Paid in Full: The Old Man They Said Couldn't Afford Anything
The first car Calvin Booker ever owned was a 1966 Cadillac Fleetwood, black, with a cracked dashboard and a passenger door that would only open from the inside, and he bought it in the spring of nineteen seventy-four from a widow in Gary, Indiana, for four hundred and twelve dollars in cash, most of it in five-dollar bills.
He still had the receipt. It was in a frame on the wall of his office, above the desk, next to a photograph of his wife. The receipt was written in pencil on a sheet torn from a spiral notebook, in the shaky old-fashioned handwriting of a woman named Mrs. Opal Turnbull, who had been married for forty-one years to a man who drove that Cadillac to church every Sunday and nowhere else, and who had sold it to Calvin because, she said, her Harold would have wanted it to go to somebody who would take care of it. Received from Mr. C. Booker, four hundred twelve dollars, for one Cadillac automobile, black. Paid in full. Then her signature, and the date, and underneath, in smaller writing, as if she had added it as an afterthought: God bless you, young man. Drive careful.
He had been twenty-three. He had been working for three years as a chauffeur for a car service on the South Side of Chicago owned by a man named Leonard Pike, who paid his drivers a dollar and ten cents an hour and kept their tips, and who had told Calvin, when Calvin asked him for a raise, that if he didn't like it there were fifty boys on the corner who'd be happy to take his place. Calvin had saved every dollar he could for two years. He had eaten beans and rice and day-old bread. He had walked to work in the winter to save on bus fare. And when he had four hundred and twelve dollars, he had gone looking for a car.
He had gone to a dealership first. A Cadillac dealership on Michigan Avenue, with tall plate-glass windows and a showroom floor so polished it shone like a frozen pond, and he had walked in wearing his chauffeur's uniform, because it was the best clothing he owned, and he had stood in the middle of that showroom for twenty-five minutes while three salesmen in good suits looked at him and looked away and talked to each other in low voices and laughed. Nobody came over. Nobody asked if they could help him. Finally one of them, a heavyset man with a red face and a gold tie clip, strolled across the floor and stopped a few feet away and said, without taking his hands out of his pockets, the service entrance is around the back, boy. If you're here to pick somebody up.
Calvin had not said anything. He had turned around and walked out through the big glass doors into the cold, and taken the bus to Gary, Indiana, where a newspaper ad had told him a widow was selling a used Cadillac, and he had bought it from Mrs. Opal Turnbull in her kitchen, with a cup of coffee and a slice of pound cake, and she had called him young man and told him to drive careful.
He had driven careful. He had driven that black Cadillac for eleven years. He had driven it on his days off for anybody who would pay him, weddings and funerals and proms and businessmen to the airport, for half what Leonard Pike charged, and he had kept every penny, and eighteen months later he had bought a second car, and quit Leonard Pike, and hired his cousin Raymond to drive it. And that had been the beginning of Booker Executive Transportation, which was now, forty-nine years later, the largest Black-owned car service in the state of Illinois, with a hundred and forty employees and a garage on the west side of the city that took up most of a block and a client list that included three Fortune 500 companies, two professional sports franchises, a major university hospital, and, once, for a week in nineteen ninety-six, the President of the United States.
He had never in his life bought a car on credit. Not one. Not the first, not the second, not the hundred and thirty-ninth. Every car Booker Executive Transportation had ever owned had been paid for in full on the day it was bought, because in nineteen seventy-three, when he first tried to borrow money to start his own business, a loan officer at a bank on LaSalle Street had looked at his application for about four seconds and handed it back to him and said, I don't think we're going to be able to help you, Mr. Booker, in a tone of voice that made clear he did not think anyone was ever going to be able to help Mr. Booker. And Calvin had decided, walking out of that bank, that he would never again in his life ask a man like that for anything.