WORKING IN L.A. / TRAFFIC SCHOOL TEACHER : A Touch of Humor Helps Drive Home Lessons for Lawbreakers

It’s 8:30 on a Saturday morning.

Twenty-eight people are sitting on hard little chairs in a cramped, windowless room at a bowling alley in Covina.

They are not there because they want to be. They are there because they all got traffic tickets, and if they spend the next eight hours in that dismal little room, their automobile insurance rates probably will not go up.

Up in front of this sullen throng steps Roy C. Barrows, 33--an actor, novelist, composer of classical music and stand-up comic.

“Good morning,” he says cheerily. “Welcome to the More Amusing, Less Confusing Traffic School.”

It was not the career that Barrows had in mind when he was a “weird kid” growing up in Kennebunk, Me. Back then, he was thinking more about the stage, or television, or the movies.

He said that after earning a degree in broadcasting and film at Boston University, he followed the dream of thousands before him and headed for Hollywood. There was some work as a comedian at nightclubs and college shows, but Roy C. Barrows did not become a household name.

One day, Barrows got a traffic ticket. And he went to traffic school.

“I thought, I can do this,” he said. “I can do this better.”

After working for someone else’s school, Barrows started his own. Now, in addition to himself, there are six people out there on Saturdays striving to be more amusing and less confusing.

Tossing off short impersonations of Bing Crosby and Bette Davis, Barrows starts the class at the bowling alley with a show-and-tell session during which students are asked to describe the offenses for which they had been cited.

The first pupils are a trifle hesitant, mumbling things such as “35 in a 25-m.p.h. zone” in barely audible tones. But as the recitations continue, the whole thing degenerates into a can-you-top-this contest.

“I was going 55 in a 35 zone,” one man says with ill-concealed glee. “Mine was 65 in a 40,” crows a silver-haired matron. “I did 70 in a 40,” a slender youth boasts, confident that he has won the day.

Then Julie, a blonde woman in her 20s, raises her hand.

“I was going 110 in my Mustang convertible in a 65 zone, but the policeman only wrote me up for 99,” she says with a big smile. “I didn’t have my seat belt on either, ‘cause it’s uncomfortable and wrinkles my dress, but he didn’t write me up for that.”

Querulous in defeat, the other students start sniping at Julie, pointing out that what she did was reckless, endangering not only herself but others.

Barrows does nothing to dissuade them, tossing in facts about death and dismemberment as they relate to speed. Fifteen minutes later, Julie is sitting there, silent and chagrined, as her classmates trade homilies about the foolhardiness of driving too fast.

Everyone takes a 10-minute break.

Game time.

“It’s Hollywood Squares!” Barrows shouts, underscoring his announcement with a short riff on a little music synthesizer before drawing a Tic-Tac-Toe pattern on the blackboard.

Dividing the class into four teams, Barrows serves as master of ceremonies, imitating the voices of celebrities and political figures as he asks questions from a Department of Motor Vehicles quiz on traffic laws and regulations. The teams have to choose between answers A, B and C.

“If you are asked to submit to a test of the alcohol in your body, you may choose what?” Barrows asks in a Groucho Marx-ish sort of way. “Is it Answer A--’Only a blood test?’ ”

“No!” choruses a team that has elected to call itself “The Violators.”

“You got it!” Barrows yells. “The correct answer is Answer C-- ‘A blood, breath or urine test!’ ”

He marks an X in one of the squares.

“Blood, Breath or Urine,” he mutters. “Sounds like a rock group.”

There are more questions and more impersonations--Jack Nicholson, Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, Clark Gable, Mae West (in a shopworn blonde wig) and Elvis. Barrows’ listeners are mostly under 35, and some of his bygone characters--Peter Lorre, Charles Laughton--leave them flat.

One girl believes that Louis Armstrong may have been the first man to set foot on the moon. One young man knows that Winston Churchill was “somebody,” but is unwilling to go beyond that.

The Violators finally get three Xs in a row to win the championship.

Time for the lunch break.

Patty, a middle-aged housewife, is three minutes late getting back from lunch.

Barrows, who has warned everyone about tardiness, says that unless her excuse is world class, she will have to sing the class a song.

“I went home and talked to my sister on the phone,” Patty says. “Then I got behind someone on the way back who wasn’t driving fast enough.”

“Does Patty have to sing?” Barrows asks.

“Yes,” says the class.

Patty manages to squeeze out a vaguely tuneful moan, accompanied by Barrows’ synthesizer, and the class is satisfied.

Barrows then launches into a general critique of California drivers, pantomiming the actions he is describing.

“People out here don’t think driving is important enough to pay attention to it,” he says. “You see guys shaving behind the wheel, women putting on makeup, people reading the newspaper. One guy out here in an RV left the wheel and went back inside to get something. He thought the cruise control was an automatic pilot.”

After that come discussions about road signs, followed by a quiz. Then there is a short play, using four students as actors, about the evidence one needs to fight a ticket.

Time for the last break of the day.

Upon their return, the students split up again to discuss a hypothetical case in which a young man with a previous arrest for drunk driving gets drunk again, loads eight friends into his pickup and crashes, killing all eight of them. He is convicted of manslaughter. What sentence should he serve?

The debate becomes heated. Some pupils want the young man to serve a long prison term, as punishment and an example to the driving public. Others, stressing the man’s youth and his potential for rehabilitation, favor a short prison term, followed by probation.

After a half an hour or so, a compromise is reached: The young man is to serve between five and 10 years in prison, followed by an equal period of closely supervised probation, during which he must refrain from drinking, attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and lecture youths about what happened to him.

Barrows is dead serious about drunk driving.

“There’s no excuse for it,” he says. “None.”

While Barrows is filling out the paperwork everyone needs to prove that they were there, his pupils sit around chatting, grateful that the eight-hour day has passed so quickly.

“He’s done a good job,” Jason says.

“You’re right,” says Sal, who’s something of a connoisseur. “I’ve been to four or five of these before, and this is the best.”

Barrows hands out the diplomas, and everyone heads for the door.

One man pauses at his desk to say that he had a good time, and learned a lot.

“That’s good,” Barrows says. “That’s exactly what I hope my students will get out of it.”