Ninety-one years ago today, on July 16, 1935, drivers in downtown Oklahoma City rolled up to something no one on the planet had ever seen at the curb: a parking meter.
One hundred seventy-five of them, actually, planted along 14 blocks of the business district. The price to park was a nickel an hour. The reaction was not gratitude.
A Newspaperman’s Fix for Downtown Gridlock
The contraption was the idea of Carl C. Magee, a lawyer and newspaper editor who had landed in Oklahoma City from New Mexico in 1927. Downtown workers were parking at the same curbs all day, leaving shoppers nowhere to stop, and the city’s answer up to then had been cops chalking tires. Magee patented his “Park-O-Meter,” and a Tulsa company that normally built timing devices for oil wells manufactured the very first units. It was a piece of American ingenuity that would soon spread coast to coast.
‘Un-American’ and Headed to Court
Not everyone read it as progress. Opponents called charging people to park on public streets un-American, a tax on the simple right to own a car, and money taken without due process. A few drivers took the city to court. That August, a minister named C.H. North earned the first parking ticket ever issued after he stopped, he said, only long enough to run into a store for change. A judge dismissed the case…