The History of the White Cloth in a Broken Down Car Window
A common question about abandoned cars on North Carolina's highways has an answer from a long time ago on a turnpike far, far away.
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Here’s a remix I’ve been playing in my head lately. It’s an imaginary mashup of North Carolina’s national anthem, Petey Pablo’s “Raise Up” (please rise and remove your hats), and the abandoned cars that seem to be strewn about our state’s highways:
North Carolina! C’mon and raise up
Take your shirt off
Twist it ‘round your hand
Stick it in your driver’s window
Once you’ve seen one broken-down junker with a white rag in the window, you start seeing them everywhere. Five years ago, they became a cause célèbre for the North Carolina Highway Patrol. “We don’t want our shoulders to become parking lots,” one trooper told CBS 17 in Raleigh, which counted a dozen abandoned cars on I-440 in a single day. ABC 11 in Durham reported that in 2017, the highway patrol got 3,269 complaints about abandoned cars. In 2018, that number went up to 4,115.
Other people noted that some cars sit there for weeks or longer. A reporter in Charlotte did a whole story on the issue after he noticed an old green Ford sitting abandoned on the Billy Graham Parkway for nearly two months. None of these stories say why the cars are abandoned, by the way. One trooper noticed that the problem was worse in summer, when cars are more likely to overheat when sitting in traffic.
No matter the cause, if a police officer or state trooper notices your abandoned car, he or she is supposed to slap an official orange sticker on the window. You then (technically) have 24 hours to move it before it gets towed. But there’s another totem that seems to have firmly entered the realm of abandoned car folklore: White towels, shirts, or handkerchiefs shoved somewhere into the driver’s-side door. It’s a TikTok trend! Sort of!
The pictures above are from a running bit by Kerry Burns, the former North Carolina Museum of History TikTok Guy who now goes by @northcarolinakerry on that platform and Instagram. Back in November, he put out a post about remembering to bring a white shirt when you get in the car. Then, months later, he did a follow-up where he finally came back for the car that he’d (satirically) abandoned.
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It’s even entered the realm of poetry. Caroline Parkman Barr, a graduate of the MFA Writing Program at UNC-Greensboro, wrote a piece entitled “Abandoned Cars on I-40, North Carolina,” which was published in 2020 by Juke Joint magazine. The poem is worth reading in full, but here’s the critical part to me:
Some with twisted white tee’s hanging from rolled-up windows, as if to say I’ll be back soon, or, Here is the wick, light me.
I had not reimagined a busted Nissan Altima as a Molotov Cocktail. Now it’s all I can think about.
The whole white-shirt-in-the-door question pops up online with some regularity around here. But! Is this just a North Carolina thing? What’s it supposed to mean? Why do so many people do it? And, if so many people are doing the same thing, then where did the idea come from?
It’s time for a good ol’ fashioned Rabbit Hole investigation. Let’s go! (spins t-shirt like a helicopter.)
It’s In The Handbook!
First off, the white cloth thing isn’t just folklore. It’s officially part of the North Carolina Driver Handbook. “If a vehicle breakdown forces you to stop, move far off the road,” it reads on page 62. “Tie a white cloth on the radio aerial or left-door handle and raise the hood.” The fact that this advice references a radio aerial, which has been disappearing from new cars for decades now, means it must be old school.
An imperfect check of the state’s digital collections shows the White Shirt Thing (as I’m gonna call it) was listed in the driver’s handbook as far back as 2005, which is the oldest digitized handbook on the State Archives website. However! I was able to find an archived PDF of the 1951 state driver’s handbook, which includes this fantastic imagery of a man dealing with the aftermath of an accident.
The handbook has all sorts of outdated details. “Sometimes, it is true, the pedestrian does thoughtless or foolish things,” it states in one section. Okay! It also decrees that cars are not to have “any device known as a ‘smoke screen,’ to release gases or odors.” which apparently was a James Bond-esque add-on to your car you’d deploy to lose the cops. But aside from saying that a driver shouldn’t park on a paved shoulder, it mentions nothing about a white cloth.
I then went looking for evidence of the White Shirt Thing in old driver’s ed training films made in the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s and boy, I wish I hadn’t. The results were mostly highway patrol filmstrips titled “Mechanized Death,” “Highways of Agony,” and “Wheels of Tragedy,” which all featured gruesome footage of actual accidents. I am not going to link to them here, because I do not want you to share in a type of nightmare I haven’t had since I last watched “Faces of Death.”
Anyhow! I decided to expand my search beyond this state. And it turns out that the White Shirt Thing isn’t just a North Carolina thing. It was born up north.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike And The Grudging March Toward Safety
The Pennsylvania Turnpike was the first of its kind. The idea for it came about in the 1930, a time when states were having trouble rebuilding roads and bridges after World War I and the Great Depression. Around then, someone came up with an idea to get private investors to help build a public highway. Basically, states would sell bonds to investors, then said they’d pay those investors back with the money the state collected in tolls. Pennsylvania became the first state to make the idea a reality when it opened a 160-mile stretch of turnpike in October 1940. The road was four lanes (two in each direction), divided, and had no intersections, only interchanges. Freeways had existed before, but this one was the longest one in the United States, and its design became the inspiration for the Interstate Highway System that would follow decades later.
