laughing at me or somebody else?” asked a rattled and embarrassed Michelsen.
”He was laughing at you,” said Strantz. ”I`ll laugh too if you run over this lawn.”
”I`m going to run him over,” huffed Michelsen, who couldn`t have even if he wanted to. Strantz, after all, would have stepped on his brake.
”There are people who intentionally pick on drivers` ed cars,” said Strantz. ”They`ll get the students all riled up. Tonight it`s been quiet because of the cold weather. But when it`s warm, it can happen every five or 10 minutes, people in cars or on the street, adding their two cents as you go by. Like they never had to learn how to drive.”
Strantz recalled the time he was teaching a gentle old woman when two kids, spotting the sign, dropped to their knees in front of the car and began crossing themselves. ”She said, `Isn`t it great there are children with religion.` I said `Lady, they`re making fun of you.` ”
Then there are people who play a game of chicken with drivers` ed cars.
”They say, `Hey, watch me scare this guy,` ” said Strantz.
The geek sign isn`t supposed to be a target, said Strantz. ”It says,
`Yes, we`re out here and we`re a hazard to traffic.` ”
Strantz said he is proud that his students have never crashed into another car during their lessons. But while teaching he has been rear-ended five or six times by drivers who either weren`t taught or forgot what Strantz kept repeating to Hail and Michelsen throughout the evening: ”When you pull up to stop, make sure you can see the rear tires of the car in front of you.” A car crash was Strantz`s most terrifying moment as an instructor. As his student tried to turn left off Fullerton Avenue onto Western Avenue, another driver crashed her Country Squire station wagon into the front of the school`s car.
”She said she didn`t see the light,” said Strantz. ”Her hood came to rest so close to me I could reach out and touch it. Our car was totaled, the wheel and MacPherson strut were ripped right off. Her car lost the front license plate bracket.
”I was lucky. There`ve been other driving teachers, people we`ve known, who`ve been killed doing this.”
Pity the testers
Strantz instructed Hail to drive over to the secretary of state`s facility on North Elston Avenue so she could rehearse the licensing road test she would soon be taking. Other neophyte drivers before her had literally left their marks on the facility. A chain-link fence sagged and a directional sign was contorted.
”The guys I really feel sorry for are the testers out here,” said Strantz. ”At least we know the skill level of the people we get in the car with. They have no idea. We have a brake on our side too.”
As in any teacher-pupil relationship, there are times when Strantz hasn`t seen eye to eye with his students. One student once arrived carrying a newspaper, which she began to spread out on the car`s seat.
”I asked her what she was doing,” said Strantz. ”The car was clean. I had just cleaned it. She said she was suffering from diarrhea and just wanted to be safe. I told her I didn`t think it was a good idea to go out. She insisted it`d be all right. I told her to go upstairs and we`d drive when she was better. She said no. I won. It was my car.”
Then there was the immigrant who wanted Strantz to drive him to the state`s road test facility even though Strantz told him he wasn`t yet skilled enough to take the test. The man grew angry and announced that he was intentionally going to crash the car if he didn`t get his way.
”He tried to ram my car into a parked car,” said Strantz. ”I slammed on the brake, grabbed the key out of the ignition. Walked around to his side and told him his lesson was over.” Strantz said he left the driving terrorist standing in sandals in the snow somewhere on the North Side.
For Strantz, the risks he runs during workdays, which can stretch for 14 hours during the busy warm months, are offset by his job`s tangible rewards.
”I really enjoy having somebody who can`t drive a lick, and three or four weeks later they have a license,” he said. ”There`s a great sense of satisfaction. There aren`t that many jobs that give you that.”
