John Wendeborn

Oregon Voices

Oregon Voices: Broadway Cabs Yellow with Age

Back then — way back then — yellow was the enemy, the good guys wore black, and the Great Depression was wearing everyone out. Back before two-way radio, before one-way streets, before "veteran-owned" appeared on the doors of postwar Radio Cabs to attract fares. Before Honda, Toyota, Volkswagen, Saturn, Saab — and SUV. Our Broadway DeLuxe cabs were Plymouths, DeSotos, Studebakers, Nashes, Pontiacs, even a Lincoln Zephyr.

Their Yellow cabs — the competition — copied a nationally recognized name and franchise that held forth in every major city in the country. That bright yellow could be seen all over town — the foe of foes. To the Broadway owners, those Yellow Cabs were hacks, not taxis, putting a sarcastic label on them that had evolved over the decades since it was used to describe for-hire horses or hackneyed, seedy-looking for-hire carriages.

Most competing cabdrivers were affable with each other even as they vied for fares, but Broadway owners stood apart from the others. They were fulltime businessmen, while the other companies hired, well, drivers who worked eight- or ten-hour shifts, pocketed their wages and tips, and went home. Many drove a different cab every day. But all belonged to the same Teamsters Union, Local 281. In what was considered odd then and probably would seem more so today, Broadway's owners, while being business-owning entrepreneurs in the legal sense, also had to belong to the union. They were both labor and management.

Broadway cabs were a gleaming black, accented by a hand-painted silver shield on the door that proudly bore the owner's name and cab number. Cars and owners were well kept: owners and the sizable cadre of hired drivers wore black caps, some at a jaunty angle, and that little silver shield was pinned on each cap, topping off a clean and pressed uniform. Now, there were no inspections per se, but if a driver, whether owner or hired hand, began his shift on the wrinkly side of neat, somehow superintendent Eddie Bain would suddenly show up at the driver's-side door with a comment on ironed shirts.

J.P. Wendeborn — the author's father — Max Miller, and John "Barnacle Bill" Wheeler

Courtesy of John Wendeborn

In the beginning, twenty-five, later fifty, and then seventy-five Broadway cabs were mostly driven by the men whose names were on the doors, usually the day shift. Those owners had to employ drivers for the night shift, most of whom held a steady job with an owner. The extra list of drivers would report daily to the office to find a driving job for that day.

There were no women driving cab in any of the companies, and only white males could drive (or own). Broadway held frequent owner meetings as well as meetings of a board of directors that included the two men hired as general manager and superintendent, the former dealing mostly with owners and the latter with both drivers and owners.

J.P. "Big John" Wendeborn with a 1942 Pontiac, wearing an Al Kader Shrine fez

Courtesy of John Wendeborn

Owners' profits were realized from their own daily labor, but the hired drivers took a percentage of money from fares, plus tips, which could be a sizable portion of a day's take. All fares were recorded on a daily tripsheet. If a driver picked up a fare downtown, for example, and took it to, say, the Hollywood District, upon the fare's leaving the cab the driver would either go to the nearest cabstand phone or call in on the two-way radio with his position. The dispatcher would tell him what position he had with respect to others in that area — first, second, or third — and he would decide whether staying in that area might result in a fare. Everyone driving a cab then and probably today would have his own idea of success. Some spent most of the time at the airport; others would get in line at the train or bus depots. But in a sense, making those instant decisions might feel like playing the lottery.

You could sense the pride these men had in their jobs. They worked hard for little pay, as a day's labor meant ten to fourteen hours behind the wheel.

Yellow had begun in the mid-1920s, and by the end of the decade there were ten cab companies in Portland, with names like Checker, Red Top, Brown & White, Royal, General, and Union. Broadway DeLuxe was born in 1930–1931, little more than a year into the Depression. As the depressed 1930s wore on, the number of taxi companies in Portland ranged from ten in 1930 and eleven in 1931 to six in 1935 and five in 1938, as the Depression was approaching its last legs. By the cash-plentiful days of 1943, only three companies were in business: Broadway, Yellow, and Union. Radio Cab's "veteran-owned" logo showed up after the war as Union was going out of business.

