Wearing his trademark pith helmet (with chin strap) and an oversize pair of sunglasses, Ulysses Horatio Penelopi Poindexter C. Mortimer Alewishus Hale Gammill II regularly drives his Model T along Central Avenue to his Rotary meeting in downtown Phoenix.
The doors of the classic car he bounces along in are plastered with promotional words for his empire, the Sears Arizona School of Driving. On the front of the car, just below the little windshield, it says, "Our first training car." He cuts a striking figure. Almost traffic-stopping.
The name is something Hale Gammill's grandmother did to his father. She couldn't decide which of the family names to use, the story goes, so she used them all. Gammill says he knows the spelling of Alewishus is wrong. He also says the C. doesn't stand for anything, that it's just C.
Using his left arm, Gammill signals every turn, even turns in parking lots. Now seventy, he admits to receiving only one traffic ticket in his life. "Between 1967 and 1972, I was commuting between the San Francisco Bay area and Phoenix, three days here and four days there," Gammill says. "Somehow or another I didn't notice that my driver's license had expired. So I got stopped for I don't know what. Maybe it was a taillight or something. Of course, the officer asked me for my license. In those days, they gave you a ticket, and if you showed up in court with a driver's license, they'd usually dismiss it. It was a violation, there's no doubt about it. I don't know why I told you that last part. I guess it's kind of embarrassing."
The evening newspaper made Gammill's violation into front-page news. "The headline said, `Safety engineer in violation,' or some darn thing," he says. "I was doing a little work around the legislature at the time, some public relations work--although now you'd probably call it lobbying. I was ashamed to show up there. I was relieved that all of them thought it was a joke.
"For me to get into a traffic citation or violation and/or collision was far worse than for a rabbi or a priest or minister to be caught coming out of a house of ill fame dead drunk. It took a year before people could introduce me to a stranger and not tell that story."
Today it is a story Gammill clearly loves to tell. Possessed of a seasoned public speaker's self-confidence, he almost always manages to insert himself as the butt of each such anecdote. It is a sheepish, warm and quite sly style. First the eyes twinkle, then the smile opens wide, then something outrageous comes out. Meanwhile, Gammill's hair piece-cap hovers nearby. (There is no nice way of saying it: Gammill's wig is one awful piece of work. Maybe he was out walking somewhere, the rug fell from the sky and landed on his head, and he liked it. Who knows? Just barely vain enough to own a wig, he isn't vain enough to own a decent one.)
A prime Gammill yarn is the one about the time his wife left him over the Model T. This happened some time ago. Also, it should be noted, several wives ago. (He's been married six times, to five different women.)
He tells it: "I had been saying for years that some day I would buy her a car that didn't have a sign on it. She liked to sit cozy, you know, next to me in the car. Well, that didn't look too good in a training car, so I had managed to save up about $500 in order to buy a nice-looking car for my wife."
As Gammill recalls, it was Mother's Day. "It was kind of a dull day, and I was looking through the paper after dinner and saw an ad for a Model T Ford this fellow had for sale out in Wickenburg. So I packed the kids up and went out there. This fellow wouldn't let me leave. He wanted $3,000. I told him I only had $500."
But the sale was made. An hour or so after sundown, Gammill returned home--and to his waiting wife--with the ancient car. "Before we could get it down off the truck, I could see her glowering inside. She came out of the house. `Happy Mother's Day,' I said. That went over like a lead balloon. The kids ran inside and locked their bedroom doors, crawled under the covers and put cotton in their ears."
And the Gammills had it out in the street. "`That car goes or I go,'" Gammill says Mrs. Gammill said. "An ultimatum. That was stupid, because you can always get another wife. But a 1917 Model T for $500? Those are hard to come by."
Considering the scale of the Gammill family's business, this perpetual self- deprecation might seem like kind of a weird character flaw. Still, he persists. "It says `has-been' on my business card," Gammill claims, taking one out to show that it really says "founder." The company he started in 1939 has become one of the nation's most successful driving-school chains. Since 1980, he's been semiretired from the business. His sons run the show now, and the family also owns and operates driving schools in Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Francisco.
