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- Parks to hang up cab keys By Rick Baker
PONTIAC--Almost three decades in the taxi game have left them with some good stories to tell--like the one about the woman who thought she was in Pontiac, Mich., and the millionaire he thought was a bum. this is forest and Albert Park’s last week at the Safeway Cab co., a small taxi business they opened here in 1941. “I got into cabs because I was a barber and I saw the war taking all my customers away,” Forest said.
He started with the family car and made $8.25 his first day on the job. He built it up at one time to a fleet of six cabs and a gross of more than $300 a day in this town of 10,500. Odds are pretty strong that he has driven over the streets of Pontiac more than any man ever has or will. He’s covered every street in the city hundreds of times and worn out a lot of cars on them.
“I’ve seen a lot of things come and go,” he said in his small office Monday. One of the strangest things he’s seen come and go was a man he picked up in 1971 in front of the old Pontiac Hotel, since demolished. “That guy had me worried from the moment he got in my cab,” Park recalls, describing a poorly dressed and dirty man. “He was the oddest rider I ever had in one of my cabs.”
The man had been living at the hotel a while, Park learned, and he had some odd habits--like sleeping with his shoes on and keeping his bedroom mirror covered with a blanket. “Well, this dirty fella says he wants to go on up to Joliet. So I said, ‘get in.’ All the while we drive along, he keeps looking out the back window as if something is after him,” Park said.
It was beginning to get dark near Dwight, Park said, when the man changed his mind and began telling him to drive down dirt road. “Finally we got to Morris, when he said he wanted to go to Seneca. I stopped at the first gas station, grabbed the keys out of the ignition, and told him that was as far as we were going,” Park said.
Park said he had given the ride up as profitless soon after leaving Pontiac, but still asked if the man had the money to pay him something. the man pulled several bills out of his shoe. The bills were waded into little balls. “He started peeling them open, and when he came to a $50, he handed it over. I gave him the change, and then called the police. I figured he was wanted for something,” Park said.
A few days later the sheriff called Park and told him his dirty customer was a millionaire--the owner of a few prosperous California orange groves. “If I had known that then, I would have driven him anywhere in the world,” Park said.
Then there was the elderly woman destined for Grand Rapids, Mich., by train from St. Louis, Mo. Grand Rapids is in western Michigan. When the train conductor announced the train was moving into Pontiac, she thought she had somehow gotten off course and wound up in Pontiac, Mich., in the eastern part of the state. “Well,” Park said, “She said she wanted to go to Grand Rapids, so I took her up there. It cost her $125. Our fares were quite a bit cheaper then,” he said. He’s also made runs to Indianapolis, Ind., and St. Louis for people who didn’t have the time or patience to wait for a bus.
But most of his driving--hundreds of thousands of miles of it--has been right here in Pontiac. With a 10-year leave from the business from 1951 to 1961, he’s been at it for 27 years. So has she. Alberta has spent most of her time answering calls in the office, but she used to drive a cab for her husband’s company.
When he started, his fare was a flat 25 cents for any ride in town. Today there is a minimum $1 far, with zone rates applying after a certain number of blocks are travelled. While his cabs have never been involved in a major accident, he has seen his insurance premiums double. He’s also seen his gasoline bills triple.
He’s also seen eight other cab companies in this town come and go since he opened his business. Safeway has been the only taxi business in Pontiac since 1961. The Parks plan to turn the business over to one of their three sons next week.
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1907 - 1980 (72 years)
