Once upon a time, I was someone else. But only to some people, and for a good reason, or at least what I thought was a good reason, and only for about eight months.

In 1969 I was trying to find a way of saving $250 (about $2,300 in today’s money) to buy an engagement ring to give to my girlfriend, now my wife of 53 years. I was in college full time and  had done stints in the Tribune pressroom, written death notices, and clerked in circulation, but while they paid decent wages, there never seemed enough left before pay day to put aside. 

My dad, who had died the year earlier, had driven a cab on his days off from the Chicago Fire Department, and it occurred to me that this might solve my problem; that would be if I were 21 years old, the minimum age then to drive a cab. But I was 19, almost 20.

There was a fellow worker at the Tribune, the kind of guy you just knew was working all kinds of angles and small bits of larceny, and who had a sideline hustle, one of many,  generating fake IDs.  For $10 he solved my problem;  I now had a fake driver’s license, made of paper, and bearing the name of Dennis Smith, age 23.

 The information world of 1969 was so very simple, different, and disconnected from today’s world. Your license was typed on a paper card, without a photo. The age of the PC and laptop was in the distant 1980’s. The birth of the Internet, while officially listed as occurring  in 1969, would not fully integrate into our lives for several decades to come.   Computers were not widely in use except for giant corporations,  the military, and the federal government, so verifications and background checks were limited to phone calls and “snail mail.” Information collected and issued in one state could not easily be shared with another state.

So off I went to the Blue Cab Company on South Boulevard in Oak Park, not far from my home in the Austin neighborhood in Chicago. I first talked to a cab dispatcher, who turned away from his radio microphone long enough to point me to a small office where an older woman handed me a one-page application to become a cab driver, and then handed me a list of rules for new cabbies; she then asked me when I could start. She glanced at my fake license without reacting. Not a very demanding hiring process for cab drivers, as it turned out.

Here’s what I learned about how the cabbing business worked in 1969……….

• I would need to spend one whole day as a “shadow’ with an experienced driver, to whom the company would pay a small bonus for teaching a rookie. I would receive no payment that day.

• I would be entirely dependent on the two-way radio in the cab. The dispatchers would give out a street intersection to all cabs working at any given time. Drivers would “bid” back over the radio with your cab number and your current location. The dispatcher would reward the closest driver with a street address and the name of the passenger.

• I could pick up in any suburb and drop the fare (passengers were called “fares”) in the city. Or I could pick up in the city and drop off in any suburb. If I picked up and dropped off within the city of Chicago, a special unit of the police department, known as “Vehicle Police,” could pull you over and issue a fine. You paid the fine.

• You could work whenever you wanted, days, nights, weekends, whatever, but a minimum of four hours.

• When you came to work, they would assign a cab to you and you would be handed a brown paper envelope with printed lines, on which you listed by hand all “fares”, and in which you placed their cash. You got fifty percent of the take, less $2 which would be added to a “bond” account in your name they kept somewhere in case you piled up a cab.

• In 1969, it was a cash world. Credit cards were also in the future.

• When you had your fare in the cab and learned your destination, you pulled the handle on the meter. When the ride ended, you pulled the meter handle again and collected the amount shown on the meter. At the shift’s end, they tallied the meter against the cash. Any mismatch came out of your pocket. Tips were yours to keep.

• Your cab had a full tank when you started and you had to purchase gas in their garage to top it off, but it was cheaper than any gas station and gas in 1969 at about 35 cents per gallon.

And I quickly learned a few things not in the instructions:

Almost all of the financially successful cabbies had found a way to sever their fate from the two-way radios. Over the years, they had developed a cadre of regular customers. Grannie who wanted to do her grocery shopping at 10 a.m. every Tuesday. The poor guy who needed dialysis every Friday at 2 p.m. The lady who goes clothing shopping every Monday at 3 p.m.

They still had to fill in the idle gaps with radio calls, but the real money was with their regulars, not all of whom generated a “flag pull” on the meter and for whom they pocketed 100% of the fare.

And in the black neighborhoods on Chicago’s south side, where most white cabbies would not travel, a black version of the same type of cabbie, known then as “Jitney” cabs, took Grannie, and the dialysis guy, and the shopper to their destinations. They were unlicensed, drove unmarked cars of their own, and if caught were subject to arrest. Most old-time cops didn’t focus on them, however, recognizing they provided a needed service. In a way, they were precursors to Uber and Lyft.    

To make money during the lulls, most of the rest of us had to resort to a practice known as “short blocking” or telling the dispatchers that your cab was considerably closer to the prospective fare than it actually was. You had to be careful, because if you really stretched the distance, and the fare called back to complain about still waiting, the dispatchers would punish you by refusing to give you fares for a few hours. I taught my kids this term “short blocking” and am happily surprised that they now use it to call each other out  when one of them is late for a get together and lies about how close they are to arriving.

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 None of this tale could have ever occurred today in an Internet-enabled world. Cell phones, interactive databases, IDs with photos, online background checks, site registrations,  apps and  the like would have stopped me and my little bit of larceny in its tracks. Two-way radios have given way to mapping apps and texts. And there must be a dozen ways of pinpointing your location on this earth, to you or anyone.  

Still, part of me remembers with fondness the ability to bend the rules, to commit a crime that harmed no one, and to be, briefly,  Dennis Smith, a sort of pedestrian scoundrel and scofflaw.

And when I made the money for the engagement  ring, which came from the bond fund they kept at Blue Cab, I cashed it at a Currency Exchange, where it seemed no one ever asked questions.  I walked away from being a cabbie. Dennis Smith simply disappeared into the non-internet controlled thin air. No one cared to ask what became of him.

God, I miss those days of freedom from the information age. A little larceny can be good for the soul.