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More Parking in Chicago 1982: Age 20 Parking Tickets
Quite some time ago I started relating various 'stories' and one of them touched on my exploits in Chicago. Here now are some more stories of my parking in Chicago.
While working at Goldblatts I was trying to save $$ by not parking in the parking garages and kept trying to find spots to park on the street. That was quite an adventure. Show up on State St around 3 PM and drive around for about 45 min trying to find an open spot. Once I located a great parking spot that had no parking meter, just a post. I parked there & when I came out of work around midnight, I had a ticket for parking where they were going to put a meter.
Another time I found an empty spot & got a ticket for parking where a cop wanted to park.
An old ploy in Chicago is to park, not put $$ in the meter, grab a ticket from a nearby car & place it on your own. This makes it look like you have been ticketed already. When you leave, you place the ticket back on the car you got it from, if it is there. If not, just any car will do. But the cops were getting wise. They started checking the tickets & if it didn't match your car, you got two tickets, one for parking & one for stealing a ticket. This happened to me. I parked, paid and when I came out I had 3 tickets. The ticket somebody put on my car, the parking ticket (even though I paid) and a ticket for stealing a ticket.
However, the best ever ticket I received was this one. I had found a wonderful spot, just across from Marshal Field. I parked, checked all the signage to be sure it was legal, paid my 2 hours worth and went to work. I came out at midnight and there was my car, surrounded by traffic barriers, flashing lights, traffic cones, and (best of all) a trench.
Yup, a trench. Seems the water department decided to work on the water mains and dug a trench about 3 ft wide & 15 ft deep. This trench ran right along the sidewalk, alongside my back bumper. then alongside the driver's side of my car, along the front bumper, and then along the sidewalk. Instead of towing my car, they trenched around it. I stood there amazed. I then heard a slurred voice above me hollering, "I tol 'em notta do it. I said, my frien'z gunna be mad but the sunzabitches did it anyway." I looked up at the drunk on the El as he continued to explain how he tried to fight them off, to get them to leave my car alone.
So here it is, after midnight in downtown Chicago and there is a trench around my 1972 Mercury Monterey. How was I gonna get home? That's when the idea hit me....
Continued.....
and since they had trenched all the way around teh building and actually
were halfway to being all the way around the city limits of Chicago...I
activated the flight mechanism that came standard on that particular year
of Mercury.....
