Eugene Salomon - Confessions of a New York Taxi Driver

Certain moments in your life create such an impact that they remain frozen in time forever in your memory. You replay them over and over in your mind, noticing and renoticing every detail in the mental image. This was such a moment for me.

She wore a loose-fitting burgundy blouse with narrow, vertical, gold stripes and a black skirt cut at the knees. Her hair was the brown, shoulder-length style we were so used to seeing in photographs. In fact, although she was over fifty at the time, Jackie appeared remarkably to have aged not a day since she had been the First Lady of the United States. She looked exactly the same.

And she was gorgeous. Drop-dead gorgeous, as the expression goes. Stunningly, exceedingly beautiful. A woman everyone would look twice at, even if she weren’t already so overwhelmingly famous.

Jackie walked out onto the street in front of my cab and peered inside, trying to see if there was already a passenger in the back seat. If I could have pushed an ejection button and sent my passenger flying off into the stratosphere I would certainly have done so, and Jackie would have gotten in.

But it was not to be. She saw that my taxi was occupied and then spotted another cab, a Checker, without a passenger in it directly next to mine on my left. As she walked around the front of my cab and entered the narrow space between this other cab and my own, I realized that in a moment she would be right next to me and, because my window was already rolled down, I would be able to speak to her. I felt a distinct rush that must have been a release of adrenaline, and then, as the moment arrived with Jackie Kennedy standing beside me, I found that my mouth had opened and words had begun to dribble out of it.

‘Hello, Mrs Onassis,’ I said sheepishly.

Right away it didn’t sound right. Sure, her name was actually ‘Jackie Onassis’ because she’d married Aristotle Onassis, but it didn’t fit her. In my mind, and I think in everybody’s mind, she would always be ‘Jackie Kennedy ’ . I thought maybe I should have just said, ‘Hello, Jackie’, but, anyway, it was too late. The words had been said and she’d heard me and now she was putting her attention on me. I feared she might scowl at me or just ignore me entirely, but she didn’t – she smiled at me.

It was a warm smile that, interestingly, made me feel special, as if somehow we had known each other for a long time. It was a smile that communicated that she knew who she was and was quite aware of and caring about how her presence affected other people, and that she had mastered the elements of fame.

But more than that, it was a smile that brought back an era. Here was Camelot, not gone, but returning to life once again. Here was John F. Kennedy and the idealism of my generation. Here was the woman in the pink suit covered with the president’s blood, catapulted out of history, standing right next to me, undefeated, triumphant.

Jackie reached forward to open the door of the Checker cab on my left and as she did so I could see through the window that the driver of that cab was an old-time professional, an American, about fifty years old. Here was a guy who could easily be typecast in a commercial or a movie as ‘taxi driver’. He had an Archie Bunker kind of appearance.

Jackie Kennedy opened the rear door of his cab and started to get in, but before she could sit down, this driver turned around in his seat and looked right at her – he had something to say. With his face contorted into a snarl, and with a voice that was somewhere between a growl and an outright scream, out came these exact words:

‘I’M ONLY GOING UPTOWN!’

‘Oh my God,’ I said to my passenger, ‘I can’t believe he spoke to her that way!’

‘Oh my God,’ she echoed, ‘I can’t believe it, either!’

But Jackie batted not an eye. She was, in fact, going uptown and stepped into the guy’s cab with her companion, completely undisturbed by the driver’s incredible lack of manners.

So there he was, the taxi driver of old, himself a vestige of a bygone era. I believe I can safely say that if this guy wasn’t going to take Jackie Kennedy down town, he wasn’t going to take you to Brooklyn. But not to worry, today a perfectly nice fellow named Ramesh will drive you to Brooklyn, or to the Bronx for that matter, without a word of protest.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what’s changed in the taxi business in New York City.

Along with one other thing – did someone say ‘Checker cab’?

Now here’s something I can’t blame on the mayor. In fact, I hate to admit it, but it may have been my fault: the Checkers are gone. The beloved Checkers – these were the taxis you see in any movie set in New York City between 1956 and about 1990. Built like tanks, they had extended room in the back, flat floorboards with no uncomfortable ‘hump’ in the middle, and two folding ‘jump seats’ that enabled five adults (or twenty midgets) to sit back there. These vehicles have become nostalgia items for anyone who grew up or lived in New York during those years.

Most people don’t know that the Checkers were manufactured by the Checker Motor Company, which was not a subsidiary of General Motors or any other conglomerate, but was an independent company on its own. Located in Kalamazoo, Michigan, nearly all the cars that rolled off that assembly line were specifically built to be taxicabs. To make it easier for taxi fleets to replace broken parts and to keep costs down, they stopped redesigning the Checkers in 1956. So the Checkers looked like they were old cars even though they may have been relatively new.

But the Checker Motor Company had big problems. After the gasoline crisis in 1979, many taxi fleet owners switched to Chevrolets, Fords and Dodges. In the highly competitive world of automobile manufacturing, Checker was losing ground and by 1981 was barely treading water.

How was I to know that an innocent conversation between myself and a certain passenger would provide the coup de grâce for these fabulous cars? I’m asking you in advance to please not hate me. Okay, here’s the story…

In the second week of July, 1981, I was driving a Checker cab that was owned by my friend Itzy at a garage called West Side Ignition. At West Side Ignition they had a saying: ‘If it’s not broken, don’t fix it. And if it is broken, don’t fix it.’ So when I’d bring the car in for an oil change and mention to Itzy that the shocks were basically gone, Itzy would tell me that as long as the cab was in running condition, to hell with the shocks, just go out and drive. Apparently ‘running condition’ meant that your condition would be better if you were running instead of trying to drive the damned thing.

Anyway, I was driving this Checker when I was hailed by a middle-aged suburban Workerbee in a business suit who looked like any other commuter on his way home from work. He asked me to bring him to Penn Station, a fifteen-minute trip, and he settled back into his seat and opened up a newspaper. It looked to be an uneventful ride until, about two blocks from where we’d started, the cab ran over a particularly nasty pothole.

Now, the Checkers were strong cars and they had a reputation for being indestructible, but they didn’t exactly give you a smooth ride. When we hit the pothole, the cab kind of went KA-BOOM, and I found myself momentarily bouncing up and down on the front seat. In fact, the car had taken the pothole so badly that I felt a need to apologize to my passenger.

‘Sorry,’ I said with a laugh, ‘I guess they don’t make them like they used to.’ Not that they really made them any differently than they ever did. It was just something to say.