Broadway DeLuxe Cab began and survived in this logjam of taxi firms because its drivers owned the company — one owner for each cab. The company was operated in the long run by those owners who forked over funds daily or monthly to the "kitty," which was the foundation of the company business and kept it afloat. Driver-owners took care of their customers and their automobiles while the number of cab companies diminished to three as World War II raged. The irregularity here is that war production in the shipyards of the Portland-Vancouver area had workers toiling around the clock in three shifts. The metro area kept cabs busy all the time, and if those eleven companies of 1931 had somehow managed to stay active all would have done well.

It is difficult today to know why the companies came and went, but it would be easy to assume that the Depression's unemployment levels, which some say reached 25 percent, forced men with few other skills to seek any kind of work. The odd thing about it is how many companies survived in that atmosphere and how many people could afford to hire a cab every day. Perhaps odder still, why were there only three companies during the war? One answer has to be the diminishing availability of manpower as the war grabbed men for military duty and others turned to the well-paying jobs in the war effort — shipyards come to mind.

So, in 1940, how would those men in black in the clean cabs of Broadway know that a half-century later their efforts would end up in vain, the black yellowing not with age but with a paintbrush, the drivers now, well, drivers, those marvelous taxis just hacks again. With today's Broadway cabs no longer owner-driven, painted that bright yellow, and with uniforms a thing of the past, yes, it's different in the twenty-first century.

Maybe that rumble you might feel when you enter a Broadway cab today isn't just an unexplained earthquake. It's all those Broadway DeLuxe cab owners rolling over in their Pontiacs, Nashes, and DeSotos.

Black Pontiacs, Nashes, and DeSotos.

Guys with names like Tusco Thompson, Barnacle Bill Wheeler, Big John Wendeborn, Dirtyneck Jones — guys who actually wore real uniforms with real neckties and real caps, festooned with those Teamsters Union Local 281 buttons alongside the gleaming, silvery Broadway shield.

They drove those Studebakers and Plymouths and, yes, that Lincoln Zephyr, way back when a nickel bought a "cuppa joe" at the Broadway Café at dayshift's 6 a.m. start. Or a dime could buy a beer at Dahl & Penne's at 7 a.m. when the graveyard shift called it a night.

By the time my dad, John (J.P.) Wendeborn, bought into Broadway in 1942, the company was solid. It had the biggest part of a lot at Northwest Broadway and Couch, sharing the block with Sam Hammel's Shell Station. It was adjacent to Roy Burnett's DeSoto dealership, and you can still see the old painted DeSoto sign in pinkish tones on the building wall that faces Couch Street.

The Broadway Café was across the street from the cab lot and located next to the Broadway Hotel. The hotel is still there, and the café is now a sushi bar. Dahl & Penne's took up a corner of Second and Alder but fell years ago when new and tall buildings took over much of that area. As for the Broadway Hotel, while searching through old Portland city directories at the library, I looked up Wendeborn and found my grandfather Robert's name. In a bit of irony, my dad's father was manager of the hotel in the late 1920s, a full ten years before this area would have significance to his son.

You could have breakfast, lunch, or dinner at John's Café, a cabstand at Second and Morrison downtown, for less than a buck or so. It also faded away. Or another cup of coffee at Nick's, the stand at Northwest Sixth and Couch where the riffraff came and went and the cabbies knew the boosters (burglars or thieves) from the suckers. This part of Portland, from Third Avenue to Broadway and Burnside north to Glisan, has slowly risen from the skidrow it was to a gradual gentrification. But during the 1940s and 1950s, when crime and corruption were a bit on the rampant side, cabbies were treated as "one of the boys" by both the good and bad sides of the law. Nowadays, driving cab can be dangerous, but robberies and murder would have been unthinkable then.

