Gripping the wheel
Sadie Drucker didn’t learn to drive till she was 39, and that was almost 50 years ago. She’s still driving, sometimes in her blue Toyota Camry, other days in her 89-year-old husband’s Volvo sedan. About a month ago, he failed his driving test, so Sadie now is the family driver.
In the days since an 86-year-old man drove into a crowd at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market on Wednesday, killing 10 people and injuring dozens, national attention has focused on elderly drivers. Because they tend to travel shorter distances, older drivers statistically have fewer than their share of accidents. But in the wake of this week’s tragedy, collisions caused by septuagenarians and their elders have been widely reported.
Drucker followed the news about the Santa Monica crash and found it terribly sad and scary. But it has not deterred her from driving, she says, and will not, as long as she feels competent behind the wheel.
Drucker, 87, isn’t easily rattled, even by discourteous drivers who sometimes plague her. “They honk the horn if you don’t go fast enough,” she says. “They have no patience. It’s the young ones usually, I’m sorry to say.”
She has a good driving record, and it’s been a quarter-century since her last accident, but she remembers it vividly. At the time, she worked in downtown L.A. as a bookkeeper and office manager, and she hasn’t driven on a freeway since. “A car cut me off, and to avoid hitting him, I drove into the wall,” she says. “I wasn’t hurt or anything, but I was so upset I have a blockage and I can’t get back on the freeway. I’ll go when other people are driving, but I just can’t do it. I know I could save some time taking the freeway, but I just can’t get myself to do it.”
She drives every day, but doesn’t venture far from her West Los Angeles home. The car helps the Druckers stay engaged in activities they are loath to give up. Friday afternoons, the couple attends a current events class at Emeritus College in Santa Monica; on Thursdays, they take a Shakespeare class at the Santa Monica YMCA. “I hate the parking there,” she says. She thinks someone smashed the left rear brake light of the Volvo when it was parked there. “You park it somewhere, and you never know,” she says. She used to attend an evening sculpture class at Santa Monica College, but hasn’t gone lately. “I don’t like to drive at night, but I do it,” she says. The couple likes to see movies at the Westside Pavilion theaters, where parking is easy on the roof. (Sometimes she had trouble finding her car there in the enclosed garage, even though she had memorized the license plate.) Wednesday afternoons, she goes to a long-standing bridge game in Park LaBrea, and sometimes stops at the 99 Cent Store on Fairfax on the way home.
On Friday morning, Drucker is bound for a 99 Cent Store at Pico Boulevard and Stewart in Santa Monica. It’s warm and muggy, and the talc dusted on her neck doesn’t do much to relieve the heat. She walks, slowly and with the support of a cane, to her Camry, which is parked in a lot behind the second-floor garden apartment she shares with her husband of 65 years. The car is protected by an old green gingham bedsheet. She circumnavigates it, removing the brick pieces that hold the covering in place. The 1989 Toyota had 90,000 miles on the odometer when she paid $2,000 for it five years ago.
A shoulder belt automatically zooms across her torso as the car door closes. “I feel uncomfortable in the seat belt, so I just use this one,” she says. Her husband doesn’t like seat belts either, and failing to buckle up was one of 11 violations he committed when he tried to renew his license and flunked the road test. “He thinks he can go back and take his test again and I say, ‘Dave, you’re wasting your time.’ It’s hard when you have to give up your driver’s license. He said, ‘What’s going to happen when you can’t drive?’ and I said, ‘We’ll do whatever everyone else does. We’ll use the City Ride coupons. I got some from my neighbor. She still drives, but she doesn’t like to drive too much and she should stop driving all together. She’s going to be 89.”
Except for the arthritis that makes walking difficult, Drucker’s health is good. “I have a crushed vertebra and high blood pressure, which everyone has at this age,” she says. “And I shrank! I used to be 5-4, and I got measured and the doctor said I’m 4 foot 9 1/2. I can’t believe it. My husband shrank too. He was 6 foot 2 and now he’s 5-9.”
Small, perhaps, but alert and upbeat, Drucker drives cautiously. There’s no rearview mirror on the right side of the car, but she compensates by looking over her shoulder when making a turn. Traveling north on Sepulveda, she doesn’t change lanes early enough to safely make a left turn onto Pico, so she turns left on Olympic and works her way back to Pico. There are a number of vacant spaces in the lot at the 99 Cent Store, and she easily glides into one, then uses a shopping cart as a kind of walker, tossing her cane inside it.
When it’s time to load her finds -- baby shampoo for her great-granddaughter, the big pretzels her daughter likes and a mop for the cleaning lady who comes once a month -- she quickly recognizes her trunk key because it’s been notched to distinguish it from the ignition key. A steady stream of traffic makes turning left onto Pico at Stewart difficult, so she usually goes around the block to accomplish the turn at a quieter intersection.
“I used to walk every morning, but now I can’t,” she says. “I’m unsteady on my feet, so I do better driving.”
Dave Drucker, who was a social worker and probation officer, taught his wife to drive after they moved from Brooklyn to Staten Island and bought their first car. “He used to yell if I did something wrong, and my friend heard him yelling at me and she offered to teach me,” Sadie remembers. They became a two-car family when she bought a 1950 Pontiac from her father for $400 after she earned her license. In 1958, the Druckers drove to California in a blue Studebaker. “It took us a week,” she remembers, “with no air-conditioning and two children. On long trips I’d always do some of the driving. When we got to Needles it was 130 and I thought I was going to pass out.”
Her cars are air conditioned now, and, she says, they’re the last ones she’ll ever own.
