Meter Maids celebrate

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After last week’s bikini celebrations, this week’s merriments should go to the parking meter. It’s 81 years ago tomorrow that the first of them, known as the Park-O-Meter 1, was installed on the southeast corner of what was then First Street and Robinson Avenue in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma – supposedly here. The man behind the device, named both diabolical as godsend, was lawyer and publisher Carlton Cole Magee, who’d moved to Oklahoma City from in 1927 to start a newspaper. But as even then parking in Oklahoma downtown proved to be a challenge, Magee came up with his idea. And despite plenty of opponents, the parking meter spread throughout the US in a short period of time. By the early 1940s, there were more than 140,000 parking meters operating Stateside. Oh – and until 1967 the majority of them was checked by ladies – the so called ‘Meter Maids’.

(Words Jeroen Booij, picture courtesy John Pratt)

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