Does anyone else remember how in the 50’s through to the early 80’s every sitcom would have an episode where the teenager is taking Drivers Education lessons, and he was driving in a car with his instructor where they both had steering wheels so the instructor would often be forced to directly intervene in the driving lesson?
I always wondered if those were real things or not. I know cars with 2 steering wheels exist but I can’t imagine a driving school would pay tens of thousands of dollars custom made for them when they could just buy a cheap used car or do what my drivers ed class actually did, force me to provide my parents car to drive in,
Shhhh! My wife needs to remain ignorant of this option…
In the late 60s, I took Drivers’ Ed with cars the school owned. They were equipped with a huge brake pedal on the passenger’s side.
(That was because of Brenda. I was paired with her, and while she was starting to brake when she got to the red light, I’d be cowering in the back seat, aiming my head at the back of her headrest, knowing that’s how our drive would end.)
I took Driver’s Ed as an elective in high school, and the car was a 2 steering wheel car. In addition to that type of car no longer being popular, from what I gather Driver’s Ed is no longer taught in school.
The Driver’s Ed episode I remember is from The Brady Bunch. IIRC it was one of those deals where the instructor put an egg on a cone and they had to get close to it without knocking it off while parallel parking. Another trope I recall had to do with the instructor having a full cup of coffee and the person taking the exam had to avoid spilling any.
Was watching ‘Gilligan’s Island’ the other day. Part nostalgia value, part boredom / nothing else on. The Howells heard on the news over the radio that the minister who married them was not properly ordained, and everybody he married is not actually husband and wife. Must have been a slow news day in the South Pacific! They plan for Skipper to (re)marry them, but they get in an argument and almost don’t get (re)married! Fortunately cooler heads prevail, and Skipper manages to (re)marry them.
So that’s a common sitcom trope you don’t see anymore-- the couple, seemingly married for years find out due to a technicality they aren’t really married. Hijinks ensue before they finally seal the deal for real. I’m guessing it was a more popular trope back then because, in an era in which a husband and wife couldn’t even sleep in the same bed, the ‘not really married trope’ was a bit of TV-acceptable naughtiness. “Oooh, they’ve been living in S-I-N for years! Their children are bastards!” Nowadays, who would care?
Also, I don’t think a ship’s captain could marry them. That may have been true at one time, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t anymore.
On Dick Van Dyke the other day, the Petries had to get remarried because Laura lied about her age on the marriage application. No way could they bring themselves to say that Ritchie was a bastard!
The seed for those sitcoms was MAS*H, a once raucous comedy that decided they had to purge their characters of all negative traits. Which made the show much less funny.
Seinfeld and its “ensemble of misanthorpes” successors had the opposite problem of presenting people whose story I had no investment in because they were a-holes. Those shows devolved into ONLY working on a cartoonish/comedy level.
Funny you should mention that-- Skipper initially offers to (re)marry the Howells, to which the Professor points out that Skipper could only legally marry them at sea, so that path seems out, until Gilligan, in a rare helpful moment, asks “couldn’t we build a raft and float it in the lagoon?” To which the Professor says “great idea, Gilligan!” Seems like a bigger technical disqualification than whatever caused their first marriage to be invalid, but good enough for sitcom logic, I guess.
Of course the raft tips and sends everyone into the lagoon at the end, but not before the Howells are officially (re)married.
Let me quote from the Code of Federal Regulations, Title 32, Subtitle A, Chapter VI, Subchapter A, Part 700, Subpart G, Rule 716, also known as 32 CFR 700.716):
“The commanding officer shall not perform a marriage ceremony on board his ship or aircraft. He shall not permit a marriage ceremony to be performed on board when the ship or aircraft is outside the territory of the United States, except: (a) In accordance with local laws … and (b) In the presence of a diplomatic or consular official of the United States.”
Similarly, the official logbook supplied to ships’ captains by the British Mercantile Marine Office warns that shipboard marriages performed by the captain are not legal. If the ship is registered in New York state, the captain can be fined or imprisoned.
Service comedies are also a lost genre. In 1986 when I was operating a CCTV station onboard a Navy amphibious assault ship, and the Vietnam War was very much a legacy, the officers would have never tolerated MAS*H, and the enlisted would never have accepted Gomer Pyle. This left a cultural void. I did buy a copy of The Good Soldier Švejk from a San Diego bookstore, and passed it around a few shipmates where it was well-received.
At least one classic Twilight Zone episode (“The Silence”, which was very good but might have been better off as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents since it had no sci-fi or supernatural elements) took place in one of these clubs. It kind of brought home to me that when these episodes were being made (late 1950s/early 1960s), many people who’d been around in the late Victorian/early Edwardian eras were still alive, and these clubs were a vestige of that time.
Those clubs are still a thing, although they may not be esteemed by tech millionaires (although dropouts Gates and Zuckerberg have both been awarded honorary degrees and now may be admitted to the Harvard Club). In the 90’s my company did printing for the Rainer Club in Seattle, including the list of clubs with which it shared reciprocal memberships. While modern economics require them to rent out for weddings, they still all have sanctum sanctori of comfy leather upholstery straight out of Around the World in 80 Days
