It was the summer of 1962, and I had just finished my junior year of high school. A few weeks earlier, my parents and I had moved from Chicago, where I was born and had lived all my life, to Hollywood, Florida. None of us has ever been there, although my 18-year-old brother, who was in college in Boston, had vacationed there with his girlfriend during Christmas break and reported that it was, “Really nice.” My parents always took his opinions very seriously.
The decision to move was due to my father’s health: he’d had three serious heart attacks during the previous year. This had forced him to quit his job as a textile salesman, since he couldn’t continue to carry heavy sample cases, and wasn’t able to drive from town to town across the Midwest to visit his customers like he had done for many years. His doctor advised him sternly to avoid Chicago’s bad winters, telling him, “You won’t be able to shovel snow, and it’s dangerous for you to be out in the cold weather; it would be much better for you to live in a more moderate climate.” My parents took the doctor’s advice very seriously, also.
But the three of us were totally unprepared for the impact of this move. For me, leaving all my friends, most of whom I had known since kindergarten, was emotional and difficult. My parents also had a lot of friends in Chicago, mostly Holocaust refugees from Europe like them, and I know they were very sad to be parting from them. Because of my father’s health problems, my mother had become the family breadwinner. She had taken classes at night so that she could find a better job, and now worked at a big bank in downtown Chicago; I knew it was hard for her to give up her hard-earned position.
We never owned a house, so leaving our rented 2-bedroom apartment in South Shore wasn’t very complicated. I tried to hide my feelings, but I found myself sad and bereft as we sold most of our furniture to the many strangers who answered our ad and showed up at our door. I was old enough to understand why we had to move, and tried hard to look forward to it as a new adventure, but it wasn’t easy.
As might have been predicted, moving to Florida turned out to be a disastrous mistake. In Chicago, we lived in a beautiful historic neighborhood, close enough to the Museum of Science and Industry that I could ride my bike there with my friends. Our apartment was only a 15-minute walk from our favorite beach on Lake Michigan. I loved being able to take the El downtown by myself when I took art lessons at the Art Institute of Chicago: I felt excited and proud to walk through the big wooden doors that led to the classrooms, past the sign that said, “Authorized Personnel Only.”
But Hollywood, Florida in 1962 was a totally different world. The move was true culture shock: from a major, exciting city to a very small town that had little to offer, at least in our eyes. There was only one street in Hollywood’s downtown area, and a handful of stores. The only good job my mother was able to find was at a bank in Miami Beach, 25 miles away, an hourlong journey on a battered old Greyhound bus. My father and I dropped her off at the bus station every morning, which felt very strange. My father tried hard to find a new job, even studying for a real estate license, but he was miserable staying at home by himself during the day in the small, bare house we had rented. He missed his friends, and it was the first time in his life that he had no occupation.
Although I tried my best not to show it, I was also totally miserable. I had transferred as a senior from an academically demanding high school in Chicago to a mediocre regional high school in Hollywood, and I didn’t know anyone at this new school. I had thought, at least, that I would be the “new girl” in class, and the other students would be eager to make friends with me. But on the first day of class, I discovered that almost one-third of the students were new to the school that year. To add insult to injury, when we went to register, the school administrators took away the extra credits I had earned from my accelerated classes in Chicago, because this high school in Hollywood did not offer similar classes.
My parents were terribly unhappy, and they knew that I was, too–but the worst part was that the three of us were afraid to admit our unhappiness to one another. We couldn’t bring ourselves to discuss it; we avoided the topic, the so-called elephant in the room. We were terrified to acknowledge that leaving Chicago had been a huge mistake.
The only positive thing in my life at that moment was that my father was teaching me to drive. In Florida, you could get a driver’s license at age 16. The town had no public transportation, so the only way to get anywhere was by car. My mother never got her license, but my father loved to drive: I have great memories of our road trips around the Midwest when I was a child. My brother and I would tackle each other in the back seat of our maroon 1952 Nash, or we’d kneel backwards, aiming out the rear window with our forefingers, pretending to shoot at other cars. Sometimes I would lie on the back seat, falling asleep watching the rhythm of the telephone wires on the side of the road as they rose and fell from pole to pole. I loved the ‘motor courts’ that we stayed in, with their cozy one-room cottages. At night, I enjoyed listening to the singing sound of the tractor trailers as they rushed past on the nearby highway.
So, I was very excited when, in July, I passed the test for my learner’s permit. My father handed me the keys to our light-blue 1961 Dodge Lancer and smiled at me as he moved over to the passenger side. I wasn’t quite sure why he had such confidence in me, but he seemed remarkably calm and reassuring as I took over in the driver’s seat. The next month, on the day of my 16th birthday, I proudly passed the test for my full driver’s license on my first try, and thereupon became my family’s designated driver.
Amazingly, my parents gave me permission to take the car and go off by myself, whenever and wherever I wanted, which suddenly gave me the means to escape from Hollywood. By teaching me to drive, my father had literally handed me freedom; and I was thrilled.
On those solo drives, I usually headed straight west out of Hollywood, as far from the beach and the town as I could possibly get. The streets and houses faded away within a couple of miles, and the road opened up to a flat expanse of brown prairie, with clumps of scrub vegetation here and there. I would see deer, foxes, rabbits, an occasional possum. The air smelled different, pleasantly dusty and soft, and I fantasized about campfires and western plains and horses. Sometimes, I saw paragliders floating high above the open expanse. Sitting by myself in the car, I would stare at the wide grasslands and dream of herding cattle in Wyoming or Colorado, forgetting about Hollywood for a while.
If my parents were worried and anxious about my whereabouts on my solo drives—which I imagine they must have been—they never said a word about it to me. Their confidence, granting me the chance to explore the world on my own, was really important at that moment in my life.
After graduating from high school in Hollywood, I went off to college about 350 miles away in north central Florida. I knew that my absence was difficult for my parents, who felt more isolated and lonelier than ever. To my surprise, when I came home for Christmas break, they brought up the topic of their misery for the first time, and openly admitted their unhappiness and disappointment with our move to Florida. They had decided to correct this huge mistake by moving back ‘up North’ to New York, where we had a few distant relatives and where they knew they would feel more at home. I decided to transfer to a college in Boston.
On the much-anticipated day of our departure from Florida, my father and I locked the door of our small rented house in Hollywood, and I drove with him to Miami Beach to pick up my mother from the bank where she worked. She was excited to be receiving her final, much-needed paycheck. Looking radiant with happiness, she climbed into the car.
As we speed off northward, away from South Florida and our many unhappy memories there, my father turned around to look at her and asked nervously, “Did you get the money?”
Keeping my eyes on the road, I laughed softly to myself, imagining that this was a bank robbery, and I was driving the getaway car.
Judith Teich’s personal essays have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Moment Magazine, The Ravens Perch, JAMA, and the Washington Post, among others. A retired health services researcher, she worked for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services for 27 years, and is the author/co-author of 40+ peer-reviewed publications.
