Parking Meter Man Writes Book About 25 Years On The Job

[matcom]

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Jack Fawcett is one of the best-known and best-loved characters in Birmingham, though plenty of people who have parked in the city's downtown have had reason to be a bit peeved with him.

For a quarter century, Fawcett's job was to take care of Birmingham's parking meters. He installed, repaired and collected money from the meters. And when one expired, it was Fawcett's job to slap a ticket on the offending car's windshield.

Often, Fawcett says, the car's owner would come running up with an excuse as he was writing the ticket.

He's got lots of stories, most of them funny, and this summer, the Birmingham Historical Society has collected them in a memoir titled "Parking for a Nickel," released by JCarp Publications of Ann Arbor.

Fawcett, 85 and a Birmingham resident, has donated all royalties from the 93-page collection of stories to the historical society. He said Wednesday that so far, several hundred had been sold. The book is filled with short vignettes with a small-town feel.

"All of my stories are true, even if some are over 50 years old," Fawcett, who retired 23 years ago, writes on the jacket cover. "All of the characters are real. The names of some have been deliberately left out to protect the NOT so innocent."

The book also contains stories unrelated to meters about silly little things Fawcett and other Birmingham police officers used to do.

"It was a great job," Fawcett said last month. "I liked it, even though it was pretty tough going when the snow was knee deep, and you had to go from meter to meter and fix them."

And people like Fawcett so well, despite his ticket writing, that the folks around City Hall nicknamed him "Birmingham's Goodwill Ambassador," which is the subtitle of his book.

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2006607210446