Some behind-the-wheel instruction still goes on--a few little old ladies still have to learn to drive when their husbands die, and teen-agers still need to learn the three-point turn--but the fact of modern life for driving schools is to punish traffic miscreants. The Sears Arizona School of Driving spends most of its time organizing classes for violators. More than fifty different classes will meet this week in the Valley, all of them full of wayward motorists.
If you've been popped for speeding or any other driving infraction, you've likely been put in touch with the Phoenix branch of the Gammill clan's business. And Ulysses Horatio Penelopi Poindexter C. Mortimer Alewishus Hale Gammill II is probably the guy you want to blame for your wasted Saturday in traffic school.
Gammill understands your disappointment in him but firmly believes that the traffic school probably did you some good, whether you enjoyed it or not. "Just between us boys, what we try to do is get 'em from point A to point B without getting in trouble, either without a ticket or physical contact," he says. "There really isn't any other goal. By the mere fact that they're in class is prima-facie evidence that they goofed it on one of those two goals."
GAMMILL WAS BORN in July 1918, while his farmer-rancher parents were living on a dairy farm near the rural intersection of Seventh Street and Thomas Road. The family eventually moved to the far west side. Dad died just before the Depression, so Gammill's first real memories are of hard work and near poverty on the family's spread near Laveen. The bank had foreclosed on the property but allowed the Gammills to live there and run the place.
"Every job I've had since then has been a giant promotion," Gammill says. "I think that kind of childhood is one of the things that caused me to be so happy and upbeat. Not only didn't we have any fans or coolers or any comforts, but we didn't even have any electricity. We slept outside at night. Of course, in those days, no matter how wealthy you were, you still slept out in the yard. You couldn't buy comfort. The difference was, wealthy people had inside plumbing. What we had I don't even think you could call plumbing."
Gammill began a lifelong relationship with things vehicular when he got work as a teen-ager pumping gas at a station on the corner of Southern and Central. "That was such a pleasant job, so terrific compared to working on the farm for no money, that I was shocked when they gave me a paycheck," he says. "The fathers would come by and bring their daughters, and I'd get to talk to all those pretty girls. That was so much better than working on a farm, sweating all by yourself out in the middle of a field."
His next move was onto a bus. Gammill became a South Phoenix Ralph Kramden, driving commuters around town and to and from the distant suburbs of Tempe, Glendale, Mesa, and Scottsdale. The fare was a nickel in the city, 25 cents for a ride to the sticks. Gammill's mind for ancient minutiae--figures especially--is remarkably sharp. "I made fifty cents an hour and worked ten hours a day, six days a week," he says. "That came to $120 a month. Eventually, I saved up enough money to buy a two-year-old status symbol, a prestigious DeSoto convertible sedan. I put a down payment on it, and payments were $17 a month. I'd go to church or somewhere, and they all thought that I was rich because I had that red-leather upholstery, white sidewalls and chrome."
Gammill's passengers came to admire his facility with the big bus and began to inquire about locomotion lessons for themselves. So he trained them in his flashy DeSoto. At first Gammill didn't charge. "It was so much fun, and I was very flattered," he says. "I had never been a teacher before. To me, this was another giant step forward. And some of them would tip me for the driving lessons. It would only be two or three bucks, but when you're making fifty cents an hour, that's terrific."
By late 1939, the demand for lessons was picking up. Gammill, while still driving the bus, had some business cards printed and began to promote his side job. "I tried to hit all the red lights I could," he says, "so I could give little fifteen-second commercials. That was how the Arizona School of Driving started, although it didn't have a name at the time."
THE KARL MARX of driver's-ed dialectic was a man called Harold Smith. U. Hale Gammill knew him personally during the years Smith was promoting his driving philosophy, and the men once collaborated on instruction material. "He was a profane person, a stern master," as well as a bit of a hell-raiser, Gammill says, but Smith's defensive-driving theories were--are--sound.
