Speaking of Hemmings (the absolute bible of collectible cars):
enjoy!
p.s. - the magazine is a delight - find it!
p.s. - Cars of the 30’s were all over the place in terms of weight, power, brakes, steering, etc - a Packard was a huge beast, the Model A was a quick little thing - and we won’t talk about the Auburns, Deusenbergs, Pierce-Arrows and other huge monsters of the age.
Is the OPer still with us?
racer72,you’ve gotta be thinking of another car, and not the T. All T’s had a planetary transmission controlled by three floor pedals, and no gearshift lever. Here’s a link:Driving a Model T
Of course, by 1927, this system was looking pretty antiquated, and the Model A, which superseded the T in 1928, had a conventional gearshift.
My earlier post may have come off a bit negative; there’s nothing like an old car for attracting attention! You tend to have the same conversations with strangers; I once thought about forestalling the inevitable first question by getting personalized plates: “ITSA 47” 
Just an observatyion.
Never have I heard[?] so many words on a subject from so many people who never experieced driving a 30s machine----especially not in the 30s.
To those few of you who actually might have actually spun an engine with a crank-----I salute you!
I wish I still had my 36 Ford sedan with the “continental” spare.
Well, I drove a few 30s autos in the 50s, most notably the 38 Chevy mentioned above.
I owned a Renault Dauphine that I often started with a crank, just to amuse folk. And, I have used a pull rope around the crank pulley of the old 36hp VW engines to start the things more than once.
Hey, come on. My Willys is practically a '30s vehicle!
So was my model A - and the question was re. driving a 30’s car NOW, not in the 30’s. So there 
no, I never used the crank - I like my bones intact, thank you.
Just watch your thumb and things are fine - I’ve started my MGA a couple times with the hand crank - it IS an old design!
I could say something very dirty about “cranks” and “bones”.
…they were called “slushboxes”. I guess the term came about because it was like driving a manual car with a slipping clutch-you had toreally rev up the engine before you got any forward motion!
Anyway, those oldfluid drive transmissions-were they reliable? It seems to me that americans happily drove manual-transmission cars for well into the 1950’s…now,less than 5% of new cars come with manuals.
How about the danger factors? A 1930’s car is not built to crumple in a crash-and that hard steel dashboard has got to hurt!
My Hudson and Plymouth both had monstrous steel frames under them, so I wasn’t worried about crumpling; what I was worried about was being skewered on the steering column. There’s a reason one of the first safety improvements they did on cars, back in the 70’s, was the collapsible steering column.
The frame under a Model A is not nearly so stout, and I’d be worried about crashworthiness.
I (briefly) drove a 1948 Plymouth with a “fluid coupling”, which was a proto-torque converter which eliminated clutching between shifts. The transmission was a standard three-speed, and you had to use the clutch to start from a stop. Interesting, although I understand that it made the gas mileage go to heck.