The Other Side of Midnight (3 page)

The bank manager turned him down: “We can't lend it to you.”

Dad told him right to his face, “Go to hell!”

He walked out of the Bank of Montreal and went right across the street to the Bank of Nova Scotia. He told them the same thing—that he needed a loan of $500 to go taxiing.

They said, “You're going to make this a successful business?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Here's your $500.”

Years and years later, Mr. Ches Pippy, a well-known local businessman, rang the stand. He said, “Harry, we need a chauffeur for my Cadillac.”

My father asked, “What do you want that for?”

“The president of the Bank of Montreal is coming to spend a week here. We need a chauffeur to drive him around.”

“No trouble.”

I became the chauffeur.

When it was all said and done, Mr. Pippy gave me an invitation to a big banquet on the final night the president of the Bank of Montreal was going to be in St. John's. I thought to myself,
What do I
want to go to an old banquet for? I know my father won't go to no Bank
of Montreal banquet.
But I brought the invitation down to the stand.

My father said, “Bank of Montreal? Not likely. Wait now. Yes, I'm going to go to that!”

He went down, walked in, and met the president. “How do you do? I'm Mr. Harry Burgess. I'm a successful businessman here in St. John's. I deal with the Bank of Nova Scotia.”

The president asked, “Mr. Burgess, why do you deal with the Bank of Nova Scotia?”

“Because the Bank of Montreal turned me down.”

Now is that an old-time story? It has nothing to do with the taxi business, but it does because that's how my father got started back in 1917. He would've been eighteen years old then. Now that's how far back the taxi business goes in my family.

In those early days, my father used a car in the summer and a horse and a side-sled in the winter. He operated down on Water Street right by the railway station. The horses were kept in a barn off LeMarchant Road. He told me that; I don't remember it. It was before my time. After all, I'm only eighty-odd years old. He used to go to the railway station and the harbour to pick up passengers. At times, there could be hundreds of people down there. Some came across the Atlantic from England and Europe and all those places. Some came from Nova Scotia and New York and Boston. He met all the Newfoundland coastal boats, too, like the
SS Kyle
. The cars would be all lined up, and the drivers would say, “Taxi, taxi!” In those days, that was part of your business. Those people needed taxis when they came to town. Nobody had a car. Even if they did, they weren't getting around. Sure, we never got our first snow plough until after the First World War. It was an old British tank. All they did was put a blade on the front of it. But that was no good because when she'd go down in a drift she couldn't get back up out of it. Eventually, they scrapped her for metal during the Second World War.

Later on, when the Newfoundland Hotel went up in 1926, my father and his brother and four others formed Hotel Taxi. They were Bugden, Voisey, Clooney and Dooley. That was so long ago now I can't remember their first names. But they were all taxi men trying to make a dollar wherever they could. They called it Hotel Taxi because it was on the side of the Newfoundland Hotel.

My father was the type of man who wanted to be on his own. When he started up at the Newfoundland Hotel, he had 500 people telling him what to do. But then war broke out in Europe. All of a sudden, business was booming. Fort Pepperrell (American Air Force Base) was here, and Buckmaster's (Canadian Military Headquarters for Newfoundland) was here. But all he had was his car and his brother's car—that's it. He wasn't going to have that; he wanted to make money. “I'm not staying here with just two cars,” he said. “Goodbye, boys.”

The rest of them carried on, but they broke up after. The hotel said they no longer wanted a taxi stand on the side of their business. Voisey took the Hotel Taxi name, and he started up again on Queen's Road. Clooney and Dooley both got out of the business. Harry Bugden had nowhere to go; he had nothing. When Voisey moved down on Queen's Road, he didn't take Bugden with them. Old Harry Bugden couldn't get along with Voisey and them. He was a nice man, but he had his own ways.

