A Hollywood Memoir: my Mom Drives!

• Posted on 23rd May 2016
• in celebrity books, celebrity stories online, entertainment books, Hollywood High School, Hollywood memoirs
• by Ben

---

This excerpt from my

Hollywood memoir

Three Stages does take place in Hollywood but it’s really all about my Mom and the greatest achievement of my life.

“I had an audition the result of which would actually take me to New York after several weeks on the road. This presented the Lucy transportation problem again. Knowing I was leaving town in October I really began pressing for her to learn to drive. Finally, realizing her options were from bad to terrible if she refused, she agreed to take lessons. She wanted me to teach her but I thought that was not a good idea at all and insisted in enrolling her in a driving school.

“The first step was to get her a car. When [my Dad] Bish died he owned a Chevrolet Chevette, an experiment by G. M. only slightly more successful than Ford’s Edsel. After a lot of shopping around we settled on a Plymouth Valiant, traded in the Chevette and Lucy was a car owner. The next trick was the big one.

“I coached her thoroughly and she had no problem passing the written test to get a learner’s permit. After interviewing several schools we picked one and the day came for her first lesson. The instructor was a fairly young guy, younger than me anyhow. Introductions were made, Mom got behind the wheel of the dual-control training car and they set out.

“I bit my fingernails for the next half hour and finally I spied the approaching car. Lucy emerged in tears. She hated that ‘obnoxious kid’ and said the only way she’d learn to drive was if I taught her. Period. End of discussion. Thus began what I’ll always consider my greatest achievement in this lifetime. I taught my Mother, at age fifty-nine, to drive a car.

“It wasn’t really that hard. She had good instincts, good depth perception and spatial consciousness. She was a natural. We had a session every day after I picked her up from work and in a week I had her driving on the freeways. My main concern, and a biggie on the driving test, was parallel parking. I made sure I didn’t imply that it was difficult but a natural thing to do and she got it immediately. After two or three days of practice she could get into a spot nearly as small as I could.

“From the 1950s through the ‘70s the Norman Luboff Choir was a record selling machine. During that period the group recorded more than seventy-five albums. The holiday albums Songs of Christmas (1956) and Christmas with the Norman Luboff Choir (1964) were perennial bestsellers for years. Luboff and his choir won the 1961 Grammy Award for Best Performance by a Chorus.

“In the fall of 1963 Norman was mounting his first tour of the USA doing live performances. I auditioned and was hired as the tenor soloist. …

“The tour was eleven weeks of one nighters and … a week prior to our departure I had to get Lucy through her final driving test for her license. … She was ready. We went to the DMV and met the driving tester. They got into her Valiant, she drove smartly out of the parking lot and I waited.

“In the lot at the Department of Motor Vehicles they had a curb with traffic cones set apart at a reasonable car length plus a few feet for the parallel parking test. After a few long minutes Lucy’s car appeared and rolled over to that spot. She stopped just beyond the front cones and backed to the curb – perpendicularly!  She pulled out, circled the lot and did it again. And one more time. When I met her at the front of the place she was crying. The tester got out, looked at me and said, ‘Sorry.’

“I got in the car and asked her what happened. She said, ‘He told me to stop and back into the curb and that’s what I did.’ She had taken him literally, in her nervousness, not realizing that he meant to parallel park.

“As soon as we got home I called the DMV and got to a supervisor. I explained what has happened along with the fact that she was an excellent parker and he said to bring her back the next morning and he’s administer the test himself. He turned out to be a warm, avuncular gentleman and he put Lucy through her paces including three consecutive parallel parks and we went home with her drivers license. For the rest of the week I followed her to work and back home in my car and she had no problems. So it was with great relief that the following Tuesday I got on the Luboff bus for the eleven week gig.”

Read about the adventures on the Norman Luboff tour and many other showbiz stories when you click here and get Three Stages.

Tags: Norman Luboff Choir