Yesterday my sister and I drove down to Tacoma, to the Marymount campus of the LeMay collection, where she had arranged for us to take a little class on driving a Model T Ford.
The LeMay collection at one time was the largest private auto collection in the world. Harold LeMay, who made a fortune hauling garbage, had a sort of magpie instinct for collecting all kinds of stuff—but mostly cars. After his death, the family set up America’s Car Museum, a fancy museum in Tacoma, and kept a couple of the other sites where he stashed his stuff. Marymount is a former Catholic military academy which he bought, and all its buildings are stuffed full of cars, everything from a Powell pickup to a Stutz boattail to a Tempo Matador truck to an Ultravan.
Anyway, as a fund-raiser, they offer a class in driving the Model T Ford. There’s a nice little classroom lecture on the history and impact of the T, and a session where you actually get to drive on.
Driving a T, as you might know, is very very different from driving a modern car. The throttle is a hand lever on the right side of the steering column. And the gearbox is controlled by foot pedals: The right-hand pedal is the brake; the center one engages Reverse; and the left-hand one, ah, the left hand one!
It controls the forward speeds, in conjunction with the emergency brake lever. If you depress the left pedal, the car is in Low. If you release the pedal, with the brake lever in the aft or center position, the car is in neutral. But if you release the pedal with the brake lever in the forward position, you are in High gear.
Oh, and the brakes are crap.
So here’s how you start it: You yank the spring-loaded choke knob a couple times (I think it’s not really a choke in the modern sense, which chokes off the airflow to the carburetor to give a richer mixture; I think it actually squirts raw gasoline into the carburetor throat). Set the spark lever (left side of the steering column) to full retard (up), and the throttle lever to about 2 notches open. Put your right foot on the brake (right-hand) pedal. Turn on the ignition (key-operated switch on the dashboard). Depress the electric start button on the floor just ahead of the seat with your left heel. (All the LeMay Ts have been retrofitted with electric start; one of the volunteers demonstrates crank starting, and it looks like no fun at all.)
The engine, if it’s warm, gives a sort of reluctant grunting noise, and then burps into action. Move the spark lever to advanced (downward) and move the throttle lever up all the way, and the thing settles into an agricultural-sounding idle. Since the brake lever is in the full-aft position and your foot is off the left pedal, you’re in neutral, with the parking brake applied.
Now let’s get Nancy into motion. (The LeMay T’s all have names, because they all look pretty much alike otherwise. 
) Nancy is a 1924 touring car. It’s surprisingly roomy, although the narrow body means you’re touching shoulders with your seatmate. The top is up; hey, this is western Washington in the spring, and it’s been raining off and on all week.
You move the brake lever to the center position, releasing the parking brake. You open the throttle a bit (the engine revs up with a meaty-sounding growl) and carefully you depress the left-hand pedal, putting the car into low; and with a lurch, you’re off! You adjust the throttle to get the speed you want, maybe ten miles an hour.
The noise is enormous. The car has no sound-proofing whatsoever; through your left foot you can feel every vibration of the engine. You aren’t cold; the firewall has no insulation, either, and the engine and exhaust pipe are keeping your legs and feet nice and warm. And two strong men are pushing the left pedal back up, so it’s quite an effort to hold it down.
LeMay has a trail going through the woods, maybe half a mile loop, with plenty of up-and-down. The car lurches and bounces on the rough road, and you have to keep a firm grip on the steering wheel as it hits potholes and ruts. The steering wheel, incidentally, is the only control on a T that is anything like a modern car.
You control your speed with the hand throttle. Think about all the little adjustments you make with your foot as you drive a normal can: More gas as you go uphill, less as you go downhill; well, you’re doing all those things with that little hand throttle lever now.
Now there’s a steep downhill. The instructor tells you to let the car coast down braked by the engine’s compression, so you move the throttle lever up, slowing the engine, and roll over the crest of the hill. She also tells you not to ride the brake (right-hand-pedal) because if you do, you’ll wear the band. This is a common theme in her instruction; when pushing a pedal, don’t slip it like you would a modern clutch. Commit! Push that pedal with conviction! Because if you wear out a band, she has sworn to make you change it yourself, and it’s a greasy, messy, awkward job way down inside the transmission somewhere.
By now your left leg, holding down that pedal, is just aching. I was able to brace my butt against the back of the seat and sort of lock my knee, but jeez, our ancestors must have been men of iron.
The T rolls down the hill just fine. In low gear, the compression braking effect is prodigious. The thing is really competent at what it’s built for: Almost unstoppable transportation on marginal roads.
Now, down in the valley, the road straightens out, and we can shift into High gear. Move the brake lever to the full forward position. This “arms” High gear, in modern jetliner parlance. Now, simultaneously, move the throttle lever up a bit, slowing the engine, and take your foot off the left pedal. The car gives a bit of a lurch, and you’re in high gear, barreling along at a fairly terrifying 25 miles an hour or so.
Remember, for all practical purposes you’ve got no brakes. The car judders down the gravel road. The steering has a large dead spot at the center, but once the mechanism runs out of slack, the steering is quick and direct.
When her turn comes, my sister, feeling bold, swerves out onto the adjacent grassy field. The car does just fine, bounding along happily over the swales; remember, this car was designed for crappy-to-nonexistent roads. Sis is in the wrong gear (High) and ends up stalling it, but you can see that the T is clearly in its element.
At the end of the straight is a hairpin curve, followed by a steep uphill. You shift back down into low (brake lever to center position, then stomp on the right-hand pedal while adjusting the hand throttle to match rpms), cruise sedately but noisily around the curve and start up the hill. You pull the hand throttle down, giving the engine more gas, and it churns up the hill just like a tractor would, with no particular fuss except for the noise.
There’s some knucklehead in a golf cart coming down the hill, against the flow of traffic. “Don’t stop,” the instructor cautions, “we’ll never get started again.” Apparently juggling the hand throttle, the right-hand (brake) pedal, and the left-hand pedal all at once is super challenging, even for experienced drivers. The golf cart pulls over, and we chug up past him. Disaster averted.
We bounce through a small work area, past the restoration shop, and onto pavement. On the paved driveways around the school, the car rides smoothly and, without the ruts of the gravel loop, tracks pretty well.
And now it’s time to stop and give Sis a turn. Okay, move the throttle lever up to slow the engine, take your foot off the left pedal (you’re in neutral now, for those of you who are keeping score at home), and use the brake (right pedal) to slow to a stop. Pull the brake lever all the way back to set the parking brake, and there you sit, ears ringing a bit, left leg aching.
It’s great.
Because of the low enrollment, Sis and I got more driving time than usual; we each take the T out four times, four circuits of the gravel trail. Our instructor is patient and cheerful; she’s a dental hygienist in real life, and she and her husband own a T of their own. She tells a hair-raising story of driving through a snowstorm; she ended up kneeling on the passenger-side floor, reaching up through the windshield slot, wiping snow off the windshield with her hand so her husband could see to drive. The other T, following them, has no such windshield-wiping help and darned near rear-ends them when they stop.
Afterward, one of the volunteers gives a nice little lecture about the T. 15 million of them built, and at one time half the cars in the world were Ts. You can see why; it’s a competent, cheap, reliable vehicle, ideally suited to its milieu.
The Mustang, incidentallly, had gauges that were mechanically identical to those in my 1947 Hudson.