Locked Out

Today’s Flyover People column as seen in The Emporia Gazette:

 

LOCKED OUT

I turned my back on my car the other day and it locked itself. I heard the click. Luckily, I hadn’t left the key in the car.

My car has a remote control to lock and unlock its doors, a wonderfully convenient tool, but the car sometimes has its own sneaky agenda.

My mom’s car does the same thing, locks itself at random. Dave’s vehicle has locked itself too, out in the middle of nowhere, with the keys in the ignition, while it was running.

Despite my car’s best attempts to lock me out, it has yet to achieve its goal. I don’t think I’ve been locked of a car since I was in high school. (Some lessons I learn easily, other lessons the universe gives me over and over.)

In general, lock-outs don’t seem to happen as often as they once did. When I was a new driver in the ‘70s, it seemed that people were always standing at their car doors with a metal clothes hanger, untwisting its neck, reaching it into the car, angling it just so, trying to lift the lock knob. In fact, during my teenage years I carried a clothes hanger in my trunk to help friends break into their cars when necessary.

Oddly enough, back then when people locked the keys in their car, it was not because they forgot to pull the keys from the ignition, but because they accidentally pushed the lock down as they closed the door. In those days, many folks left keys in their car all the time.

One day in 1977, just out of personal curiosity, I surveyed unattended cars parked along Broadway Street in Larned. About one in three had keys dangling from the ignition. The ‘70s in rural Kansas were a time of trust, and in some places that trust is still intact.

Locking the car seemed unnecessary. There was usually nothing in there worth stealing and theft was a rare event. But the arrival of 8-track players and nice stereo systems got the ball rolling on auto burglaries.

If you did lock your keys in your car, it was a fairly easy problem to resolve. Those were the days of wing windows and lock knobs. If the wing window was open or at least unlocked, you could just reach your arm into the car and lift the lock.

If the wing window was locked, the rubber seal around it was pliable and you could slip the clothes hanger in, wiggle it over to the lock knob on the top ledge of the door, catch the knob’s lip with the hook, and raise it.

Younger readers may not remember wing windows at all. Car windows for front seat occupants were once divided. The back section rolled down while the front piece was a triangle of glass that swiveled open to let air enter the car sideways. Wing windows provided a gentle air flow.

Once car burglaries got rolling, car-makers first did away with the lip on the lock knobs, and then later integrated the door locks into the door panel.

And it may still be possible to unlock a car using a metal clothes hanger slipped into the door panel; I’m not sure. I’ve never had a reason to try.

But apparently others have. I was amused a while back when a college-aged guy locked the keys in his car in front of my house. It apparently happened during a nighttime party he attended at the house across the street from me.

From my writing desk I see everything, and one morning I noticed an unfamiliar car parked along the street. Mid-morning, this young man drove up and parked behind the first car, got out and peered through the car’s window. He tried all the doors and then he drove off.

A little bit later, he returned. This time when he got out of the car, he had a clothes hanger in his hand. Now I’m sure he got advice to the effect, “All you have to do is slip a clothes hanger down alongside the window, into the door panel, and jimmy the lock.”

And that might have worked, except that he had in his hands one of those new-fangled thick plastic clothes hangers. Sometimes valuable information, such as how to break into vehicles, skips a generation. Before I could get out there to offer assistance, he took his broken clothes hanger and left.

Copyright 2012 ~ Cheryl Unruh