Hailing a taxi when needed, a look back on Midland's cabbies

Cabs are called day and night and serve a round the clock business helping you and me to get places.

If on a Friday night you are out and may have wandered from the path of rectitude, if such exists, and need to return home to collect your wits, hailing a cab is best.

Over the years, livery stables proliferated in Midland and a hansom cab was always out for hire.

Getting into town or back home is the bailiwick of the cab companies operating today and we see their silent cars buzzing around quietly.

A few memories below, mostly anecdotal, not much more.

Martins Taxi had their stand on Hugel in the back of the old Georgian Hotel. The Deluxe Cab Company seemed to operate in the Georgian Hotel Block.

The reverse side has a period poem dedicated to the cabby who seemed to also serve as silent witness to the local dramas.

There were several cab companies operating along Bay Street, east of King on the north side with Hebners and Blue Taxi on the south side.

The latter on that little pitch at the eastern end of the old Queens Hotel. Both gone today.

These companies serviced Dubeau’s Bus Lines which stretched east  toward Midland Avenue and was ‘downtown’.

Cabs kept the community connected for those, not owning cars, those who, if public transit was available, used it, and those who needed to get from here to there at low cost.

Uber was not Alles. The cab operators, like the Teamsters before them, were organized and there had always been a brotherhood of cabbies.

Today, not so much.  

René Hackstetter June 17, 2022.