When Burgess Brothers' Cabs started up in 1941, we were the first company in Newfoundland to call our cars “cabs.” Everyone else used to call them “taxis.” My father said, “We're going to call them cabs, just like they do in England.” The building is still there. It's a restaurant today, but the original building is still there on Duckworth Street. We had a small garage, too. It was foresight on my father's part. He wanted to maintain his vehicles himself. There weren't many stands around with a garage. Crotty's Taxi was one. They had an old warehouse on Theatre Hill. Queen Street is what they call it today.

The war changed everything. That's when it got rough in town. The taxi drivers were always half-afraid with the soldiers getting drunk. In those days, no one ever hailed taxis. But if they called, you might get stuck with a drunken Canadian, or a drunken Englishman, and he might vomit up over the seats. Then the car would be out of commission all the next day getting cleaned. The Canadians coming off the ships were pretty terrible. The Canadian Army base was at Lester's Field. They were always drunk up there. The Canadian Navy was in Buckmaster's. The bases were supposed to be self-contained, but the soldiers were downtown all the time into the beer parlours. If someone rang us from Buckmaster's: “Oh, we haven't got a car.” We didn't want to go up to Buckmaster's, or Lester's Field. In those days, you could choose your work because there was so much business. Why take the scruff? Take the good stuff.

If you got into trouble with Canadian servicemen, a drunken serviceman getting out of hand, you didn't ring the police, you rang the shore patrol—the Canadian Navy Shore Patrol. They patrolled around the city just as the police did. They'd just arrest them right away and make sure you got your money. They were good like that. They were next door to us, right where there's a tavern today. That was their jail. All night long they were hauling in the drunks off the ships, piling them in there to sober them up.

But you never had trouble with an American. The Americans wouldn't put up with their servicemen like that. They didn't take any shit from them at all. They wouldn't be out at night to the beer parlours because they had all their own clubs on the base. We got a lot of good work from the Americans. Fort Pepperrell was a big part of our business. We liked Fort Pepperrell because it was completely controlled. They were good people to deal with. A lot of Newfoundland men and women worked there, too, and they needed taxis to go to work and to come back home. We drove all of those people. The base might ring us and say, “We need three officers brought over to Argentia.” Or they could ask us to pick up such and such and bring him back to the NCO club. Stuff like that. You had servicemen who were courting Newfoundland girls, too. An American soldier might want to go see some young woman. He'd ring us to go pick her up to take them to a movie, or a dance.

There weren't too many companies working on the American base. There was us and Hotel Taxi. The Americans were very choosy. You had to get a licence and get checked out and everything before you were even allowed on the base. There was a little bit of bootlegging—that sort of thing. But we never got involved in any of it. If the Americans found out you were bootlegging a bottle of rum and it was in your cab you'd never be allowed back.

The Americans were a different class of people than the rough-and-ready Canadian Army and Navy men. Even the Englishmen. All they were interested in was partying and drinking. The Americans weren't like that.

For us, the biggest challenge during the war was cars. You just couldn't get cars because there were no cars being made. You couldn't get tires, either. You could still get tires but you could only get so many a year—they were rationed. Tires didn't last like they do now, either. In those days, because of the gravel roads, they only lasted two or three months. Now you can get tires on your car that'll last two or three years.

You had to have synthetic tires on your car because that's all that was being made. Synthetic tires were tires that weren't made of rubber. They were synthetic. You could tell they were synthetic by the big round red dot on them. It was about the size of a half-dollar. If you had them on your car you weren't allowed to go anywhere the trains went. The trains were supposed to take the passengers. It was to save on tires—that was the rationale behind it. We'd have to keep the old pre-war worn-out regular tires to go back and forth to Argentia. But those jobs were good money. Thousands of men were out in Argentia. On the weekends, they weren't staying in Argentia, which was actually Placentia. There was nothing in Placentia. The big city was St. John's. What would happen was, the crowd would come into town on a Friday or Saturday, and they'd have to be back on the base early Monday. But the train didn't leave until seven o'clock in the morning. Half of those guys would be in St. John's, and they'd hire a taxi to go back out. A driver could go to Argentia and make himself $35.