The flag, when pushed to the right, activated the meter. It was twenty-five cents in the 1940s and increased to thirty-five cents in the 1950s. Fifty years later, it's about two dollars. The frequent fare from the Greyhound depot to Union Station was fifty cents, or "a four-bit jerk," as it was called.

Cabstands were situated around the city, with many in the downtown area. These were by hotels and cafes, near a liquor store, at the Greyhound depot and Union Station. Drivers knew train schedules by heart and might even race each other to be close to first in line as a train pulled in. Stands could either be allotted to one company or, if in front of a busy hotel like the Benson, be utilized by all three in a first-come, first-served line. The space in front of Union Station had room for several cabs and was reserved for Broadway and the other company (Union and later Radio), while the Yellow Cab stand was closer to where the passengers were disembarking, which made it better for picking up fares.

Broadway Café and Hotel, 1940

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Once the airport moved from Swan Island to its present location along the Oregon side of the Columbia River in 1941, cabs stood in line for fares there. In the 1950s, still before the jet age, the airport was smaller than the train station and, of course, the number of flights in and out was a fraction of those on today's schedules. "The cabstands were right across from the front door of the airport," my brother Bill, who began driving the night shift in 1952, recalled. "I can remember very clearly whenever a Western Airliner would take off we would bet on when it would become airborne. Usually, the pilots would just pull the wheels up at the halfway point of the runway."

Before two-way radio arrived following World War II and changed the cab business, drivers could hang out on the sidewalk to chat and wait for the cabstand phone to ring or score a pickup. Many of those stands had a personality of their own. The one at West Third and Burnside, across the street from the legendary Erickson's Saloon, was as active as they come. The area was rife with saloons, so just about any time of day or night a cab didn't stay at the stand long. Maybe a longshoreman going home or a merchant seaman trying to find his ship would need a cab.

Although Bill began driving after the introduction of two-way radio, he recalls some of the stands:

The Liberty Theater downtown on Broadway across the street from the Benson Hotel was a big cabstand, as was the Star Theater downtown at Sixth and Burnside, and of course the [Greyhound] bus station. We still had phones at all the downtown and Hollywood stands as well as one at the Car Barn Café at Twenty-eighth and [east] Burnside. The Traction Company still had the large administration building around the corner and on the north side of that building off Ankeny Street, plus a big piece of land between Twenty-sixth and Twenty-eighth on Couch, where streetcars and buses were housed.
    When I began working nights I found out when the shows ended at the Star. It was basically a burlesque house, and if a customer coming out of the Star wanted some personal attention any night driver would know where to go. There were bawdy houses on North Larabee and Victoria streets, and I nearly got caught once at the Victoria house while waiting for a customer to come out. Another guy had told the madam the police were raiding the Larabee house, so she closed the house down while a bunch of sailors were sitting on the stairs waiting to get in. My customer and I ran down the back stairs and got back to the cab as the first cop pulled up. That area is now where the Coliseum sits.
    My favorite downtown stand was Paul's Smoke Shop. The cops working nights always stopped by for coffee and would come by after work, around two or three in the morning. One of them I had met was replacing his firearm and had his old one for sale. I bought it for twenty-five bucks and still have it.
    Amato's Supper Club was near Paul's, and that stand was pretty popular. In 1952, the state was still not serving drinks. Customers at bars had to bring in their own bottles and then were served drinks out of them that they had to buy one drink at a time. I think it was 1953 when the law finally changed.

Our father found owning and driving a cab superior to working for the Portland Traction Company as a streetcar-man and later bus driver, which he had done since shortly after moving to Portland in 1919 at the age of twenty-one. He was born in Belgium to a German family, and when he was five they moved to Canada before coming to the United States. The family made its way across Canada to British Columbia but eventually moved to Hoquiam, Washington, where my dad, at seventeen, found work driving a truck. His older brother, Robert, enlisted in the U.S. Army and saw service as an officer in World War I. John (and family) moved to Portland after the war, and by the early 1920s he had found work with the Traction Company, which we know today as Tri-Met. He became an American citizen in 1925 and married Norma Belle Seal in 1927.

