Help me Mr. Ingram!

Kregg Halstead

On Friday, Dec. 18, 1981, I was a 5-foot-5-inch point guard for the Storm Lake Tornadoes 10th grade boys basketball team, and for approximately two hours, I was Caitlin Clark before there was Caitlin Clark.

We were playing our final basketball game before the holiday break at Spirit Lake. Now, from the fourth through the 12th grade, I had plenty of poor shooting games when I could not buy a basket. But on this magical night, something amazing clicked. From my very first shot, I was on fire. I couldn’t miss. My teammates were genuinely amazed, probably wondering who had possessed my body. And because I was the shortest guy on the court, none of these were garbage points; I had to fight like a wild animal for every single shot taken and point scored.

By halftime, I had racked up an astonishing (at least for me) 19 points. Right before the buzzer, I even drained a throw it up and hope shot from the logo area. Granted, it was the Spirit Lake junior high gym, so the court was slightly smaller than regulation, but still, it was a 35-foot all net swish! Even though I cooled off a bit in the second half, I finished with 26 points (without the benefit of having the 3 point shot). I was on cloud nine. Basketball (at least in the wintertime) was my entire universe, and for a few fleeting hours, I wasn’t just a point guard — I was a king!

The next morning, however, the universe decided to aggressively re-center my euphoria with a heavy dose of reality. I woke up on a few hours of sleep for my new job as a waiter at the local Storm Lake Country Kitchen, with my shift starting at 9 a.m. I was incredibly proud of this job. It wasn’t a dirty, gritty job like detasseling corn; instead I got to wear nice clothes, sport a shiny name tag, and authoritatively guide customers through the nuances of the breakfast, lunch, and dinner menus as well as take payments operating the cash register.

Coming from our family’s home on West Sixth Street and driving our dad’s prized green Chevrolet Monte Carlo eastward on Highway 7, just past Barton Avenue, the back end started to slide on a patch of ice. Instead of pumping the brakes as I should have done, I must have mistakenly slammed them. The Monte Carlo pirouetted to the right and sideswiped a sturdy wooden mailbox post, inflicting a jaw-dropping $1,000 in damage — an absolute fortune in 1981 money which could have bought a lot of pancakes.

The car was nevertheless still drivable, so I eventually limped into the Country Kitchen parking lot. I called my parents to confess what had happened. Figuring the owner had likely witnessed my sudden vehicular assault upon his mailbox, my parents did the civic-minded thing and called the police.

Nothing says “Employee of the Month” quite like having the local police department show up at your workplace during the peak Saturday breakfast rush to fill out an accident report. My colleagues — the waiters, the cooks, the dishwasher and the assistant manager — all stared at me like I was a hardened criminal. I was a 16-year-old boy who thought he was tough and strong, but I completely broke down and openly cried into my Country Kitchen vest in front of each of them.

I couldn’t stop the tears. It was a personal disaster. The best of times had morphed in a split second into the worst of times. And the awful truth was finally out: I was a bad driver!

I had passed driver’s education that fall and received my license just weeks prior. My instructor, Mr. Ingram, was an excellent teacher — strict, fair and dedicated. My ineptness was strictly a “me” problem. Parallel parking? Sketchy. Angle parking? Iffy. Backing up? Pray! My older brothers and their friends immediately rebranded me “AJ,” after A.J. Foyt, the legendary race car driver famous for surviving spectacular, fiery crashes.

My driving confidence didn’t just drop; it eviscerated into thin air. I became paralyzed by the sheer sight of a steering wheel. By March 1982, I was regularly working the 12-4:30 a.m. Sunday bar-rush shift at Country Kitchen. My poor father, likely wanting to protect his insurance rates, would actually get out of bed at 4:30 a.m. to come pick me up so I wouldn’t have to drive home on the icy streets in the dark. It was during one of those quiet, sleepy drives home that we heard the sad and somber news over the radio that John Belushi had died from a suspected drug overdose. 

By early July, I had made (we thought) enough incremental progress behind the wheel that my parents let me drive from Storm Lake to a tennis tournament in Ottumwa. The deal was simple: drive myself, or don’t play. I traveled there with my friend Karl Stanley — with whom we would win the Iowa Boys’ 1A Doubles State Championship 22 months later — and ground out on a hot day a grueling first-round singles win at Indian Hills Community College. I even saved a match point against Jim Wilbanks, who would go on to win three years later for Ottumwa the 2A Iowa High School Boys State Singles in 1985, so it was a pretty good win for me. Except for that day, I never won a tennis match when I had a match point against me. 

Riding high then on my narrow tennis victory, I pulled into a Pizza Hut for Karl and me to get some lunch. In parking, seconds later, confusion ensued: either I backed into someone, or they backed into me or both. Frankly, who was right and who was wrong, didn’t matter. The takeaway was exactly the same: U-G-G-H-H-H-H another accident! My confidence as a driver was right back at Dead Sea level (our planet’s lowest point). 

