There’s a driving school in our building and during the summer it holds classes in the office next to ours.  I keep listening for the sounds of horrified retching, but haven’t heard any, which tells me that yet another hallowed tradition must have died.

They apparently no longer show gory car accident movies.

I missed the first day of driver’s ed when I had it in high school, so I never got to actually see one until recently.  But I had heard about them ever since I was a mere stripling.  My brother, who was nine years older, and his friends used to delight in scaring the hell out of me by describing the movies to me.

The one they always mentioned was “Signal 30,” which apparently was the “Citizen Kane” of driver’s ed movies (although instead of being a sled, “Rosebud” apparently was a 1950s sedan with a body inside it wrapped around a tree).

Well, I finally saw “Signal 30” a few days ago – it is, of course, on Youtube – and I can say this much:  Ick.

It’s certainly far from the goriest movie I’ve ever seen and, being in a business that’s occasionally required me to go to various fatal accidents, is far from the goriest thing, period.  But let’s just say “Signal 30” isn’t something you’d want to see after eating spaghetti for lunch.

It was made in 1959 and features the Ohio Highway Patrol. The title comes from the radio call sign used for a highway fatality.  With portentous, somber narration, it shows graphic scenes of actual car accidents, with heavy emphasis on floppy or blackened corpses being placed in body bags.  It’s pretty grim.

It spawned a host of imitators with names like "Death on the Highway,"  “Carrier or Killer” and “Highways of Agony.”  You can even buy them today on DVD as a collection called “Classic Drivers Ed Shock and Scare Film Library.”  I’m not absolutely certain I’d want to spend much time in the same room with somebody who’d buy that, but I guess there’s no accounting for taste.

I can see how these movies would have been pretty willies-inducing for kids taking driver’s ed in the 1960s.  But as a member of the post-“Night of the Living Dead” generation, I’ve seen enough gore flicks that I’ve developed a pretty strong stomach.  The fact that the footage in “Signal 30” is all real – unlike the mostly bogus footage in the famed “Faces of Death” films – makes it a bit more horrifying to watch. But the people shown in “Signal 30” have been in their graves for a half-century or more and that makes it almost seem like a historical curiosity.

You have to wonder if those old driver’s ed movies, much-discussed as they were, really did what they were intended to do.  Teen-agers think they’re immortal.  That’s why they keep dying in the ways shown in “Signal 30,” as well as in myriad other fashions. Their brains don’t yet contain that still, small voice that tells you when you’re about to do something stupid or even potentially fatal.  Hell, one of my best friends from high school got electrocuted jumping a train and they don’t make movies to warn you off doing that.

I’m not advocating doing this, but I think the only way you could really accomplish what those movies wanted to is to actually take a person to the scene of a fatal accident.  There’s something about being in the presence of sudden death, even as a mere observer,  that changes you. It’s happened to me a half-dozen times or so, and it’s a very odd experience.

The worst, by far, was when a transient had fallen asleep between some train tracks and been dragged under 11 cars of a freight train.  It happened late at night.  I walked up to a cop standing by the train, asked where he was and the cop said, “Right there,” pointing his flashlight about six feet away from me.  There wasn’t a lot of gore, but his legs were going in directions your legs aren’t made to go.  It was the only time in all the years we were married that I came home and woke up my wife.

Actually, one of the worst things I ever saw wasn’t a fatality, but it was close.  I went to south Fargo late one night on a report of a man about to hang himself from a tree.  His toddler daughter was watching from a window in the house.  The cops did an absolutely spectacular job of talking him down before he did it.  But on the way home, I got the most awful case of the willies I’ve ever had, before or since.

I think it’s about being in the presence of life’s ultimate fragility.  The guy under the train was some mother’s baby at one point, but he ended up stuffed under a rail car, looking like nothing so much as a discarded marionette.  And the guy who was up in the tree was in such God-awful psychic pain; I had witnessed probably the single worst moment in another human being’s life.  Granted, he had chosen to do it in a semi-public place and I was there only because of my job (you wouldn’t believe how many folks come out just for chucks to watch a body being pulled from the river), but I still felt like I’d eavesdropped on something that should’ve been private.  It was one of those times when doing my job has been unpleasant at the deepest level.

It also was one of those times when I was reminded life  – and death – is no driver’s ed movie.