Strong and sharp and bearing down on 100 years of living, Arthur Winston has drawn a bead on what it takes to age well.
Cut up the credit cards. They don’t do anything more than bring about worry. Worry will kill you.
Get off the couch. Stop in one place too long, you freeze up. If you freeze up, you’re done for.
Work as long and hard as you possibly can. Folks retire, they end up on the front porch watching the street go by. If despair sets in, you’re as good as gone.
Known as Deke to some and Mr. Winston to most, Winston is walking history and a living parable. A 97-year-old black man who turned the sting of racism into something sweet. A man who plans on loving every bit of life until his last breath.
In 1924, at age 17, Winston started cleaning trolley cars for the Los Angeles Railway Co., which morphed and merged nearly half a dozen times and is now the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
He quit that job for a while, then went back Jan. 24, 1934.
He has never left. For 70 years and counting, Winston has worked for the transit agency as a service attendant, applying spit, polish and love to vehicles ranging from the current fleet of buses to the trolley cars that once made the Los Angeles transit system a marvel.
For as long as he has endured, he has been astonishingly consistent.
In 70 years, according to the transportation authority, Winston has missed just one day of work–the day his wife died, in 1988. The records show he has never been late, never left early.
The closest to him in seniority at the MTA has 25 fewer years on the job and weeks of absences. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor says he’s never heard of anyone like Winston. The American Public Transportation Association searched and could not find anybody like him in the transit industry.
“Mr. Winston,” says Donna Aggazio, a spokeswoman for the association, “appears to be one of kind.”
In South Los Angeles, Winston is something of a celebrity. People fuss over him. The barber refuses to take his money.
Awake at 4:30
Winston lives with his 26-year-old great-granddaughter and 2-year-old great-great-grandson. He wakes at 4:30 each weekday morning, cooks his Malt-O-Meal, puts on his uniform, then drives his 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass to the yard.
He parks at a spot reserved for him. Then he sets about supervising a crew of nine men and women who do the heavy lifting–carrying tools up ladders, whooshing grime out of buses with powerful hoses, lugging carts of soap and mops.
Working people, Winston says, are simple and humble. They use the money they earn wisely. They see to it, even if the boss doesn’t ask and the job doesn’t call for it, that no bus leaves with grimy rims. And they absolutely do not fuss or mope or complain.
These values, he says, have allowed him to survive.
Though one of his credos is that one should not spend too much time dwelling on the past, Winston will tell you that, when he started working at the bus and trolley yard, the bosses would fire a black man in a flash. Whites and blacks didn’t mix then.
There were separate bathrooms and lunch rooms. Winston started out earning 41 cents an hour and made that much for nearly his first 10 years. His white co-workers got 51 cents and regular raises.
“It was ugly,” he says. “But there was nothing we could really do about it. Not a thing.”
Winston wanted to be a driver. Blacks weren’t allowed to drive. They were allowed to clean the buses and trolley cars.
Too late for new job
By the time he could have trained to be a driver, Winston was approaching middle age. He and his wife were settled. It was too late to learn a new job.
So he stayed and he worked.
There were low points. Riots. Rising crime. The death of his wife and of his father, who lived 99 years until “sickness got him,” Winston says.
There were high points too. The Olympics, when the city, taking gridlock seriously for once, boosted its bus system and Winston worked double shifts. The rebirth of the commuter train in Los Angeles.
In 1997 the MTA decided to name the bus yard after an elderly service attendant.
Today, the agency has 15 bus and rail yards, also known as “divisions.” Most are identified by numbers–Division 1 downtown, Division 15 in the San Fernando Valley. Only one is named for a person: The Arthur Winston Bus Division.
“I’m not leaving just because it’s got my name on it,” Winston says. “If I did, you’d probably see me freeze up and get sick. If I got sick, I’d probably die.”
