(double punctuation sic)I was coming home from the local public library (of all places) on a Wednesday night. I was minding my own business, happy with the books and records that I’d snared, when a carload of idiots presumably from my high school roared by, hanging out their windows, yelling my name, and waving. Curious what they were yelling about and who they were, I foolishly sped up to catch them. (I was a sixteen-year-old male, and I was thinking like one.) As might have been predicted, I didn’t catch them, and in fact I never found out exactly who they were, though the policeman who turned on his lights and directed me to pull over and stay put apparently went on to get them before returning to me. In any event, I was given a speeding ticket very shortly after my acceleration to warp speed.
The judge suspended my license for a month. My parents weren’t especially pleased, and the next several weeks passed very slowly..
As for the second incident, here's how DCP describes it:
Indeed, things seem grim for Young Peterson as he and his father make the trek out to meet with a judge in downtown Los Angeles:I had looked to my right and into the rear-view mirror and had seen no problem, so I flipped on my turn-signal. Unfortunately, though, presumably because he was in my blind spot and because, with my girlfriend cozied very gratifyingly up to my side, I didn’t turn around to look as well as I should have, I changed lanes right in front of a California Highway Patrol car, which I hadn’t seen. I was given a ticket for an unsafe lane change.
This, I knew, would be serious. I might lose the right to drive for a significant length of time. And it would definitely not play well with the parental units.
But guess what? It turns out that luck was on the Young Dr. Peterson's side. Not because he is lucky, or because his parents had special sway with the "Powers That Be," but--get this!--because of his LDS faith! Check it out:The judge stressed how dangerous my lane-change on the freeway had been, and how bad my driving must have been to have merited not one but two tickets in such a short space of time.
I could say little in return. I had no real defense. I had definitely deserved my first ticket, though it seemed really bad luck. As for the second, I had genuinely been trying to drive well. I guess I just hadn’t understood how big my car’s blind spot was, nor how well most of a black and white Highway Patrol vehicle might blend into the nighttime darkness.
LOL! A classic faith-promoting rumor, no? Except there are some details about this that strike me as a bit odd. First, how did the judge know that DCP was a "good Mormon boy"? Aren't there other religious sects that hold early-morning Bible study classes? Second--maybe this is just a matter of the story being set in a different era--but why was he summoned into court over relatively minor traffic infractions? Didn't these judges have something better to do? In my experience--i.e., both my personal experience and every traffic ticket I've every heard about, like, *ever*--these violations are handled pretty much entirely by either mail or (these days) online. While I get that there was no Internet during the time of the story, surely snail mail existed back then. But maybe judges in Los Angeles really did feel it was necessary to take time out of their day to meet with a smarmy young teenagers who were driving way faster than they should have been?SeN wrote:At this point, my father, who had been silent throughout, asked if he might be permitted to say something, and the judge told him to go ahead.
My father – who, at this point, was still a non-practicing Lutheran — explained that I attended a daily early morning church class before going to my high school, and that, if I couldn’t drive, either I would have to drop out of attendance or else one or the other of my parents would have to pick me up and take me there. He said that, although they could probably manage it, this would be awkward and significantly inconvenient. He didn’t mention the name of the church.
The judge sat back in his chair, smiled, and said that he thought that maybe an exception could be made for a good Mormon boy. He told me that he would expunge this latest offense from my record, but that he expected me to drive more carefully in the future, not to repeat such nonsense, and not to be back in front of him ever again.
I don’t know the judge’s name. I assume, but I don’t actually know, that he was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
In any case, I floated out of the judge’s office with the thought going through my ecstatic adolescent mind over and over again, “The Church is true!”
And that's the thing about faith-promoting rumors: they can often seem either noticeably embellished, or like outright fabrications. I can't help but be reminded of Russell Nelson's "Doors of Death" story, which was thoroughly debunked on this site some time ago. I'm also reminded of Gene Cook's uproariously funny and wholly implausible story about sitting next to Mick Jagger on a plane ride. So, is DCP's story true? I'm curious what others think....