Liberty Theatre, Broadway and Stark, Portland, 1946

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Dad was an outgoing, somewhat gregarious man who by his thirties had grown to well over three hundred pounds on a six-foot frame. He apparently enjoyed singing, and my brother Bill remembers that he was occasionally involved in an amateur German light-opera company. I have a recording made in 1946 of him singing on the popular Johnny Carpenter Northwest Neighbors radio program.

He joined the Masons along the way, later joined the Al Kader Shrine, and found many new friends. His lodge was the Midday Lodge, which included men who worked nights. Through the lodge he met Ted Simmons and John Wheeler, who became his two best friends. Simmons was employed by the Portland Traction Company and Wheeler drove cab, several years before Broadway Cab came into being. He had been a merchant seaman before giving that up to drive cab — hence his nickname, Barnacle Bill.

Wheeler began talking about Dad joining the cab business in 1940. It seemed obvious to these men that war was on the way and that soon-to-be-huge Kaiser shipbuilding was going to be part of that. By the middle of 1941, Dad had made up his mind and joined Broadway Cab for a stint as a driver while retaining his other job.

In 1942, he bought into Broadway, acquiring Cab No. 21. He sold it in 1946 to buy a tavern but bought back into it in 1950 and owned No. 39 after the company went from twenty-five to fifty cabs and added twenty-five new owners. When it later added another twenty-five cabs to the fleet, the company's board of directors decided that the present fifty owners would each add half of a cab. Dad then owned No. 39 and half of No. 70.

When the united states joined World War II in 1941, the Depression uttered its last gasp and Portland, with its booming ship-yard industry and port status, was ready to give Broadway Cab owners a living. I learned to drive on the back lot at Broadway. My first job was being a gas-jockey for the cabs, and so, at age eleven, I had to learn how to drive to get the cabs to and from the pumps. Gasoline was rationed soon after the war began, and while everyday drivers, including cab owners' family cars, had to be satisfied with the A Card, cabs were given a T Card, which meant pretty much unlimited gas — as long as it was for the cab business. Most of the cabs were equipped with siphon hoses, however, purchased at Coast Auto Supply across the street (now the Embers nightclub). Family cars and cabs occasionally met on a remote street after dark to utilize the siphon to take gas from a cab and put it in the family car.

The cab business seemed like hot stuff to a young kid of eleven. Drivers exchanged the sort of stories that made eccentricity out to be commonplace, although the kid wasn't supposed to hear them. The night drivers would talk of nightlife and the many directions that could take. Day drivers would listen and wonder why their shifts weren't quite as exciting, even as they could compare notes about odd fares. Yet, these guys weren't driving hack between other jobs: the Tuscos and the Barnacle Bills were businessmen, and the company held frequent meetings of owners to take care of business.

As the war raged in Europe and in the Pacific, soldiers would pile into cabs at the depots to go home for a leave before heading into action, sort of a friendly, gee-whiz look about them. Or they'd arrive home in a uniform with medal ribbons on that worn Class A uniform jacket with a weary look that said "don't ask," many with bandages, casts, and even the occasional wheelchair.

The year 1946 saw the arrival of a fleet of Packards that several Broadway owners had ordered in an effort to continue the company's growing success while still competing with not only Yellow Cab but also the new Radio Cab with its war veteran connection. After World War II, that "Veteran-Owned" logo was a strong business weapon. Union Cab was already out of business. With the war's end months before in 1945, Broadway's owners must have felt well-to-do, since Packards were a lot spendier than those Plymouths and Pontiacs. Dad bought one even as he was planning to sell out. At Broadway, a company rule said cabs had to be replaced every two years.

