about this sitesee Meranda's resumesee clips and work sampleskeep in touch
home

How cabbies get a bad rap

My father is a cab driver in Akron. He’s been driving cab for most of his life and all of mine. (In fact, he met my mother when she was a dispatcher at the cab company.)

So, today when I read “Cab slams into downtown restaurant” in the Beacon, I didn’t even finish reading the story. I just called him up to find out what happened.

That photo is crazy. The cab was apparently hit by someone who ran a red light and thrown through the window of the restaurant. And the witness said it sounded like “a bomb going off.”

When I asked my dad about it, he just laughed. The driver, a friend of his, is OK. Apparently though, he was joking with her earlier about the accident. After checking to see if she was OK, he asked if she wanted to go to lunch, he heard there was a new drive-in restaurant downtown. Hehe. That’s my father for you. I definitely inherited his sense of sarcasm.

If nothing else, the driver has another great story for her kids/friends. One of the best parts about having a cab driver for a father is the awesome stories he hears and the things he sees. Seriously. If you wanted to do participatory journalism and write a book about a city, becoming a cab driver would be a great way to do it. You get to mingle with everyone from coked out professionals to drunk college students to the normal working class people. Hmm. If I had the guts to be a cab driver (and I didn’t think my parents would kill me for considering it), that would actually make a great book.

Comments are closed.