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Putting it in ‘Park’: Driver’s Ed teacher retires after 60 years
McCOOK, Neb. — After teaching driver’s ed classes in McCook for 60 years, Warren Everts found there were basically two types of students.
One group were the students who had never gotten behind the wheel before. That was fairly common, Everts said. “Every year, I’d have students get in and say, what does that pedal do? What does this pedal do?” he said.
The other kind were those who had already been driving a couple years on the farm and thought they knew it all. “So I’d ask them, then why are you taking the class? And they’d said, my dad says I have to,” Everts said.
Everts, 83, retired in January and estimated he’s taught close to 1,500 students through the years. ‘I didn’t like teaching the classroom but I preferred being out on the road with kids. I liked the face to face contact.”
He started in 1960 when he was teaching world history. Back then, the State of Nebraska reimbursed high schools for teaching the class and driver’s ed was a requirement for graduation, Everts said. At one point, during the oil boon in the 1970s, the students would number over 100 each semester and even more in summer, requiring three teachers.
That meant Saturdays, after school and 10-hour days, he recalled.
There were only a few close calls during the years, he said. One time, a driver jumped the curb and hit a retaining wall. “And I had just praised her for doing a beautiful job on parking,” Everts said.
In fact, focusing on what students did right was a big part of his instruction, he said. “Most times, if a kid did something wrong, I didn’t have to tell them, they already knew it.”
Everts said he had only one really bad accident while teaching and in that one, it wasn’t even the student’s fault. A student driver had just completed parallel parking and was carefully pulling out, when a speeding vehicle from behind ran into them. The vehicle driven by the student was rammed into another vehicle and the windshield broke, spraying glass.
He and the student were pretty shook up, he said. “She looked at me and said, does this mean I didn’t pass,” Evert chuckled. Afterwards, it was discovered that the driver of the other vehicle was talking on his cell phone, he said.
Everts wanted to make sure students had control of their vehicle and to do so, had them practice on rural roads in the county. He’d have the students drive just past a sharp curve, then have the students put the car in reverse and back up around the curve. For many, it wasn’t easy and the car would sometimes come perilously close to ending up in a ditch.
“You could see the exhaustion on some of their faces when we were done,” he remembered. Other students navigated the challenge with ease, some commenting afterward, “That was easy, usually I have a cattle trailer behind me, too.”
His students weren’t only teens but adults as well. After he retired in 1997 from McCook High School teaching world history, he taught driver’s ed at McCook Community College. There, his students included foreign wives of returning service men or older women who never had to drive before.
Another group of students he taught were grandkids visiting their grandparents in McCook during the summer. Driver’s ed at the college was less expensive than in other places and for inexperienced drivers, McCook was a great way to begin, Everts said, with streets, highways, cross walks and traffic — just not all at once.
More than half a century later from when he first started, Everts maintained kids didn’t really change much through the years. Yet, he did see something occur year after year without fail when it came to teenage drivers.
“There were always a group of kids who just liked to tear around,” he said.
He and his wife, Ladonna, who was also a teacher at McCook Public Schools have three sons, 10 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.