The Driving Skills of Seniors

* Re: your article “Still Driven to Drive” (July 15), I feel it should not applaud a 92-year-old woman who still drives her own car. It should chastise the Department of Motor Vehicles for extending (Ruby) Sweeney’s license, through 1996, without giving her a driving test to see if she is still capable of driving. I have a 91-year-old father-in-law who still drives. His car is a 1965 Pontiac, which is built like a Sherman tank. His eyesight is poor, he is hard of hearing and he gets dizzy spells--but his driver’s license is good until 1995 and we cannot stop him from driving. He beams when he tells us that he drove from Fullerton to Desert Hot Springs in 1 1/2 hours. This scares me as he could be the cause of a terrible accident.

LORRAINE CHIMERINE

Buena Park

* * I enjoyed the article about the 92-year-old woman and her driving skills. However, the sentence, “The 92-year-old woman is still driving--more than 80 years after she cranked up her first car, a jet-black Model A Ford,” jarred my senses.

Eighty years ago the lady would have been 12, and the year 1913. In 1913 the only Fords being made were the Model T, and that would have been the model that she cranked up for her first time behind the wheel. The Model A didn’t arrive in the dealerships until January, 1928, and it didn’t have a crank and came in a number of different colors. My father bought a dark blue Model A in 1929, and I learned to drive in it, also at the age of 12.

FREDERICK H. SCANTLING

Cypress