Once upon a time, boys and girls, there was a place called Checker Taxi Co. in Boston. (Their slogan was "Don't take a chance, take a Checker!") Checker is long shut down. The taxicab medallions were sold, the garage was sold to the university next door, and seemingly the employees were scattered to the four winds.

I had lunch recently with my friend Scott who at the same time was 1) Checker Tow (the tow truck driver), 2) a radio dispatcher, 3) a driver, and 4) professor at Checker University. I was an accounting clerk, a telephone operator, a radio dispatcher and executive secretary to both the president and vice president of the company. Of course those were in different incarnations of employment.

Scott and I went to lunch at a restaurant owned and operated by one of the former body shop workers. What a treat! Steve (formerly known as Stevie the paint guy) walked out from the kitchen, looking dapper in his cook's whites and exclaimed that he hadn't seen me in more than 20 years but that I looked just the same. Well, that compliment's not hard to take. Steve looks the same too -- a little older (I remember him as a kid but then again, most of us were.) but still full of the same positive energy, with a smile and a good word for everyone. He is still in touch with several of the mechanics I knew which is great to hear.
 

Talk turned to who was still around and who is not. There were stories of how one of our co-workers had died and how a couple of the men I worked with are still around. One of them recently had an article published in a newspaper. I remember him as always writing little vignettes about Boston and having me type them up. He was always threatening to write a book about the City of Boston filled with the obscure and not so obscure factoids that he loved digging up. There were the guys (600 men when I was there) who were emphatically not cabdrivers but just waiting until they got a big acting break or the novel sold. And my favorite boss (at one time I had six bosses) is still kicking so I'm now thinking it's time to get the phone book out and look him up.
 
At the time we all worked there, we constantly asked why, thinking that working for Checker was a deadend, the bottom of the barrel of employment. But we didn't want to quit and we did establish a family, dysfunctional though it might have been, out of our knowledge that we were a kind of searching generation, not willing or able perhaps to sit in a conventional office and do a conventional job. There was something special about getting out of work at midnight and running into the night with people who just wanted to grab some fun and who always cared enough about each other to share whatever they had. I was proud to be a Checker employee then and I'm still proud of my Checker family now.
 
If you're quiet, maybe you can hear a call echo through some old radio waves. "Top at 225? Anyone?"

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