Joan Robinson walked into a Soo Service Ontario location on Monday and walked out with a renewed driver's licence.
"She turned 94 in January," chuckled her daughter-in-law Louise Robillard. "We had some good laughs with the staff," Robillard said.
"Joan showed the staff at Service Ontario her Irish-born father’s 1926 copy of the Ontario Highway Traffic Act and jokingly said she had been studying diligently to pass the test. She said she knew the rules about driving safely around horse-drawn carriages."
Interviewed by SooToday, Robinson said she usually reviews a current edition of the Official Ministry of Transportation (MTO) Driver's Handbook to prepare for licence renewal examinations. Still, she didn't this time because she'd lent it to a friend.
"Just as kind of a joke, we took one of my dad's books. I have his box of letters that my mother received when he was in World War 1 at Vimy Ridge."
She found the 1926 edition of the Highway Traffic Act in that box.
Robinson's father was Harry George, who worked in the Sault as a police constable, a firefighter and an Algoma Steel worker.
"I have all these old letters of his that he wrote, or that my grandmother wrote to him, and he saved them and brought them back from there, and I still had them with all those old stamps on them," Robinson said.
Further deploying her razor-sharp sense of humour, Robinson told the Service Ontario staff that she'd come to them without her wristwatch.
"Joan said that she did not wear her watch because she knew she would be asked to draw the face of a clock and wanted to make sure the staff did not think she would try to cheat by peeking at her watch," Robillard said.
"Joan does not do any long-distance driving. The grocery store and pharmacy are just two blocks away from her home and she would only drive in good weather, and never at night."
Robinson told us she prepped for her renewal examination using online resources explaining traffic signs and rules of the road.
She doesn't have a computer, but her son Andy brought his laptop over to her place.
"It was a very simple procedure," Robinson said. "They just tested the eyes, then at the very end had me draw the picture of a circle and a clock."
She remembers a time when road tests were considerably harder.
"Years ago, they used to take you up Bruce Street Hill, and I think you had to back down.
"So you'd have to pull over to the other side and back down with going traffic. Like if you're on the right-hand side, you couldn't back down there because the cars are coming up so you'd have to go to the other side."
"I don't drive very much any more, because everybody's so good to me and they take me."
"Like my son said: 'I'm not worried about you, mom. I'm worried about the other guy because there's such awful drivers out there right now.'"