This is such an outstanding story.... No wonder he won a Pulitzer. This
is a
wonderful piece by Michael Gartner, editor of newspapers large and small
and
president of NBC News. In 1997, he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial
writing. Well worth reading... and a few good laughs are guaranteed. . .

My father never drove a car. Well, that's not quite right. I should say
I
never saw him drive a car. He quit driving in 1927, when he was 25 years

old, and the last car he drove was a 1926 Whippet.

"In those days," he told me when he was in his 90s, "to drive a car you
had
to do things with your hands, and do things with your feet, and look
every
which way, and I decided you could walk through life and enjoy it or
drive
through life and miss it."

At which point my mother chimed in.

She said, "He hit a horse."

"Well," my father said, "there was that, too."

So my brother and I grew up in a household without a car. The neighbors
all
had cars -- the Kollingses next door had a green 1941 Dodge, the
VanLaninghams across the street a gray 1936 Plymouth, the Hopsons two
doors
down a black 1941 Ford -- but we had none.

My father, a newspaperman in Des Moines, would take the streetcar to
work
and, often as not, walk the 3 miles home. If he took the streetcar home,
my
mother and brother and I would walk the three blocks to the streetcar
stop,
meet him and walk home together.

My brother, David, was born in 1935, and I was born in 1938, and
sometimes,
at dinner, we would ask how come all the neighbors had cars but we had
none.
"No one in the family drives," my mother would explain, and that was
that.
But, sometimes, my father would say, "But as soon as one of you boys
turns
16, we will get one."

It was as if he wasn't sure which one of us would turn 16 first.

But, sure enough, my brother turned 16 before I did, so in 1951 my
parents
bought a used 1950 Chevrolet from a friend who ran the parts department
at a
Chevy dealership downtown. It was a four-door, white model, stick shift,

fender skirts, loaded with everything, and, since my parents didn't
drive,
it more or less became my brother's car.

Having a car but not being able to drive didn't bother my father, but it

didn't make sense to my mother. So in 1952, when she was 43 years old,
she
asked a friend to teach her to drive. She learned in a nearby cemetery,
the
place where I learned to drive the following year and where, and a
generation later, I took my two sons to practice driving.

The cemetery probably was my father's idea. "Who can your mother hurt in
the
cemetery?" I remember him saying once.

For the next 45 years or so, until she was 90, my mother was the driver
in
the family. Neither she nor my father had any sense of direction, but he

loaded up on maps -- though they seldom left the city limits -- and
appointed himself navigator. It seemed to work.

Still, they both continued to walk a lot. My mother was a devout
Catholic,
and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn't
seem to
bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75
years,
and they were deeply in love the entire time.)

He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20
years or
so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin's Church. She would
walk
down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he
saw
which of the parish's two priests was on duty that morning.

If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile
walk,
meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it
was
the assistant pastor, he would take just a 1-mile walk and then head
back to
the church. He called the priests "Father Fast" and "Father Slow."

After he retired, my father almost always accompanied my mother whenever
she
drove anywhere, even if he had no reason to go along. If she were going
to
the beauty parlor, he would sit in the car and read, or go take a stroll
or,
if it was summer, have her keep the engine running so he could listen to
the
Cubs game on the radio.

In the evening, then, when I would stop by, he would explain: "The Cubs
lost
again. The millionaire on second base made a bad throw to the
millionaire on
first base, so the multimillionaire on third base scored."

If she were going to the grocery store, he would go along to carry the
bags
out -- and to make sure she loaded up on ice cream.

As I said, he was always the navigator, and once, when he was 95 and she
was
88 and still driving, he said to me, "Do you want to know the secret of
a
long life?"

"I guess so," I said, knowing it probably would be something bizarre.

"No left turns," he said.

"What?" I asked.

"No left turns," he repeated. "Several years ago, your mother and I read
an
article that said most accidents that old people are in happen when they

turn left in front of oncoming traffic. As you get older, your eyesight
worsens, and you can lose your depth perception, it said. So your mother
and
I decided never again to make a left turn."

"What?" I said again.

"No left turns," he said. "Think about it. Three rights are the same as
a
left, and that's a lot safer. So we always make three rights."

"You are kidding!" I said, and I turned to my mother for support.

"No," she said, "your father is right. We make three rights. It works."
But
then she added, "except when your father loses count."

I was driving at the time, and I almost drove off the road as I started
laughing. "Loses count?" I asked. "Yes," my father admitted, "that
sometimes
happens. But it's not a problem. You just make seven rights, and you are

okay again."

I couldn't resist. "Do you ever go for 11?" I asked.

"No," he said. "If we miss it at seven, we just come home and call it a
bad
day. Besides, nothing in life is so important it can't be put off
another
day or another week."

My mother was never in an accident, but one evening she handed me her
car
keys and said she had decided to quit driving. That was in
1999, when she was 90. She lived four more years, until 2003. My father
died
the next year, at 102. They both died in the bungalow they had moved
into in
1937 and bought a few years later for $3,000. (Sixty years later, my
brother
and I paid $8,000 to have a shower put in the tiny bathroom -- the house

had never had one. My father would have died then and there if he knew
the
shower cost nearly three times what he paid for the house.)

He continued to walk daily -- he had me get him a treadmill when he was
101
because he was afraid he would fall on the icy sidewalks but wanted to
keep
exercising -- and he was of sound mind and sound body until the moment
he
died.

One September afternoon in 2004, he and my son went with me when I had
to
give a talk in a neighboring town, and it was clear to all three of us
that
he was wearing out, though we had the usual wide-ranging conversation
about
politics and newspapers and things in the news. A few weeks earlier, he
had
told my son, "You know, Mike, the first hundred years are a lot easier
than
the second hundred." At one point in our drive that Saturday, he said,
"You
know, I am probably not going to live much longer."

"You are probably right," I said.

"Why would you say that?" He countered, somewhat irritated.

"Because you are 102 years old," I said.

"Yes," he said, "you are right." He stayed in bed all the next day.

That night, I suggested to my son and daughter that we sit up with him
through the night. He appreciated it, he said, though at one point,
apparently seeing us look gloomy, he said, "I would like to make an
announcement. No one in this room is dead yet."

An hour or so later, he spoke his last words: "I want you to know," he
said,
clearly and lucidly, "that I am in no pain. I am very comfortable. And I

have had as happy a life as anyone on this earth could ever have." A
short
time later, he died.

I miss him a lot, and I think about him a lot. I have wondered now and
then
how it was that my family and I were so lucky that he lived so long.

I can't figure out if it was because he walked through life or because
he
quit taking left turns.