The key to understanding Smithism is a concept called "high-aim steering," which essentially teaches drivers to follow the car ahead of them in their lane. It's a careful, defensive, practical method that if used by every single driver on the streets of Phoenix would either a) totally eliminate traffic accidents of all kinds or b) cause all vehicular movement to cease forever. "The eyes are the whole thing," Gammill says. "Your wheel will follow the eyes.
"The specific thing about the Smith system is the use of a space cushion of visibility. You cannot have a collision if you have a space cushion. Well, you say, `What if someone suddenly goes through a stop sign or a red light?' He didn't suddenly do that. He wasn't set there by God or the manufacturer. He came down the street, and you could've seen him if you were careful."
There are other driving theorists, other driving theories, but Smith was the true pioneer. "They all copy it," Gammill says. "They call it different names. Instead of `high-aim steering' they'll say `long-aim steering' or something else to keep from getting sued.
"It's fun to use the Harold Smith system of driving. You go along without exceeding the speed limit, and you pass other cars because they've got low-aim steering, and they go from brake to gas, brake to gas, and they're getting surprises all the time. If you go with high-aim steering and keep your eyes moving, you don't have emergencies. You don't have the brakes squealing and the wheels howling and things like that. It's a great thing."
"I'LL BE UP-FRONT with you," Gammill says, recalling World War II. "I didn't volunteer like Dan Quayle did.
"I was drafted and went to Fort Bliss in El Paso. I ended up doing about everything there." Later, Gammill was sent to the China-Burma-India Theatre, where he worked on the ground at an air base.
After the war, Gammill returned to his bus route, and the driving school stayed an on-the-side thing, although he did manage to spring for a small ad in the phone book. "We lived in a little prefab house that cost $3,945. Payments were $35 a month," he says. "I had a wife then, and she answered the phone. We had a ten-party line, trying to run a business. Every month or two, I took a box of chocolates to everybody on the party line for being so nice and courteous. They were so nice. They'd get off their line and keep their calls short to help us all they could."
Gammill also sprang for his first dual- control training car, a '49 Ford. Driving lessons were no longer free. His decision to upgrade the company's rolling stock was wise. The Valley's streetcar tracks had been torn up, and the automobile was about to take over. "An awful lot of people didn't have cars when the war ended because of the situation with gasoline and everything," he says. Soon, however, they would. The Arizona School of Driving grew as Phoenix, Arizona, grew.
Meanwhile, back on the bus, Gammill was becoming a kind of community activist. He carried a variety of petitions for his riders to sign, and his efforts got south-side improvements moving on several fronts. At the time, none of the neighborhoods south of downtown were part of the city. Gammill helped get community pools built and roads paved. It also got him a role as unofficial area spokesman, a role that led him to the office of the morning newspaper's editor--and into yet another career. Gammill pitched the man on a weekly column of news about the mostly ignored south side of town.
"He went into a tirade," Gammill recalls. "He said, `That crap that you write? I wouldn't disgrace my newspaper with that junk.' It didn't take very much to discourage me. I didn't have any ego, and I was out of my element."
The episode did encourage the bus driver to enroll in writing classes at the local teachers' college. Gammill emerged four years later with a master's degree in education. The driving school was still chugging along as a sideline, but it was time to quit the bus company. With his new degree in hand, he applied for a teaching job with the Creighton School District in Phoenix. Gammill became the district's first full-time safety director.
THE GAMMILL PHILOSOPHY of pedestrian safety seems stunningly simple: "It's the stupidest thing in the world when somebody who has 70 percent of their body in water challenges a tank like an automobile that weighs 2,000 to 3,000 pounds. There's no way you can win. Whenever a pedestrian lets himself get hit, whether the driver ran a red light or no matter how drunk the driver was, it's dumb."
Who's at fault? Who cares. The way Gammill sees road safety in general, "It kills me just as bad to get hit by somebody who gets the ticket than by someone else."
During the late Fifties and early Sixties, he taught bike safety and crosswalk theory to students and teachers. "The school board just turned me loose," says Gammill, noting that the district had never before made a solid effort to teach safe pedestrianism to students. "The tendency then was to have kids stand there at a crossing until the whistle blows. Well, fifteen minutes later, after they'd gobble a peanut butter sandwich and a glass of milk, they'd be right back over at the school, crossing the streets. We were really killing them on Saturdays, Sundays and holidays."
