Some, like me, would read that and shout, “Heck yes! Sign me up!”

Others, I’m sure, would say, “What is a Model T?”

If you don’t know a Model T by name, you’d certainly recognize it by sight. It’s that small old-timey automobile with four big, skinny wheels. It bounces down a road and looks like a horse-drawn carriage minus the horses. It putters, lurches through its gears and leans wildly around curves.

It was the masterpiece of Henry Ford, launching both the Ford Motor Company and the concept of the assembly line. From 1908 until 1927, the Ford factories rolled out some 15 million Model Ts. The design was deliberately simple, keeping the Model T’s price within the reach of America’s growing middle class. It was the car, folks said, that “taught America how to drive.”

Each summer Hood River’s antique car and plane museum puts on its Model T driving school. It’s a one-day experience, offered a half-dozen times from late spring to early fall. They open only 10 spots per session that often fill quickly with antique car aficionados from across the country (and in this case, one reporter who never grew out of a boyhood love of vintage cars and planes).

But the Model T driving school is just one program of a much larger museum of cars and planes, gathering together a community that is devoted to making history “hands on.”

‘We’re not small’

When you first walk into the museum, you find a gift shop, not unlike other small museums. In the mornings, a handful of regular volunteers sip coffee, munch on doughnuts, and swap stories of their favorite topic: old planes and old cars. The scene hardly prepares a visitor for what they are about to experience as they push through the double doors into the exhibition area.