The ultimate test, though, of my driving came six weeks later, in late August. My parents, sister, and I had been visiting my oldest brother, Kevin in Decatur, Ill. My parents both had to get back to Storm Lake for Monday morning, but I greatly wanted to play the All-Iowa Open Tennis Tournament held in Clive at Racket Club West, located on the extreme (then) western edge of Des Moines (on Hickman Road right across from Living History Farms).

The logistics were the following: on the way to Illinois, my parents had left our second family car with our close family friends in Mitchellville. In coming back from Illinois that Sunday, I was to drive the car from Mitchellville (10 miles east of Des Moines) to Indianola (14 miles south of Des Moines) to stay with my sister-in-law Monica’s mother, Sherrie, and then drive to Racket Club West on Monday morning. If I was still alive in the tournament at the end of Monday (and then Tuesday), I would then drive back from Racket Club West to Indianola and again stay with Sherrie. 

An average driver would have taken the shortest, most logical route from Mitchellville to Indianola: i.e. I-35 west to I-235 passing by the State Capitol straight through the center of Des Moines and then down Highway 69 quickly to Indianola. Total time: around 30 minutes.

But I wasn’t an average driver,being terrified of downtown Des Moines traffic. Instead, I hatched a brilliant master plan to bypass the city entirely. From Michellville, I would take I-80 west all the way around the western suburbs, hug the Interstate shifting to I-35 South, and take Highway 92 back east to Indianola.

Naturally, the joke was entirely on me. When I finally reached Highway 92 in the pitch-black Iowa late evening, the road was unexpectedly closed for road construction.

With no GPS, no smartphone, and a rapidly mounting sense of doom, I was forced to detour another 10 miles south into what seemed like the absolute abyss. Driving down empty, pitch-black roads, I was absolutely convinced that the next road sign I saw was going to say: “Welcome to Missouri.” And that would have been the end. I would have forever disappeared into a black hole. 

As I white-knuckled the steering wheel, I found myself repeatedly saying out loud to the empty car: “Help me, Mr. Ingram! Help me!” I could practically hear my driving instructor’s stern voice echoing over the hum of the engine, reminding me to keep my hands at 10 and 2 and closely watch the road. Like a child thrown into the deep end of a lake or pool, I was frantically treading my way through Warren County.

By the time I finally corrected course and pulled into Sherrie’s driveway in Indianola, a 30-minute easy Sunday drive had turned into a two-hour Lewis and Clark marathon expedition. Sherrie practically burst out the front door, panicked: “Where have you been? I have been super worried!”

But a favorable thing happened when I woke up Monday morning. Although my heart was still pounding, I realized something crucial: I had survived. I had conquered the pitch-black Southern Iowa driving unknown, not disappeared somewhere into northern Missouri, and arrived (maybe not on time but at least safe and sound) to Indianola.

That morning, I successfully navigated north up Highway 69, took Army Post Road west to I-35 then went north and rolled into Racket Club West in Clive. To my small-town Storm Lake eyes, more used to playing tennis at Chautauqua Park, this indoor club looked like Wimbledon. Fancy, fancy, fancy … elite, elite, elite … posh, posh, posh.     

But my intense driving anxiety had done something wondrous to my psychological state: it made playing competitive tennis feel like a casual walk in the park! On Monday, I easily knocked off Steve Mayer from Denison, who would place third in Iowa in 1A singles both our junior and senior years. On Tuesday, as the rain poured outside, I stepped onto the indoor courts and dismantled Chris Huston, the No. 1 player for powerhouse West Des Moines Valley.

By Wednesday, my surging confidence behind the wheel had completely bled into my tennis game. In the finals, I faced Bryan Stocksted, Des Moines Hoover’s top player. His father had been the Iowa State high school singles champion in 1961 and grandfather was the Drake men’s tennis team coach for many years. The kind of player who in all reality someone from Storm Lake not having the benefit of indoor courts should not have been able to beat but I was able to defeat him, narrowly winning the last two sets after badly losing the first. 

So I was the All-Iowa Open Boys 16 and Under Singles Champ August 1982, but more importantly, I was Kregg Halstead, driver survivor! 

On the happy drive home from Clive to Storm Lake, I even had enough confidence to slightly go off of Highway 30 in Glidden and stop and see Merle Hay’s grave (the first U.S. soldier killed in WWI and namesake for Merle Hay Mall and Merle Hay Boulevard in Des Moines).

From that point on, I have always considered myself a good driver. But more significantly, these four days of first peak but then dissipating driving tension, and overcoming such, was a personal transition from childhood to adulthood. And looking out over the cornfields on that final triumphant drive home to Storm Lake, the road ahead didn’t look intimidating anymore — it just looked like home.

Kregg Halstead graduated from Storm Lake High School in 1984. He enjoys sharing his cherished childhood memories of life in Storm Lake during the 1970s and 80s.