The best place to read one of Chicago`s newest publications is in hell.
To a Chicago cab driver, hell is Lot D at O`Hare Airport, a vast asphalt wait land behind a Cyclone fence you`ve never entered unless you were in the driver`s seat of a sedan of yellow, checkered-green or any one of the saddleshoe two-tones that cruise the metropolitan grid.
It is here that the polyglot drivers idle for hours, stacked in lines 20 across and 19 deep, waiting for the go-ahead to lurch toward the airport curb where they just might score a $20 fare downtown. In a holding pattern beneath the big metal birds whose noise makes every other sentence a fill-in-the-blank quiz, the cabbies sleep. They chew the fat. They chow down from paper plates soggy with gyros or tin pans piled high with kim chee.
Sometimes, they even read TaxiTalk, a cozy little newsletter-circulation 2,500-put out since April by the people at Yellow Cab Co. for the 2,648 folks who drive the Yellow cabs, the country`s largest taxi fleet. It`s designed to help a cabby force whose linguistic diversity can be frustrating to a rider who may request, ”City Hall, please,” in perfectly plain English, yet find herself 10 minutes later at the Civic Opera House.
TaxiTalk talks in six tongues, besides English: Urdu for the Pakistanis, Ibo for the Nigerians, Farsi for the Iranians, Arabic, Korean and Spanish. Each month, the newsletter is sent to a translator who spins out a condensed version in one of the six languages, printed under the column heading ”In Other Words.”
It`s a chatty type of publication. Newsy too. Filled with courtesy tips.
(”Avoid jerky start-and-stop driving.” ”Don`t use strong or sweet odor-maskers.” ”Don`t lose your temper with other drivers.” And this, surely an offering from that mostly mum Miss Meter Manners: ”If you have a newspaper handy, ask if the passenger would like to read it.”) It`s got boldface listings galore, and complete reprints of letters, all praising cabbies who went way out of their way for a passenger.
And TaxiTalk doesn`t lack for scoops. July`s four-page issue includes a dispatch from Warren, Mich., where the makers of Yellow`s Chevrolet Caprices, specifically a spokesman from the Fuels and Lubricants Division, reported this: ”Even in the worst city-driving conditions, on even the hottest days, constant use of an air conditioner might cost 1 mile per gallon in fuel efficiency.”
It`s factoids like that that get Jeff Feldman, president of Yellow Cab, all tanked up about his new newsletter.
When Feldman dreamed up this idea for a new way to talk to the troops, he insisted on one thing: Put it in language the cabbies will understand.
Making a point
”When you`re dealing with a large block of immigrant drivers, it`s very difficult to get the point across,” said Feldman, 41, a cheery fellow who took over the Yellow and Checker taxi empire last fall from his father, Jerry, who wasn`t exactly a hero to the cabdriving corps. ”They believe what they hear on the street.”
Take the bit about air conditioning. ”Many of the Middle Eastern drivers don`t like air conditioning,” Feldman said. ”When in Rome, do as the Romans. You`re not in Saudi Arabia now, not in Pakistan, you`re driving a $15,000 vehicle. A cool, comfortable cab will pay them dividends, as will courtesy, as will opening up a door once in a while.” Maybe in their own tongue, Feldman hopes, they`ll get the message.
It`s no small task, this tongue twisting. The Korean alphabet, for one, has thousands of characters and requires typesetting that costs twice the standard rate. Ibo is rife-or so the newsletter editors thought-with accent marks and diacriticals, so they hired an artist who spent hours painstakingly drawing slashes and dots over and under practically every vowel (and ”m” and ”n”) in a 492-vowel passage. After the premiere issue hit the taxi garages in April, a Nigerian driver strolled up to Feldman and commended him on the fine effort. Only one problem-the chicken scratches over and under the vowels are tres passe, having long been dropped from everyday Ibo.
Feldman shrugged his shoulders. It wasn`t a waste as far as he`s concerned. Feldman, you see, is a man with a mission. He knows there`s no love lost between the drivers and the company he now steers. He`s hellbent on getting out the word that things have changed in the Yellow garage.