Dahl & Penne's, around 1950

OHS neg., OrHi 51949

The Packard cabs were a Spartan version of that classy car, obviously a ploy by the manufacturer to increase sales to a business that purchased a lot of cars nationwide. Checker cabs (the car, not the company) nationwide were built for taxi service, and Packard apparently decided to compete. That Packard was a great car. One of its selling points was an early version of air-conditioning: the rear window had two "arms" that, when activated by a cockpit switch, raised the window to cool the summery atmosphere inside. It also created breathing space in the trunk, in case a teenage kid borrowing his dad's car — before it got the painted doors, rooftop sign, and meter — wanted to sneak a couple of pals into Blue Lake Park to save the dime admission.

Getting a new cab every couple of years was a big deal. The new car always had the great "new-car smell," and there were no prouder drivers in the city than Broadway owners putting that first thousand miles on a new cab (it took about ten days). Dad left before the Packard saw duty, and when he came back he returned to the Pontiacs he preferred. He bought his Pontiacs from Winslow Pontiac, located at West Nineteenth and Burnside, the site now occupied by a McDonald's. Before hitting the street, the new and old cabs went to the meter shop to exchange meters and then to the sign painter, who meticulously hand-painted that silver triangle with a ribbon through it that said Broadway DeLuxe Cab, topped always with the owner's nameline — in Dad's case, J.P. Wendeborn.

Bill Wendeborn and his pet, Dopey, on Broadway Cab No. 21, a 1942 Pontiac

Courtesy of John Wendeborn

Dad got out of the business for four years between 1946 and 1950 when he bought a little mom-and-pop tavern out on Belmont called Up's Peep. The name merged the previous owner's nickname and a reworking of the word "beer." Liquor laws at the time did not allow names of alcoholic beverages on outside signage, so the previous owner had removed the lower arc in the letter "B" and the diagonal line in the letter "R" to come up with "Peep." But Dad returned to Broadway in 1950, selling the tavern and buying into cabs Nos. 39 and 70.

By the time dad returned to the cab business in 1950, I was stationed in Tokyo and had already been an Army musician for two years, having arrived before the outbreak of the Korean War and staying for three years. And the cab business even had a hand in that, albeit four years earlier, when I was in high school.

I joined the Washington High School band in 1944 as a freshman and was given a tuba instead of the trumpet I had been practicing for nearly a year. After one term, I heard that the band needed to enlarge the trombone section, and going from tuba/sousaphone to trombone seemed easy. My dad found out there was a trombone in the lost-and-found room at Broadway, and after he explained his son's potential new position in the school band to the superintendent, I was given the horn.

That trombone and I took to each other immediately, creating a practice spark that never evolved with the trumpet or tuba. It got me into two army bands between 1948 and 1952, where practicing and playing took eight to ten hours a day and made me a competent player who could turn professional after discharge.

I spent one year with the Sixth Army Band at the Presidio in San Francisco before I was transferred to Japan, where the postwar occupation was still in effect. I was slated to join the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division band in Japan; but when the troopship pulled into Yokohama Harbor in mid-August, officers from the General Headquarters (GHQ) in Tokyo — Gen. Douglas MacArthur's staff — came onboard to check records of soldiers on the ship for possible transfer to Tokyo units. My orders were changed to the 293^rd Army Band, also known as the GHQ Honor Guard Band, which played VIP functions and included the Honor Guard that, with its chrome helmets and spit-shined boots, went everywhere MacArthur went.

When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the marching, concert, and dance bands began playing twice-a-month shows at the Ernie Pyle Theater in downtown Tokyo, backing up Danny Kaye and Betty Hutton and other entertainers who put on shows for soldiers on R&R. The war forcibly lengthened many enlistments in the Far East, and my supposed 1951 discharge came a year later in 1952. It turned out okay, though. I was in both the eighteen-piece jazz big band and the seven-piece, more commercial band called Morty Reed & the 7 Crowns.