After World War II, more than a dozen states pushed ahead with Pennsylvania’s turnpike template. By January 1955, “1,239 miles of turnpikes had opened, 1,382 miles of toll roads were under construction, and plans or studies were underway for an additional 3,314 miles across the United States,” according to a history from the Federal Highway Administration.
But! There was a problem. People were driving stupid fast in cars with no airbags, no seat belts, and hard metal dashboards. The initial speed limit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike was 70 miles-per-hour, which I didn’t really believe until I saw this historical picture from September 1942:
Police, early on, were not really enforcing the speed limit, so people would do 80, 90, sometimes 100 miles per hour down the turnpike before crashing spectacularly. During the late 1940s into the 1950s, people started to complain about safety. In 1947, studies noted that the Pennsylvania Turnpike was deadlier than most other roads. By 1951, safety experts were pushing to lower the speed limit to 60 and to put more police on the road to enforce it. The turnpike commission resisted both. In 1952, a state survey blamed most accidents on the “human factor” and bad weather even though the New Jersey Turnpike, with its strict enforcement of a 60 miles-per-hour limit, had a crash rate that was half of Pennsylvania’s. By 1960 though, the pressure from experts and a steady supply of bad headlines had forced the turnpike to abandon its slogan, “The World’s Safest Highway.” That year, it lowered the limit to 65, put more police on the roads to run radar, and installed medians in between the lanes. The result was, wait for it, far fewer crashes.
Picnic Time, Engine Trouble, Who’s To Say?
Speeders were one big safety issue. Stopped cars were another. People were breaking down quite a bit because the speed was putting too much of a strain on their engines. “Some garagemen called the 70-mile speed limit too fast for older cars ‘unless they’re in tip-top shape,’” reported the Associated Press in 1952.
As a result, the turnpike began offering official roadside assistance. As part of it, sometime in the 1950s, the official turnpike pamphlet urged motorists to put a white handkerchief between the glass and frame of the driver’s side window to alert the state police or a tow truck that their car was broken down. If you were a passing driver, you were told not to stop, but to alert someone at the next toll booth. Turnpikes in Ohio, West Virginia, New York, and Texas all adopted the White Shirt Thing (which, in come places, was a white handkerchief, towel, or rag). Many encouraged a raised hood for added visibilty. After they deployed those signals, people were told to stay in their cars and wait because, as one column put it, “signaling for help after pulling off of any of the nation’s superhighways … is a frightening experience.” In short, this was the easiest pre-cell phone way to get help on a highway that was reportedly full of scary-as-hell speed demons.
I haven’t been able to find a reason why this became the preferred distress signal for broken down cars. The earliest newspaper article that references it is from 1955, some 69 (nice) years ago. That said, there seemed to be a need to differentiate who was really in trouble, and who was just taking ‘er easy on the shoulder of a busy, dangerous freeway. Several states had picnic tables right off of the side of their turnpikes, and needed a way to figure out if people were having lunch or having an emergency. “There are several picnic areas,” a trooper from New Hampshire noted, “and a person in distress could be mistaken for a picnicker.” In New Jersey, police noticed that a lot of accidents were caused by drivers who’d were parking on the berm to sightsee, to rest, or to sleep. “So we stopped that parking, and we enforce that rule strictly,” a New Jersey State Police spokesman said to a reporter in 1953. Other states that didn’t have strict turnpike parking laws adopted the White Shirt Thing. New Jersey did not, because every car that was parked on the shoulder was either breaking the law or having an emergency. A trooper was supposed to stop anyway.
The White Shirt Thing was catching on, but was a real need for a formal and universal distress signal, which finally came in 1961. That’s when the American Association of State Highway Officials (AASHO) decreed: A white cloth tied to the door handle, along with a raised hood, was the official way for any driver, nationwide, to call for help.
Soon, the white cloth policy started showing up in newspaper articles, advice columns, and driver’s handbooks nationwide. Soon, it became a thing that drivers just instinctively did, even if they couldn’t figure out where they’d first head about it.
Does This Old Signal Have A New Meaning?
It’s not the law, per se, but the White Shirt Thing is still recommended today by state agencies, advice columnists, and police departments across the country. Even the Pennsylvania Turnpike still tells stranded drivers to do it. That said, it’s a fading tradition. In a 2017 story, an NCDOT spokesperson told the Charlotte Observer that most people just use their cell phones to call police, a tow truck, or a friend whenever they break down on the side of the highway, instead of waiting for a cruiser to drive by and notice.
At some point, though, people started putting white shirts in the windows of cars they decided to leave behind. One modern urban legend states that a rag on the door is a way to tell police to leave an abandoned car alone. Apparently, this was a plot point in an old episode of “Betrayed” on Invesigation Discovery.
Actually, no! The NCDOT told the Observer that state troopers don’t interpret it that way—after all, the signal is meant to draw police in, not to ward them off. If you want your car to remain on the side of the interstate, a white cloth is not going to keep orange stickers and tow trucks at bay.
Even so, the White Shirt Thing is an old traffic-related cheat code that still works in North Carolina and beyond. Hopefully you’ll never have a need to use it. But if you do, real ones will now know that you’re following tradition, and not merely out to lunch.
This is the real journalism. My husband and I ask each other ALL THE TIME why people do this. Thank you for solving the mystery!
I've seen this done here in Pennsylvania as well. Very interesting read; well-written!