Working at the Parking Lot
From ‘The Adventures of The McGaffin’s As We Remember Them’ — a family memoir begun July 17, 2003.
Working at the Parking Lot. Bob Lewis's uncle Bud Tomkins was operating a parking lot in Plainfield. The lot was just off the main street and wrapped around the Oxford Movie theatre. It was a good location and we were usually busy. I started working there in 1945 at the age of 14. I had been doing driving on the farm and so was able to drive cars at the parking lot when it was necessary. We parked the cars around the perimeter of the lot and had the space to double park another row. The owners of the double-parked car had to leave their keys to enable us to move their car to allow the car in the first row to get out. Thursday night in Plainfield was the shopping night as the stores stayed open in the evening. Therefore, Thursday was always busy and we had the opportunity to drive a number of different cars. That was the time of some different cars: Packard, Willy, Kaiser, Frazer, Terraplane, Hudson, American, and many others that I can't remember. At one time I had driven every American built car that was in current production. Bob and I worked at each of the entrances and we liked to show off any new cars that we were able to drive. When we had to move a car, we would drive the car around to the other side so we could do some comparisons. I always thought it was funny when a person would bring in a car and ask me to park it for them. I don't know if they realized that I didn't have a license, but they felt more comfortable letting me do the parking instead of them. They didn't know that I had to ride my bike to get to the job. This was a simple fun job and only lasted a few hours at a time but didn't pay very much. I worked there, in my free time, for about 3 years. We had one benefit, because the lot wrapped around the theatre, we also had a key that allowed us to use the bathroom and when business was slow, we could go in and watch the movie from the side of the stage. The only problem was we were standing next to the screen and the people were very tall and looked very thin. At this time there was no air conditioning in the theatre, therefore the exit doors were left open for ventilation. Another part of our job was to keep kids from sneaking in through the open doors.