I returned home in 1952 and immediately began driving our cab. The lot had moved from Broadway and Couch to Northwest First and Everett, a space now occupied by a parking structure. I was twenty-two, and cab company policy at the time did not allow anyone under the age of twenty-five to drive; but since my father was an owner, that policy was relaxed. Then my brother Bill, who was twenty, also began driving. Dad was now a radio dispatcher and drove very little, while his two sons handled the day and night shifts.

I had become a competent jazz trombonist in the army, but this new day gig forced me to stash the brand-new Stradivarius tenor/bass trombone I had been given in Tokyo as a member of a seven-piece show band. Still, I visited a jazz club called the Shadows on weekend nights after driving my day shift. I began sitting in, playing both trombone and a baritone horn I had borrowed from a friend. One night I sat with the trio playing but without the baritone. This guy came up to me during a break — he was a regular and a known booster — and asked what happened to that horn, saying he really loved its sound. I told him I had to give it back to its owner, and he said, "Where's he live? I'll snatch it back for you."

Broadway Cab Company

Broadway Cab Company was founded in 1932, but its history goes back five years before that date to the establishment of DeLuxe Cab in 1927. The two companies joined in 1934 to become Broadway DeLuxe Cab, and along with the name merger came the all-important telephone number: BR-1234.

When DeLuxe Cab started in 1927, its phone number was BR-0171, hardly a number to stick in the mind. But in 1929, as the Depression rolled into town, DeLuxe became part of a company that included Rose City Auto and Dollar Transportation and got that dream phone number, BR-1234. Originally located on Northwest Flanders, in 1931 DeLuxe moved to an address on Northwest Irving and in 1932 to Southwest Mill. It moved in 1933 to 128 Southwest Lownsdale.

Broadway Cab initiated operations in 1932 with the slogan "Every Driver an Owner" and the phone number BR-0525, with its office at 328 Northwest Irving. In 1934, however, the city completely changed its address format and that location became 618 Northwest Irving, which now would be underneath the Northwest Broadway ramp to the Broadway Bridge. Two blocks east was Yellow Cab, at 628 Northwest Sixth, now the site of the Greyhound bus depot. Both Yellow Cab and the bus depot were next door to Union Station, the bustling railroad depot where many fares would develop in the 1930s and 1940s.

After Broadway and DeLuxe joined in 1934, the BR-1234 number became part of the new company's business tactics. It changed its slogan in 1935 to "For Discriminating People" and was one of a dozen cab companies trying to survive the Depression.

Broadway DeLuxe moved again in 1938, taking over space at Twentieth and Southwest Jefferson, but moved again in 1941 to 214 Northwest Twenty-first Avenue and the following year to 115 Northwest Broadway, or Broadway and Couch, where Sam Hammel's Shell gas station was located. The company moved several years later to a large lot at Northwest First and Everett, presumably because it grew from twenty-five to fifty to seventy-five cabs and needed a larger lot for those cabs. The Broadway and Couch location has since become a parking lot. One sign adjacent to the lot is still there and quite visible. The Roy Burnett automobile dealership was on the north side of the block, and a large sign advertising it in pinkish tones can still be seen.

Today, Broadway no longer uses the DeLuxe part of the name. It changed cab colors from black to yellow years ago and is no longer a company of driver-owners.

There are now more than thirty companies in the Portland metro area that offer paid transportation, including limousines, shuttles, vans, and taxis.

In the 1940s and through the 1950s, afterhours bootleg and prostitution were easy to come by in Portland. Being a day driver, I didn't see much action, but I frequently drove women who worked in the West Burnside–area hotels and had time calls (repeat calls every day) for cabs to get to work. One morning at eight, I picked up a young woman in business dress. While stopped at a traffic light on Burnside heading downtown, by a frantically arm-waving man hailed me, obviously in need of a cab. I ignored him immediately, but my passenger said, "No, pick him up." He got into the cab and chatted for a few minutes until we let him off downtown. Then she and I had a big laugh about how she came off as perhaps this secretary going to work. Like all the women in her profession, she got out at the hotel, paid me, and began her twelve-hour shift.