In our day, the taxi business was a regular business with regular working hours. It was busy in the daytime. Half of our fleet would go on at eight o'clock in the morning. They'd go home to dinner at twelve and come back at one. When six o'clock came, they went home. On the weekdays, we stayed open until twelve at night. On the weekend, it was one. Beer parlours closed ten o'clock at night. Stores were only open Saturday night until nine-thirty. They closed on Wednesday afternoons. That's the way business was in those days. Grocery stores are now open seven nights a week. That's where the difference is between then and now.

The people in the taxicab business were elite people. Everyone went to work in the morning with a collar and tie and suit of clothes on. You were more like a chauffeur, not a taxi driver.

I remember a young man came into the stand and said, “Mr. Burgess, I want a job.”

My father said, “Yes, my son, you go pass your driving test, you get a haircut and you arrive here with your collar and suit and tie on, and we'll give you a job.”

“You can't make me get a haircut! You can't make me put a collar and tie on!”

“No, I can't,” my father said. “But I can if you work for me.”

When we hired a driver, he knew he was going to get a day's pay. An ordinary day back in the ‘40s and ‘50s was $35. There were twenty-five calls on a sheet. Most jobs were $1. It was $2 an hour waiting. After twenty-five runs, he was sure to make at least $25. But then a lot of jobs were $1.50, $2 and $3. When he added it up at the end of the day, a driver probably had $35. When a driver came in at nine o'clock, the first thing he did was fill the car up at the pump. That was written on his daily sheet which he passed along to the dispatcher. On Friday, all the amounts were made up, and 40 per cent was taken off for him. That's how he was paid. Sixty per cent went to us to maintain and repair the cars and to operate the stand. What brokers do now, they go fifty-fifty. It wasn't in our day. Forty per cent of what he took in was his, the driver's. Your unemployment and your taxes came out of it, and everything. It's all cash money now.

Maintenance wasn't a big cost to us. You could insure a car for $100 a year. Now it seems like you can't have a taxi on the road for $100 dollars a day. Maintenance only got bad in later years when the drivers didn't know how to drive and were breaking up the cars. If there was anything wrong with their car, the driver would tell us, and we'd fix it. When we decided a driver needed a new car we'd take that car and give them a new one. In fact, we changed our cars every two or three years.

But the type of driving then was completely different than it is today. You got guys speeding around on two wheels today. In our day, the speed limit was twenty miles-an-hour. You didn't break up a car at twenty miles-an-hour. If you hit a pothole, the car went down and then came back up out of it. There was no such thing as complaining about a pothole down the road because what was on the streets wasn't really pavement like we know it today. It was coal tar. Sand was put down, and then tar was put down over it. There were no paving machines. The first paved street we got in St. John's was King's Bridge Road, and the Americans did that. They brought in the machines from the States and made a concrete road right from the Newfoundland Hotel, what we used to call “The Hotel,” down to the corner of the Boulevard.

The process of moving into today's taxi business—snow tires, electric meters, two-way radios and the expansion of the airport— I grew up with all of that.

I can remember when snow tires came out just at the end of the war. Terra Nova Taxi on Prince of Wales Street was the first company to have them.

Somebody said to my father, “Are you going to put snow tires on the cars?”

He said, “I'm going to put them on every one tomorrow.”

“But they say they're not as good as chains.”

“They're not as good as chains; they'll never be as good as chains. But what's the good of me being down at the bottom of Signal Hill with chains on and six guys in front of me stuck in the snow? How am I going to get up out of it? It's just as well for me to have the snow tires on, too.”

Snow tires weren't a big expense. They were no more expensive than an ordinary tire. You always had a load of replacements in your garage, anyway. But then the drivers didn't have to get their clothes dirty jacking up the cars and putting chains on. With chains, every time a bar broke it hit the fender. That's a dent in your fender then. The chains only lasted a day, anyhow. A real busy day, that's all you'd get out of them. But with chains you could go up and down any hill in St. John's. You never had to worry. There was no sanding or anything like that. Snow ploughs only went around once a week.