Proffitt’s Ponderings: The Driver’s Ed car chase

One day in the late 1970s, Mike Proffitt was sitting at his home when he got a call from the Newport Police Department.

At the time, Proffitt was a young coach and Driver’s Education teacher at Cocke County High School.

So when the policeman on the other end of the phone asked Proffitt where his student driver vehicle was, he shrugged and told them it was behind his house, same as it always was when he was not at school.

“No,” the policeman said. “It’s not.”

At the time, Proffitt did not think anything of it.

Perhaps he would have, though, if he knew what would unfold next: a wild chase through multiple states for the police, an unexpected trip to Florida for Proffitt, and even the threat of barking, snarling junkyard dogs one night in Atlanta.

In total, it became one of the crazier stories he has experienced — even secondhand — among a litany of good ones, as a few students pulled a criminal level of Houdini acts to escape the law across the Southeast.

But to dig into this full tale, let’s start back at Proffitt’s house when he found out the car was gone.

Turns out, the school’s Chevrolet Driver’s Ed vehicle had been stolen by a group of students.

They filled up with gas at a Shell station located close to where the Zaxby’s now sits on Cosby Highway and took off.

“I didn’t think too much about it,” Proffitt said, “other than we would get it back in a few minutes.”

Alas, they did not. The police searched all over town, and they never could find the vehicle.

Three days later, proffitt got a call from Hickory, North Carolina.

The group had stopped there, gassing up the car before spray painting what had been a brand-ne car in an attempt to make it unrecognizable.

In Charlotte, Proffitt said that they stopped to get gas, did not pay for it, and took off again.

Through both times in the Tar Heel State, the students moved fast enough so as to escape the state troopers.

Finally, a few days after that, Proffitt got a call from Upper Lakes, Florida.

The group had zoomed through a gas station close to a school clocking 100 miles per hour, and the local policemen set up a road block to stop them.

The students hopped out of the car and ran into a field, where they were finally wrangled down.

“They finally ran them down, but they had picked up a hitchhiker,” said Proffitt with a chuckle. “He didn’t know the car was stolen or anything.”

When all this was relayed to Proffitt, he was informed that someone would have to come get the car since it had been impounded.

Another coach, Dennis Balch, went with Proffitt to get the car, as they rode to Atlanta with former superintendent Beth Freeman and assistant superintendent Charlie Seehorn, who had to be at the convention center for some meetings.

While there, Proffitt and Balch went to check out the Omni Hotel downtown, but they were told they did not have the correct shoes on, since they wore sneakers at the time.

“I never will forget that,” Proffitt said.

Still, he had bigger problems to solve.

Because before he could get the Driver’s Ed car back in Florida, he had to get the car they had driven from Newport out of an impound lot in Atlanta.

You see, Proffitt had spotted a giant, flashing PARK sign near their hotel and pulled the car into the garage.

Except he had not read the small lettering below the sign, which informed people that their vehicles would be towed after a certain amount of time.

“I never did look at the full thing,” Proffitt said with a chuckle.

So before they could go on to Florida, Proffitt and his colleagues had to go get their car out of the impound lot in Atlanta.

Proffitt and Freeman went to the tow yard, where Freeman told Proffitt to jump the fence since she had a key for the car.

And once he did, he found several snarling, angry junkyard Dobermans waiting on him.

“Here they came,” Proffitt said, “with me on top of the car trying to keep them away. An old man came out smoking a cigar and said, ‘You’re not the first that’s tried this.’”

Proffitt assured him that they did in fact have the money to cover the vehicle, so they finished the process without any further threat of canine retaliation.

Once they actually started driving from Atlanta to Florida, Proffitt drove most of the way then asked Balch to drive.

“And he lasted for like 15 minutes,” Proffitt said with a chuckle. “Then said, ‘I’m so tired I can’t hold my head up. You’ll have to finish it up.’”

Proffitt did, and when they got to the town, the policemen showed Proffitt where the students had gone triple digits near a local school.

“They showed me where those boys had come around the curve going 100 in a school zone,” Proffitt said. “They had put them in jail near Gainesville, so we started back with me driving the Driver’s Ed car after we got it out.”

And oddly enough, when they got back to Newport, Proffitt saw the kids who had stolen the car in the first place.

“I wondered how they got back so quick,” he said. “Turns out, they had put them on a plane down in Florida, and the sheriff’s department was supposed to have picked them up when they got to Knoxville. Well they had gotten off the plane in Atlanta, then hired a taxi to bring them to Newport.”

The boys had lied to the taxi driver, telling them their parents worked at Brock’s Deli and that they would go in and get money to pay him since they did not have enough money in Atlanta.

But after they walked inside, they snuck out the back door, leaving the driver with a hefty unpaid bill.

“So they got out of that,” Proffitt said. “Then the next time I heard from them, they had finally been taken to jail in Only, Tennessee.”

Finally, Proffitt thought the students would be put away for good.

But one glance out a car window on I-40 East told him otherwise.

“We were coming back from a coaching clinic in Murfreesboro, looked over at about Cookeville, and those boys were hitchhiking back,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “They had escaped from there too.”

In total, this story became one of the craziest ones Proffitt has witnessed, especially considering the obscene amount of ways that a few CCHS students had pulled off this feat.

“It’s funny,” he summarized, “how many things they got away with.”