Cancer took my dad in 1954, making me owner and Bill a partner in the cab business, even though we were both under the company's age requirement. In the years before he died, Dad was an important part of the business as it was being revolutionized. Two-way radios arrived after the war, slowly doing away with the "call-boxes" at cabstands that drivers had relied on for fares. Dad was working as one of the first two radio dispatchers at Broadway. But call-boxes were still used when the dispatcher wanted to talk to a driver without the whole channel listening in. Call-boxes were mainly used to convey personal calls (a fare asking for a particular driver, for example) or special favors, perhaps delivery of a bottle of liquid refreshment after liquor stores closed or some other, more individual connection that coupled the caller with "personalized" service.

My growing jazz career had diminished since my return home from the army, and with Dad's death the trombone rode the backseat for nearly two years. But my brother, who played bass and drums, knew some jazz guys, and we had occasional jam sessions at our house on Southeast Ash Street. Bill remembers the Portland jazz scene from that time:

After work I would go to a bootleg joint and join the jam session playing bass, sometimes into 8 or 9 in the morning. Other times I'd go over to the Chicken Coop, the leading jazz club outside of the Williams Avenue scene. I can remember taking the Hi-Lo's (a jazz singing group) and some of the Harry James band that was in town. With Sid Porter probably the most popular pianist in town at the Coop, guys from the Basie and Ellington bands, when in town, would want to go there to sit in.
I also discovered that people leaving nightclubs that closed around 2 in the morning, long after the liquor stores had closed, would of course go to 'leg joints but some would also want to buy a bottle. I knew a driver who could sell a pint of Seagram 7 for thirty-two dollars — including cab fare.

Sid Porter would leave the Coop in the late 1950s to open Sidney's, his own jazz club at Southwest Fifth and Lincoln. It's now the Candlelight blues club.

I continued to drive the day shift while Bill took over the night shift permanently. Being as young as we were, we would have an occasional problem with the older owners. We took a fair amount of derision, for example, when I decided to move from the Pontiacs Dad had loved to a 1954 Ford — and one with automatic transmission. It was the first cab in town to make use of that automotive technology. The meter of life was on, however, and finally in 1956 I sold the cabs and returned to a music career in jazz that lasted until the late 1960s, when a speeding freight train called rock 'n' roll derailed much of jazz for awhile. I returned to college and became a writer.

Bill pretty much quit driving cab when we sold ours, eventually going into the heraldry business — selling items associated with coats of arms from historical European countries — which he still does. But before he quit, he had become friends with perhaps the leading jazz-related DJ in town, Bob McAnulty, who called on Bill frequently to drive him. Through (the late) McAnulty, Bill and I both met numerous entertainers who came to Portland, including Stan Freberg, Nat King Cole, Billy Bardy, Anita O'Day, and Bobby Short — all of whom visited the Coop with Bob in our Broadway DeLuxe cab.

Bill also says that on one of his last nights driving he got a call to the Star Theater. His fare turned out to be the notorious stripper Tempest Storm, one of many stars who played the theater. She and three other performers were headed to a private show/party that Tempest had set up. Bill recalls that "one of them did not want to go, but she needed the money to help get her soldier husband home. He was due back from Korean duty and didn't have the airfare to their home somewhere in California. She told me this party was to be her last night of stripping; she was anxious to be with her husband."

Broadway at Washington at night, around 1945, with a Union Cab at the curb

OHS neg., OrHi 102276

Looking back at those early days, it's obvious that those Broadway guys were serious. And that's why when the ground shakes these days, it's maybe because some black Broadway Cab now painted completely yellow has come too close to one of the deceased.

Yellow just wasn't in the game to these men. Their cabs were black.

The hookers, gamblers, bootleggers and their afterhours 'leg joints, the two-bit flag, leather legchaps, uniforms — they've all been beamed up.

Yellow Broadways? Ughh. Easy, Tusco; down, Barnacle Bill; keep your hat on, Jonesy. This is a brave new world, and they don't make Studebakers any more.

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