As in, “This berg’s too small for two cab companies.”
But he was wrong, according to my definitions:
- A “city” is so large that you have too many neighbors and you don’t know nor do you want to know any of them;
- A “town” is so large that you still have numerous neighbors but you do know and let your children play with those who live on your same street, or perhaps the next street over;
- A “village” is small enough that most of your neighbors are your friends and everyone else is neighborly, even those who live many streets away;
- A “berg” is so tiny that all its residents are your neighbors and there are no streets!
Anchorage was definitely a village, albeit a very cosmopolitan one. We could claim, in the late ‘40’s, to be Alaska’s largest population center, to have Alaska’s largest “international” airport, seaplane base, Army base and Air base – and two taxi cab companies.
How may “bergs” have two cab companies?
In fact, how many “villages” can boast that? Maybe we were actually a small town; I’ll leave that open to debate.
But what isn’t debatable is the rivalry that existed between the Yellow Cab Company and its archrival, Union Cab.
The ubiquitous, yellow Yellow Cabs could be seen at the head of a billowing trail of dust as they raced though our streets. In my youth I thought of the color yellow as being closer to the shade of mustard, so dirty were these Chariots of Convenience.
Union cabs were far fewer and definitely less noticeable. Their drab green and grey two tone exteriors didn’t seem to show the dust and dirt so readily. Their drivers, too, were undistinguished, whereas the Yellow Cab drivers wore snappy yellow caps.
Like a train porter. Or an airport sky cap.
To a young boy, they had a military kind of look and aura, and were the favorites of my school friends and me.
And apparently of the townsfolk, as well, since it seemed to us that the fleet of Yellow Cabs kept growing and the number of Union cabs kept shrinking by comparison.
Their rivalry led to fare wars and advertising campaigns that kept us all in a state of eager anticipation, awaiting the next volley in their game of one-upmanship.
The most memorable to me was when each company came up with a slogan – and advertising jingle – based on its telephone number.
Being a village, as we were then, our phone numbers were prefixed with an exchange name. The “downtown” area was, of course, “Main”. We dialed “M” “A” as the prefix to those numbers. An astute phone user would know exactly where on the grid of Anchorage and its environs a particular number was located by having learned where all the prefixes were. “MA” was the core downtown, the business district.
And the Main exchange had – get ready for this – 99 numbers assigned to it. The number given to Yellow Cab was “MA70”, which we all pronounced as “Main Seven-Oh”.
Union Cab, a later addition to our growing community, was assigned “MA78”, which we all said as “Main Seven-Eight”.
The advertising war started when Yellow Cab began airing this jingle on our one radio station: “When you gotta go, call Main Seven-Oh!” Having a larger fleet, Yellow Cab used central dispatch. The ad implied, and correctly so, that your phone call started a cab on its way to you from the downtown headquarters. Cabbies sat around the pot belly stove in the cramped dispatch office drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes, waiting for their turn. The dispatcher would write the address for pickup on a slip of paper, call the next driver and send him on his way.
The jingle was catchy, easy to remember, and boosted market share immediately. It also appealed to the old-timers in town who always “went” in a Yellow Cab.
But Union Cab, not to be outdone, countered with an equally ingenious jingle based on its “newer” number: “When you can’t wait, call Main Seven-Eight!”
Union Cab, you see, was the first to use radio dispatch in their vehicles. Many of their cabbies were war veterans who were accustomed to the use of two-way radio communication.
In truth, Union’s response time was much faster, since the dispatcher could call for a cab that was already in the area of the pickup address and a taxi could arrive in far less time than it would take for Yellow’s cab to drive all the way there from downtown.
The jingle was not only cute and memorable – it told the public just how different Union Cab was from its nemesis.
Because of their inspired counter to Yellow’s ad, Union Cab saw its own fleet grow over the next several years to match the size of their rival’s. The two companies traded places as Anchorage’s largest taxi operation for a couple years.
Right up until Anchorage switched to seven digit telephone numbers and Union Cab could no longer capitalize on being first with radio dispatch.
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In later years as I reminisced about these two jingles I was struck by how appropriate they were, how memorable, how fixed in my mind even after forty-plus years. And how many gazillions of dollars Coke, or Pepsi, or General Motors, or any of the other current major corporations has spent trying to get their message across to the public – and how unmemorable their jingles are.
Maybe they could take a lesson from the Main 70 - Main 78 battle.
05. MAIN 70 – MAIN 78
© 6/14/99 Gene Brown
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