By Ben Joravsky
So Kratzer found a space a few blocks away and returned to Dayton to watch the show. He acknowledges that it wasn’t a massive operation–the signs covered just three or four spaces on either side of Gore’s friend’s house. “At about four the police came, and they started writing tickets,” he says. “Word got out that it was Gore who was coming. Apparently he knows someone on the block. At five I heard them say that Al Gore was en route. They said they had his car on the radio, and he was only 20 minutes away.”
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A couple of people moved their cars, trying to avoid being towed as well as ticketed, but as the minutes ticked by, four cars still remained. “So the tow trucks came and they towed those cars away,” says Kratzer. “I don’t know the names of the people who were towed. One woman with a broken foot showed up just as her car was towed. She came up on crutches, and she was furious. There was this other car with four-wheel drive. The police explained that you can’t tow a car with four-wheel drive. So what they did is they attached it to a tow truck in front and a tow truck in the back, and they lifted the car up off the ground. Then they drove it off with the tow truck in the front going forward and the one in the rear driving in reverse. It was quite an operation.”
Asked if he thinks it’s fair to tow when signs go up only a few hours beforehand, Padvoiskais says, “My understanding is that the signs were posted well ahead of that Sunday, probably on the midnight shift. Occasionally what happens is they have to be reposted because someone tore them down.”
Even Dan Quayle, the former GOP vice president?
For a long time the CTA and RTA–the CTA provides the service, the RTA determines eligibility–were very cooperative. They enrolled her in their “paratransit” program, sending a van to pick her up each morning outside her apartment on the 1300 block of North Cleveland and drive to her office on the 1600 block of West Roosevelt.
“It’s a real catch-22,” says Drazen. “They’re working from the assumption that the system works as it’s supposed to. But if the bus doesn’t stop for me, I’m stuck on the corner.”
