Driving report surprisingly off the mark

New York drivers are the nation’s worst? That’s what a GMAC Insurance test suggests.
A written test was given to drivers across the country, state by state, in which they concluded that 41 percent of licensed drivers would fail a written test if given today. According to test comparisons, New York drivers were reported worst.
That is hard for me to grasp for a couple of reasons. One: Ever see New York City traffic? I don’t know that I have seen even a fender bender in New York (state or city), and it seems to me that it must take some pretty good drivers to run around in that traffic and not have wrecks on all corners.
Second, I’ll put S.C. bad drivers up against bad drivers anywhere.
South Carolina ranked 12th for having bad drivers which was a surprise to me. That is one ranking I thought we would have been closer to the top. Ranked worse than S.C. besides New York (starting with second worst and going through 11th) were New Jersey, Hawaii, California, Georgia, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, District of Columbia (D.C. is not a state, but they included it anyway), Florida, Connecticut and Maryland.
I always thought Florida drivers were particularly bad because before I-95, if I made a run up Highway 301 to Dillon, I expected to be run off the road at least once by a car with Florida tags that was passing improperly.
The highest group failure rate, by the way, was young adults while the lowest failure rate was older men. So take that.
Also, reading stuff here and there, we find that Diners Club issued what was considered to have been the first credit card. It seems some guy who invited people to a restaurant for dinner discovered that he had left his wallet at home, so he had to call his wife to bring some money.
This upset the guy so badly that he arranged with some New York restaurants to honor a card he created, and that turned out to be the beginning of the Diners Club.
The first athlete to appear on a Wheaties box, I learned, was Lou Gehrig in 1934, and that might have burned Babe Ruth, who was still a teammate of Gehrig’s on the New York Yankees in 1934.
Billionaires are plentiful now, relatively speaking. But my source says that America’s first one came along until 1916, and that was John D. Rockefeller.
Another first was the first skyscraper. It would be tempting to guess that it was in New York since that city is so famous for its tall buildings. But in the 19th Century the first skyscraper was built in Chicago, which also is famous for tall buildings. By the way, did you know that three of the five tallest buildings in the United States now are in Chicago?
There is no particular reason that all of this came up. It just did.

Singing kids
We went to the Men’s Choral Society Concert the other day at St. Luke’s Lutheran Church, and it was a very nice afternoon. (They sang in two performances on different days with big audiences. We went to the latter one.)
I had not expected the appearance of members of the Palmetto State Boys Choir, a local group for boys 7 and older. They intend to add high school boys with changed voices to broaden the capabilities of the choir.
Our audience was so impressed, the kids received a spontaneous standing ovation after they did four numbers to start the second half of the program.
Mark Railey is taking a lead in developing this group that, in addition to developing music, aims to instill in the boys “a keen sense of respect for themselves and others” and “the self-discipline necessary” to become effective citizens.
They really sounded good, and these kids could be important as a good influence on other kids in the area. All singing that day were from Florence and Darlington counties. Oh. The men as usual were very good, and I particularly liked the Phantom of the Opera medley with guests soprano Xin Jie, not a man, and baritone Theodore Sipes featured. Julian M. Young leads a still-new men’s chorus group that should be around a long time.

— Thom Anderson is a retired journalist who has 40 years experience with South Carolina newspapers, including the Morning News. He can be reached at .