Lifestyle
How a Driving Instructor to the Stars Spends Her Sundays
Shanti Gooljar recently got a $2,000 tip.
She runs a driving school in Manhattan that caters to a high-end clientele, and only works on referrals. She says she has taught the offspring of a few names you might know:
Jerry Seinfeld. Rupert Murdoch. Vera Wang. Katie Couric.
She had initially worked as a paramedic. But after two years, she decided she did not like it and turned to a driving school in the Bronx. Ms. Gooljar quickly realized she had found her calling.
“I just got real good at what I was doing,” she said. The teens she taught connected with her unfiltered, no-nonsense style, and they soon began giving her number to their friends. So she bought her own car and went freelance. Ms. Gooljar, 62, opened her own school in 2014.
“That was 10 years ago,” she said. “And look at me now.”
She owns the Empire State Driving School on the Upper West Side, which has five other instructors. Behind-the-wheel lessons go for as much as $200 per hour, and she works eight hours per day, seven days a week.
Ms. Gooljar lives in a three-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, near where she lived when she immigrated from Guyana with her four siblings in 1972. After the births of her sons — Philip, 43, and Michael, 38 — she and her husband,Vinny Gooljar, upgraded from a studio to a ground-floor space next to a police station, where she now lives alone. Mr. Gooljar, to whom she was married for 43 years, died of a heart attack in 2022.
“After he died, my family wanted me to go to Florida — my mom is there, and my brothers and sisters,” she said. “But I’m at the age where I like the same routine.”
ON AUTOPILOT I wake up at 5 a.m. I don’t need an alarm — it’s all in my head.
Depending what time my first lesson is, I’ll usually stop by Dunkin’ for a small hot coffee with cream. I’m a regular at a few of them — the one in the Bronx on Webster Avenue, and the one in Harlem near 122nd Street. They all know me — or rather, I make myself known to them!
FIRST PICKUP I often have my first lesson at 8 a.m. I’ll either meet the client at their house, or they’ll come to the school in Lincoln Square. I get a lot of prep school students, but also some older people. I’m teaching a 94-year-old right now!
I often take people up, around and through Harlem. I don’t teach downtown, especially not now with congestion pricing — you can’t get anywhere.
BACK TO BACK I roll straight into my next lesson at 10 a.m. I usually fit in four two-hour lessons per day.
The key is to build up their confidence right away. Driving in Manhattan is like driving anywhere. You have to know what you’re doing. If the driver behind you is beeping their horn, move around and let them go.
I don’t allow my students to argue with me, because I’m more experienced. I’d never gotten a speeding ticket in 45 years of driving until September, when I was driving to my girlfriend’s funeral in Virginia on the highway. The officer told me I went 10 miles over the speed limit — really?!
PIT STOP Around 12:30 p.m., I grab another coffee from Dunkin’ and take a pee break. Sometimes I’ll have a salad, and then when I come home I get something to eat. I don’t eat a lot — I need my coffee, though!
THERAPIST HOUR When I’m teaching these kids, I’m not just their driving instructor — I’m also their therapist. They tell me things they’d never tell their mothers.
One of the girls I’m teaching right now, her boyfriend broke up with her last week. She’s 27. It’s better they break up now than they wait until they get married. She’s young. She can move on. I know it’s hard when you’ve been with someone for that long, but it’s better to have it happen now than later.
HEAD ON A SWIVEL Don’t think I’m distracted, though! I’m so good at what I do that I can sit there and have a conversation and still grab that steering wheel out of your hands, stop the car and move across all the lanes to save you.
This time of year, it gets dark around 4:30, so my last pickup is around 3 p.m. When it comes to taking the road test, I’m very proud of my track record. I can count on one hand the number of people who failed last year.
My last lesson ends around 5 p.m., and my drive home is about half an hour, depending on where I end up.
DINNER PLANS I’ll often grab dinner with my son Philip, who lives in Connecticut. Sometimes we’ll go to a place on City Island — the Original Crab Shanty — and eat lobsters and crabs.
Or sometimes I’ll cook for him at home. I can cook real good. I can cook anything. He likes beef curry. Or, if he’s busy, I’ll eat alone. If it’s just me, I’ll have a bowl of oatmeal for dinner, or Cream of Wheat. I love that. I’m very easy to please.
WASH IT OFF I’ll hop in the shower around 7 or 8. I have always been and always will be a night shower person. Especially when it’s so cold, who wants to get up at 5 and take a shower and have your hair all wet?
SADDLE UP I love “Yellowstone” with Kevin Costner. I don’t know what I’m going to do now that it’s ended. His character’s daughter, Beth — she’s the bomb. I’d love to meet her. Maybe Kelly Reilly, who plays her, needs driving lessons — you never know!
RINSE AND REPEAT I crawl into bed between 8 and 8:30. When Vinny was alive, we used to go places. Now, I don’t go anywhere. What keeps me going is work: I get up and go to work, take a shower, come home, eat dinner, then wake up the next morning and go again.
I’m not ready to retire yet, but I’m laying the groundwork. My son Philip is learning how to run the school — scheduling, how to hire the right people, monitor the money, pay the bills. I’m proud that I’ve hired good people and made such a name for the school. That’s most important — getting good people to work for you.
EARLY TO BED I’m asleep by 8:30. I have to be ready to go at 5 a.m. for another full day of lessons.
Sunday Puzzle
NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
NPR
On-air challenge
I’m going to give you two five-letter words. Add the same two letters at the end of the first one and the start of the second one, in each case to complete a familiar seven-letter word.
Ex. Later Ready –> LATERAL/ALREADY
1. Habit Tempt
2. Laten Press
3. Blank Ching
4. Since Venue
5. Shack Groom
6. Surge Stage
Last week’s challenge
Last week’s challenge came from Rawson Sheinberg. of Plymouth, Mich. Think of a U.S. city with a two-word name. Add a letter to the first word, without rearranging letters, to name a country. Then, without adding a letter, rearrange the letters of the second word to name another country. What places are these?
Answer: Los Angeles –> Laos, Senegal
Winner
Elaine Neel of Derby, Kansas.
This week’s challenge
Next weekend will be the 186th convention of the National Puzzler League, in Bloomington, Ind., which I’ll be attending as always. Two other people who will be there are Henri Picciotto and Joshua Kosman, who created this week’s challenge. Name two words that are opposites. They share a single letter. Remove that shared letter from each word, put a hyphen between the two starting words, and you’ll get a term you sometimes see in food ads. What are the two words?
If you know the answer to the challenge, submit it here by Thursday, July 9 at 3 p.m. ET. Listeners whose answers are selected win a chance to play the on-air puzzle. Important: include a phone number where we can reach you.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Hulton Archive/Getty Images
A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images
In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
-
Fitness3 minutes agoWhy 21-15-9 Might be the Smartest Workout Format in Fitness – and How to Use it to Drive Muscle Growth
-
Videos5 minutes agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rSqnRw9t6E
-
Movie Reviews10 minutes agoMovie Review – The Isolate Thief (2025)
-
World20 minutes agoJesse Eisenberg on Why It Would Be ‘Silly’ to Leave U.S. Because of Trump, Says ‘The Debut’ Is ‘The Opposite of AI’ Following A24 DeepMind Partnership
-
Lifestyle1 hour agoSunday Puzzle: Five plus two, two plus five
-
Technology1 hour agoXbox is a disaster
-
World1 hour agoWorld leaders, dignitaries pay tribute to America on historic 250th birthday
-
Politics1 hour agoExpert who fled Cuba warns of ‘vicious cycle’ that will lead to ‘communists in double digits’ in Congress