The driving school expanded steadily during Gammill's safety-engineer years. He worked hard on the school in what amounted to his spare time. "He'd get up at four or five in the morning and go to driving school to get things set for the day," recalls his older son, Ulysses Horatio Penelopi Poindexter C. Mortimer Alewishus Hale Gammill III, who now runs the northern California branch of the driving school. "Then he'd go teach school till three or four, then it was back to the driving school. At seven, he'd come home and work on cars. It's funny, but I don't remember him ever missing a Little League game or missing a program I was in. He was a hard-working guy, very ambitious, driven.
"He explained to us often that we weren't Einsteins. We weren't dumb, but we weren't rocket engineers. He told us if we wanted to succeed we'd just have to work harder than other people. I realized it one Father's Day. I called him and said, `You've taken care of me for life.'
"He started us on the work ethic early. I was five years old and working on whitewalls. We got a nickel for each one we washed. Taxes were low, it was a good job."
BY 1964, THE DRIVING school had become enough of a success to allow Gammill to leave his school-district job. His fleet of cars stood at ten. A franchise affiliation with Sears in the early Seventies upped the company's profile, and the years since have seen fantastic growth, although the instruction emphasis has shifted.
Today the Arizona School of Driving has more than sixty contracts with towns, cities and court systems to teach traffic-safety "diversion" classes to folks eager to keep citation points hidden from their insurance companies.
"I've taught a number of Ph.D.'s, CPA's and M.D.'s to drive who said that learning to drive was the hardest thing they ever did," says Gammill the Elder. "They never had any worry about passing grades to get an M.D. or a Ph.D. or a CPA. No matter how hard you study driving, you've got to relax and let your reflexes take over. It's usually hardest to teach the ones who are brightest because they're used to memorizing something. You can sit and study all night, but when you get in a car, and you try to think--`What do I do here?'--well, all of a sudden nobody's minding the store down the road."
There are more than eighty employees in the company now and a fleet of twenty cars for actual behind-the-wheel instruction. U. Hale Gammill II, essentially the godfather of driver's education in Phoenix, has been teaching "high-aim steering" for a long, long time. His first love, clearly, is teaching the Gospel According to Harold E. Smith. If there is one person in town qualified to comment on the state of our motoring, it is U. Hale himself. Are the drivers here any good?
"Not according to our standards, they're not," he says. "They're certainly doing a lot of things better than they were. They're getting to where they go faster because police can't get out and catch them all speeding all the time."
Gammill's chief contact with local drivers comes during his Model T jaunts between his Paradise Valley home and the downtown Sheraton. (Gammill has had perfect attendance at Rotary for something like thirty years.) He doesn't keep regular office hours anymore, though he says he helped his son Tom land a big new traffic-school contract between the company and the City of Scottsdale. Gammill struggles to keep his distance from the driving school.
"Nobody really likes me around, breathing down their neck," he says. "I see more things wrong than they do, and they sense this. They'd rather not know about things. When you see a young person and they start giving you lip, you get to that stage where you say, `You just watch it, young fella. I know more about being young than you do about being old.'"
SOUND LIKE A BITTER old man? Not a chance. Listen to his answering machine: "Hello, this is Hale. My friend, I cannot come to the phone right at this moment. But so that I may give you and your very important call the attention that you deserve, please be certain to give your phone number very slowly two times. Thank you for calling, and let's have a good day and a great life."
"For me to get into a traffic citation or violation and/or collision was far worse than for a rabbi or a priest or minister to be caught coming out of a house of ill fame dead drunk."
"It says `has-been' on my business card," he claims, taking one out to show that it really says "founder."
Gammill became a South Phoenix Ralph Kramden.
"I tried to hit all the red lights I could so I could give little fifteen-second commercials."
"Whenever a pedestrian lets himself get hit, whether the driver ran a red light or no matter how drunk the driver was, it's dumb."
"You get to that stage where you say, `You just watch it, young fella. I know more about being young than you do about being old.'