”For years, drivers have built up resentment,” said Feldman. ”For too long it`s been: Feldman doesn`t care. The new thing is: We do care. We`re willing to listen. Without the drivers, we`re nothing. We have to find a way to get that message across.”
Building a following
That`s the No. 1 reason for TaxiTalk, a front-and-back stack of columns and charts, printed on a thick sheet of caution-yellow paper. The heavy paper was picked on purpose, in hopes that its contents would be deemed indispensable, and the crisply creased newsletter would become a fixture, tucked into every driver`s visor of every Yellow cab.
”We don`t want to produce a newsletter that`s used for kindling, to swat flies, or wipe up with,” said Feldman. ”If we get them to read one column, it`s great.” At least they`re betting on building a following for the monthly back-page listing, ”Where the Action Is: Conventions in (month goes here),” in which the taxi hot spots are spelled out by date, event, location and potential passenger count.
Feldman`s good intentions aside, there is a question that can also be posed in plain English, namely, does anybody read it?
”I seen it. Didn`t pay any attention to it,” barked one crusty cabby from Ghana who said he`d been driving long enough to know it all without having to read one word. ”They should give us the money instead of doing that. They want to polish their image.”
TaxiTalk is not the first cabby sheet to hit Chicago`s streets. Back in 1983, when the young Feldman first stepped into the Chicago fleet, he actually ”put to sleep” for fiscal reasons a sometimes-published-som etimes-not taxi newsletter called Trips `n` Tips.
Before that, though, way before, there was The Taxigram, John Hertz`s attempt to honey up to his generation of immigrant drivers, Europeans, the first to take the wheel of what has become America`s gateway occupation. Hertz, who incorporated Yellow Cab Co. in 1915, was a onetime runaway, boxing manager and sportswriter who went on to make his millions putting millions in the driver`s seats of his Hertz-Rent-a-Cars.
The first edition of The Taxigram, which debuted Feb. 8, 1917, wrapped up its four polite columns with this thought for the road: ”Every man needs to leave the little ditch he is digging long enough to get the points of his compass and assure himself that his direction is right. Otherwise his ditch becomes a grave.”
In the industry, taxi newsletters are not the norm, according to Alfred LaGasse, executive vice president of the International Taxicab and Livery Association based in Kensington, Md. Of the 861 member cab companies worldwide, most do little more than post notices on bulletin boards, he said. Some, like Union Cab Co. in Madison, Wis., get real fancy, with up to 10 pages of print and pictures. LaGasse never heard of a cab company spinning out news in Urdu, Ibo or Farsi. It`s usually a one-tongue spiel, he said.
Cabby critiques
Given all this talking up from afar and on high, it seemed only right to hear from the folks behind the wheel. Leaping into and out of cabs on Lincoln Avenue, Wells Street, the parking lot at cabby haunt Mike`s Rainbow Restaurant at Huron and Clark and, finally, along Michigan Avenue, proved futile. Not one cabby had seen word one of TaxiTalk. The most populous place to take a meter read, we were told, was out at O`Hare`s Lot D.
Out there, in the scorching lot where tempers spark as quickly as a meter clicks from $1.50 to $2, we culled these cabby comments:
”You gotta lotta hate out here, racism. No newsletter ain`t gonna help that,” said an eight-year driver. ”Lady, it`s a dog out here, and it`s gettin` worse. It ain`t gettin` better.”
Then this, from a Pakistani driver: ”I read it. It`s words only.” He offered this idea for intracompany communications: ”We should have a union. Block the streets or block the airport for one day-then, everything will be OK.”
At long last, this: ”It`s pretty interesting,” said Lisa Calcoate, driver No. 428, undoubtedly earning herself a big Yellow star as she pulled her copy of TaxiTalk from her side door pocket. She`d even highlighted in yellow marker the meter eaters for the month: Neocon 24, attendance 50,000;
Taste of Chicago, attendance untold; and, finally, Million Dollar Round Table, attendance a mere 5,500, but who cares when you`re talking millionaires and the meter is running.
