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I Know When Not To Try To Change A Tire Myself

I remember that the tire was on a wheel.

Actually, the setup was an entire wheel assembly (tire, wheel with lug nuts, tie rod end, part of an axle, etc.) topped by a large, gray fender.

On a nearby table were two lug wrenches. One was a crowbar blade at one end of a straight bar and a lug socket at the other end. The second was two bars welded together in the middle, with lug wrench sockets of four different sizes on its ends.

The year was 1958 or perhaps 1959. The venue was the ancient Warren High School, built in the 1880s and torn down two years later.

Driver education class. Remember that?

There were two driver education teachers that I recall. Mr. Joe Massa was an effervescent day-brightener, always armed with a rolled-up copy of that day’s newspaper. He whapped us cheerfully with the newspaper, without regard to gender. Nobody took offense. Mr. Massa was a nice guy.

Then there was Mr. Greg Springer. He was large, squarish, graying and dour.

He was my teacher.

Mr. Springer was also a good teacher. He just was not very cheerful. When he whapped one of us, a common event in high schools in the 1950s, we were, achingly whapped, usually with a yardstick or a textbook.

He taught us how to change a tire on a motor vehicle.

Last week, almost 60 full years later, I stood beside my pickup truck in the parking lot of a Sheetz restaurant 10 miles outside Pittsburgh, next to the Pennsylvania Turnpike’s intersection with Route 28. I watched helplessly as my truck’s left front tire hissed its way to rim-on-pavement flatness. The truck had run over a hunk of cable in a construction site, tearing up its tread.

I reviewed those long-ago instructions from Mr. Springer: line up jack, jack handle, other tools; block the diagonally opposite wheel to keep the vehicle from drifting; loosen lug nuts before lifting the tire; use the jack to lift the truck so that the entire tire, even the not-yet-flat part, would come out below the fender; remove lug nuts and put them inside the overturned hubcap or some other nearby place that kept them from sliding down into a sewer grate; remove the tire; free up the spare tire.

Then reverse the entire process to install the spare tire.

I remembered.

Oh, how I remembered.

That’s why I called roadside assistance immediately.

Between 1958 and now, I have changed a dozen or more flat tires. Eventually, I would succeed. The cost would wrench backs, bruise or cut foreheads, skin knuckles, wet-through clothing from lying on the ground, and a refresher course in the entire lexicon of bad words, English, Italian, German, even Russian, that I had accumulated during those decades.

So, as I said, I called roadside assistance. I will be 76 years old in two more months. I have the coverage as part of my insurance policy, for what is to me a startlingly inexpensive fee.

I am delighted that I did so.

The young fellow zoomed up in an SUV He unloaded a sturdy floor jack and a battery powered drill-driver he used as a lug wrench. He wasted no motions, not even when, at first, the three-piece set that connects to form the rod that lowers the spare from beneath the bed of the pickup would not grab the rectangular nut above the spare tire.

It took only a few tries to prompt him to connect the pieces in 1-2-3 order, not 2-1-3 order as I had done while trying to be helpful. The retaining cable dropped right down to the ground. The tire did not, at first; it was held in place by four years of road grime, dirt and gunk.

A few taps with his hammer loosened it. He knew where to lie down, and where not to be. Had I tried that, the tire would have fallen onto my head, or worse.

Zippity quickly, about 20 minutes later, we were en route back to the Mother Earth News Fair that had beckoned us to the Seven Springs ski/event resort.

I long ago lost track of Mr. Greg Springer. My presumption is that he is now in Driver Ed Teacher Heaven, dourly whapping students with yardsticks while imparting excellent instruction.

I murmured a prayer for his soul, mingled with gratitude that his long-ago teaching stuck with me to the point where I now know better than to try such foolishness as changing a tire on a full-size pickup at fragile-bone age, equipped only with a feeble hand-operated lug wrench and a teeny weeny factory supplied bumper jack.

“Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit,” said Miles Kington, the recently deceased British author.

“Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.”

Or not trying to change that tire by myself these days.

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