[2manycars]

I learned to drive on the farm, with a 1946 chevy 1-1/2 ton truck, then graduated to a 49 chevy sedan. When my father bought the town sedan in 1960, I could drive that just fine. Out of the 278 vehicles I have owned, many were manual transmission vehicles. When I worked in construction in the 70's I drove a
B61 Mack, with an 18 speed road ranger setup. My newest car is an automatic, for when I need to drive in the city, or get stuck in heavy traffic on the so called highway. The model A Fords are of course manual transmission and my MG's are manual.
An interesting bit of info is that in this country manual transmissions are often referred to as "standard shift" by older people. This term did not come from differencianting from automatic transmissions, but it came from an earlier time, when some manual transmissions on cars had a shifting pattern different from the familiar pattern of the model A, which is the "standard shift pattern". Some had second gear where third is on the model A, and high gear where second is.