I didn’t have a “normal” Driver’s Ed experience. I had Bert Snow, the oldest Driver’s Education instructor in the country at the time. When Snow finally retired, he was 87 years old. One perk of having an octogenarian instructor–besides decades worth of stories and 4,000 students worth of experience–was an important loophole. Snow was “grandfathered in” as a driver’s test facilitator. That meant instead of sending us up to the state capital for our license test, he could just make sure we were up to snuff himself. But he didn’t go easy on us.

I grew up in the 1,000-person village of Chelsea, Vermont. Bert Snow was born in Vermont in 1918. As a student, no one would have guessed he’d become a high school teacher. Snow took the “scenic route,” graduating in 6 years. But in the Great Depression, there was little work available for recent graduates anyway. One of his first gigs in the 1930s was as a truck driver, hauling trash in the mornings and furniture in the afternoons to make ends meet.

His stories were easily my favorite parts of our long practice drives. And I love to drive. Snow called himself a “wanderer,” admitting he’d spent his youth working odd jobs from hotel cook to lumberjack at the logging camp that would someday become Stowe Mountain Resort. During World War II, he deployed to Europe with the Army Signal Corps. When he came back, he got serious about school and graduated college with honors. He took a job as the local high school’s first guidance counselor. Teaching Driver’s Ed came with the gig, but Snow found it a good opportunity to connect with the students.

Snow said of his teaching philosophy, “I relate to any type of kid. Good ones I pat on the back; bad ones I kick in the butt, and they love me.”

He continued “wandering,” leading backpacking trips in the summer to Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the southwest, and Alaska. He retired in 1984 and went to the Philippines with the Peace Corps. But beach life couldn’t keep Bert Snow, and several years later he returned home to Vermont. Once back, he asked his old school how the hunt for a new Driver’s Ed teacher was going. And the rest is history.

You knew the day’s Driver’s Ed was in session because Bert Snow was waiting in front of the school in a shiny blue Chrysler PT Cruiser. It was on loan from a local dealership, with a brake pedal for him installed on the passenger side. This would be his final instructor car, and it took some getting used to. First off, he’d warn his students that it had more “pep” than the cars he learned to drive on. He had to think a minute before telling us to brake firmly and smoothly, instead of “pumping the brakes” as driver’s did before ABS. He also might suggest 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, then remember that with airbags you should actually keep your hands low as possible.

Bert Snow admitted he was spoiled because almost all his students in rural Vermont had experience driving something already–be it a tractor or a farm truck. He just said he had to cheer some of them on to reach highway speeds.

During our drives, there wasn’t much that could flap Bert Snow. He’d driven all the local roads more times than he could remember. He’d watched students dodge bear and moose crossing those roads. He’d seen other driver’s sideswipe his students, and he’d lived to tell the tale.

When the day for our driver’s test arrived, the friendly guidance counselor Bert Snow was gone. He took the tests seriously. And he was the last person in the state who wasn’t a State Trooper who could administer them. The only hiccup in my test was when we drove up and down Main Street twice searching for somewhere to parallel park, but found so few cars around that there was no parking space abutted by two other vehicles. We ended up making do with some traffic cones.

Bert Snow said the 4,000 students he taught “keep me young.” He said he’d learned some things from us. “I think one thing that needs to be put down is this myth that all the teenagers are raring to go…collectively they’re not a rattlebrain bunch and I think Vermont’s record (for accidents) shows that.”

I was in one of Bert Snow’s final classes. He “retired” at 87, though he actually transitioned to an “easier” job and enlisted as a substitute history teacher. He joked he kept working because he had taken his retirement young, and at 87 was too old for his old hobbies–such as mountain climbing, deep sea fishing, and world travel. I was sad to see that two years and three months after hanging up his driver’s education instructor clipboard, Bert Snow went to that great faculty lounge in the sky. He left behind an endowment to send students from his high school in landlocked Vermont out to the ocean on a yearly deep sea fishing trip.

Next, read about the volunteer who’s taught 400 Afghani women to drive.