Jil McIntosh

Those were the days ...

That's me, age 13, on my mother's new car, a 1972 Plymouth Scamp. (She just about had a bird when the photos came back from the drugstore.) I learned to drive on that car when I was 17, and not long afterwards, it became the first car I owned. Less than a year after I learned to drive, believe it or not, the city of Toronto gave me a taxi driver's license.

I was thinking about that Plymouth the other day, and the cabs I drove in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was assessing a brand-new car and marking against it because it had very few storage cubbies.

How times have changed. My Plymouth had a glovebox and an ashtray, and that was it. With the cabs, we'd sometimes buy plastic consoles that sat on the transmission hump. They could be a pain if someone wanted to sit in the middle, though, because most cars had front bench seats.

Cars didn't have cupholders back then, save for the inside of my glovebox's metal lid, which had a couple of indentations to hold a mug if you stopped at A&W for a root beer. I don't remember people drinking anything when they actually drove. We did in the taxis, because there wasn't time to stop. Coffee shops used styrofoam cups, not paper, and we'd wedge them between the dash and the windshield. Some guys bought cupholders that hung off the windowframe, but they were more trouble than they were worth. We'd put a lid on the cup and then tear out a hole so we could drink on the go, and sometimes passengers would marvel at such a great idea. Now the lids come with the holes already scored.

Cars didn't have door pockets. They didn't have a mirror on the passenger door, but they did have vinyl roofs that were definitely not the stylist's finer moment. If you ordered a rear defogger, it was a fan in the parcel shelf that blew warm air on the window, very noisily. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven the day I got a taxi that had air conditioning, power windows and power locks. It was like driving a Cadillac. And those were back in the days when the only thing better than a Cadillac was a Rolls Royce. Good heavens, I feel old.

In "loo" of anything else to say ...

You have to admit, it isn't every day someone shows you pictures of her bathroom ... 

... but I will. I thought I'd have some fun showing off what originally started as a single taxi-themed coffee mug. This is my taxi memorabilia collection. (Most of it, anyway. There's a bit more on the walls, and a rooflight on top of the toilet.)

Back in 1977, I got my taxi license, and became the youngest driver in Toronto; I drove for six years for East End Taxi. I originally wanted to be a driving instructor, but you had to be 21 years old. The city fathers figured I wasn't old enough to sit in the passenger seat, but was mature enough for other people to put their lives in my hands as I sat behind the wheel. I never hurt anybody, although a few passengers did threaten to hurt me.

Much of my collection consists of run-of-the-mill toys, but I've got a few gems in there. Among them are a cardboard checker game, sent by Checker to its clients, still with checker discs untouched (I don't dare pull the sheet out) and matching Christmas envelope; a "Safe Driver" cap badge from Yellow Cab; the fare sheet from my own taxi; a sill plate that went on taxi-specific Dodge models, with "Dodge Taxi" embossed in it; and a porcelain Checker made by Limoges, a generous gift from my best friend (who drove alongside me back then, and we've been best buds ever since).

I've also got taxi pencils, taxi rulers, taxi ashtrays, taxi lighters, taxi licenses, taxi magnets, taxi Christmas ornaments and taxi tin toys. I buy many of my items from the big automotive flea market in Hershey, Pennsylvania each year (I don't do eBay) and taxi memorabilia is surprisingly rare, but I always manage to find something.

Why the bathroom, you ask? Well, our house is very small, we don't have a recreation room, and my office -- the only spare room in the house -- is crammed with books. So we figured, if you're sitting there anyway, you might as well have something to keep you occupied.

Besides, the garage already contains 3,000 Hot Wheels and 200 die-cast cars. Did I mention I married a collector, too?