Parking ticket paid after 31 years

By Dan Schneider/DMG Writer
CALUMET — Nobody knows who she is or what she was doing in Calumet that afternoon in early fall.

It was the year of our nation’s bicentennial, a cool day for the first of September. The sun may have been shining when the woman drove her Buick into town. Or it may have been cloudy.

We don’t know.

We know only that her car sat too long in a parking space on Fifth Street.

For 31 years the ticket for that meter violation haunted her. Maybe she kept the little yellow envelope in a junk drawer with the detritus of her daily life in this crazy place we call America.

Maybe she kept it in a file box, alongside registration documents from long-forgotten vehicles now rusting in a scrapyard somewhere in Illinois.

Maybe she stashed it between two pages of her cookbook and only saw it when she baked oatmeal cookies.

Wherever that ticket was when she looked at it once more in April of this year, she decided on that day it was time. Time to pay the man his due.

“I always had good intentions of paying it. I put it aside and every once in a while I would come across it and said ‘some day I’m going to pay it.’ Now I think it’s time.”

She wrote this on a simple note, enclosed with the parking ticket and a $20 bill in a plain white envelope with no return address. She mailed it to the Calumet Village Police Department.

The ticket is dated “9-1-76.” The time: 2:16 p.m.

Marsha Johnson was a 22-year-old parking enforcement officer on that date. Her last name was Gibson then. The initials on the ticket are “M.G.”

“That would have been me, I wrote the ticket, and she finally paid,” Johnson said. “I wonder what made her pay it. Just her conscience?”

On the ticket, No. 1666, the box labeled “Overparked—Meter Violation $1.00” is marked with an “X.” Below that line, an advisory that the fine increased to $5 after 72 hours.

The woman addressed this in her note — “I can’t afford $5 after 31-1/2 years, so I’m sending what I can.”

Calumet Police Chief David Outinen said the fee didn’t compound itself beyond the 72-hour period.

“I guess she overpaid, she only owed us five bucks,” he said.

This is how the note ends: “Please don’t try and track me down. I am a respectable lady.”

Outinen did not disagree with the last statement.

“I’ve never seen anybody after that long period of time even bother with something like that so I guess it was nice to see,” he said.

The department has no plans to pursue the case further.

“We usually don’t do anything until someone gets several of them, several unpaid, and then we usually send out a notice,” Outinen said.

So the woman is out there, somewhere, resting a little easier now that the meter violation has been put to right. The rest of this parking ticket’s saga will remain forever shrouded in mystery.



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