No Fly-by-night Cabbie Is Jack

On occasion a fare will prove to be an adventure. "A girl got into my cab one evening," says Gartside, "and she told me she wanted to stake out a Japanese restaurant. Her name was Jodie, and she suspected that her boyfriend was having an affair with her roommate, a Japanese girl who was a waitress in the restaurant. I parked across the street from the restaurant, and after a while the boyfriend showed up and met the Japanese girl. They got into his car. 'Follow them,' Jodie said. We must have gone 15 miles trailing them before they finally drew up in front of her house. Jodie said to me, 'Why don't you go to the door of the apartment and pretend you're a Western Union messenger, and I'll hide in an alcove and when they come to the door I'll surprise them.' It was a dull night, so I said, 'O.K., but pay me now.' She did, and I went into the house and knocked at the door. 'Who is it?' asked the Japanese girl. 'Western Union,' I said. The Japanese girl opened the door, and behind her I could see the boyfriend, both in scanty costumes. 'What is it?' she asked. 'I have a message from Jodie,' I said. 'What is it?' she asked. I said, 'I think you should ask her yourself.' At which point I thought it wise to depart as Jodie came out from the alcove."

If Gartside seems unusually well-spoken and well-read for a cabdriver, even a Boston cabdriver, it should be noted that until seven years ago he was a high school English teacher in Boston. He quit the day some students set fire to a desk and the classroom went up in smoke. "It's safer driving a cab at night in Boston than it is teaching in a Boston school during the day," he says.

Gartside and his sister, Gladys, are the only Gartsides in the Boston area phone books. The name is English (it literally means by the side of an enclosed garden), and all the Gartsides in his family came from Lancashire. Grandfather Gartside was a machinist on his way to Australia who passed through Boston and never got any farther. Instead, he married a young English girl who was working as a domestic servant in Newton and raised a family. Jack's father, John, was also a machinist, and life was always a struggle. To make ends meet, he worked as a part-time cop, while his wife worked as a secretary and telephone solicitor. She also played the organ in St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Revere, Mass., where her husband served as a lay reader. "My father was a great reader," Gartside says. "He had a wonderful speaking voice, a High Church voice. He always talked about the church and never about his work, although he never missed a day."

When Jack was born, his mother gave him the middle name of Clarence after her uncle, Clarence Wheeler, a general manager of the National Biscuit Company. "She hoped he would remember us in the will," Gartside says. "My mother named my sister after Uncle Clarence's only daughter, Gladys. When Uncle Clarence died, he didn't remember us at all but left everything to his daughter."

As a boy Gartside read every book he could get his hands on. "I read King Solomon's Mines, She, all of Rider Haggard. Arthur Conan Doyle, all the Holmes stories. I reread them every other year. Ghost stories—M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, John Collier, Roald Dahl. I've always been very strong on story and plot. That's why I read and why I fish and why I live and why I play poker and why I drive a cab—for the surprise ending. Think of that passage in the Bible, 'O Lord, let me know the number of my days.' Wouldn't it be awful to know that? My father always told me stories, too, and he encouraged me to travel. He was always poring over maps, and we would make imaginary trips together. But he never did make any trips. He couldn't even drive a car. Failed every driver's test he ever took."

The younger Gartside also had a vivid imagination; he would see himself as a character in whatever book he happened to be reading. "I went to a neighborhood reunion in Revere the other day and saw kids I used to hang around with when I was 10 or 11," Gartside says. "One fellow remembered me as a boy Tarzan. The mayor remembered that I went around with a lasso for two or three years roping everyone I saw, including him. Almost broke his neck. When I was in the seventh grade I held the school record for truancy and tardiness, and I guess I haven't stopped yet. I'm still late for everything.

"The first time I was ever arrested was when I was 12, but I impressed the police with my reading knowledge. I had gone to Filene's basement with a friend whose mother had given him money for a pair of shoes. My friend lost the money, and he didn't dare go home. 'I'll pinch a pair for you,' I said. I did, and I was caught. The police took me in a paddy wagon to the station, where I was locked up behind a grill near the sergeant's desk. The cop and the sergeant, both Irish, were talking about politics, and the sergeant asked, 'Who wrote that book, The Last Hurrah?' The cop didn't know, but I called out, 'Edwin O'Connor,' and the sergeant said, 'Can't be such a bad kid if he knows that.' The second time I was arrested was in Norway for trespassing on a salmon river, a river that costs a fortune to fish. I didn't think anyone would see me. I pleaded ignorance. I said I was hiking when I came across this river, and I just happened to have my rod with me. Since I had my town license and a Norwegian girl friend testified in my behalf, they let me off."

It wasn't so easy with the pinched shoes from Filene's basement. "I had to go to juvenile court," Gartside recalls. "I was given a suspended sentence and told to stay out of trouble for six months."

Gartside's father, who was mightily upset by the incident, sought to channel Jack's energies into fishing. The senior Gartside didn't fish himself, but there was a long breakwater at Revere that was exposed at low tide, and Gartside would go there to fish for pollack, mackerel and striped bass. "I was often stranded out there when the tide rose, and the Coast Guard had to rescue me several times," he says. "Once I got my picture in the paper. I was a Red Sox fan, still am, and at the Sportsman's Show I saw my idol, Ted Williams, tying flies. I don't think I'd thought much about trout then, but I said to myself, 'Boy, if Ted Williams is doing this, it must be good.' I went home, took two of my grandfather's micrometers and used one to clamp the other one down while I used it as a vise. My grandfather wasn't pleased at all when he found out. The calibrations were off ever after. I tied flies with fur from the cat and pigeon feathers. I started fishing for trout, and with the first streamer I tied I caught a trout in Fish Brook, a tributary of the Ipswich River. I had a fishing friend, Henry Lightbody, a misnomer if there ever was one because he was one of the fattest kids I've ever known. We'd sit behind one another in class, desks half-open, reading Ray Bergman and Joe Brooks in Outdoor Life. Bergman wrote about trout fishing in the East, Brooks about Montana, and that's why I later went out there."

When Gartside was 18, he enlisted in the Air Force. "I joined to see the world," he says. "Where did I first end up? Cape Cod. Later on, I did get to Okinawa and Japan. Fly fishing appeals to the Japanese. It's very graceful and contemplative."