FAIRBANKS - If you take cabs regularly in Fairbanks, chances are you’ve been driven by Alan Marshall. The 81-year-old cabbie has been driving people around Fairbanks and beyond since 1958.

Marshall’s an interesting ride. He’s witnessed the town’s dramatic metamorphosis during the past half-century and enjoys talking about it.

“Fairbanks has changed an awful lot. All the streets were dirt, dust and gravel when I came here,” Marshall said. The only paved street was Cushman, which ran from 26th Avenue north to the river.”

Around almost every Fairbanks corner, Marshall has a story to share.

He frequently points out areas of vanished landmarks. Like the Fairway Gas Station that once operated at the corner of Cowles Street and Airport Way where the Noel Wien Library now sits.

The station owner, he said, set four fake palm trees out front to confound passersby, especially tourists.

Before there was a University Avenue bridge spanning the Chena River, Marshall recalls some of his airport pickup fares bound for the university getting a bit belligerent.

They would become querulous when they could see the university out the window and were told they had to circle back to town and around to reach it.

If they were insistent enough, Marshall would turn the cab down the road and stop at the river to prove his honesty.

“Then they’d say, ‘What kind of hack town is this?’” he chuckled.

A longtime observer of the human condition, Marshall thinks people used to be a lot happier. “There’s too much mischief for them to get into now,” he said.

Marshall grew up on a farm near Panama, Neb. He recalls it as a good life, but at the mercy of the weather.

“We were glad to see the dandelions come up some years because it was something to eat.”

For fun on a Saturday night, friends would hitch a team of horses and drive 4 1/2 miles into town to watch the steam engine train come in.

He remembers buying gasoline at 11 cents per gallon, watermelons for 9 cents each and three pounds of hamburger for a quarter.

Marshall began driving a cab as a teenager in Lincoln, Neb., interrupted by a four-year stint in the Air Force.

The octogenarian is still working 12-hour shifts.

“My folks always told me if you don’t work you won’t eat, and if you don’t sit around, you’ll last longer.”

Marshall credits his longevity to his parents’ advice combined with the fact that he never smoke or drank alcohol.

But he did have one “bad” habit — drinking a lot of coffee — which he kicked while in the military. Since then, his beverages of choice have been milk and water.

“I’ve been fortunate not to have been too ill,” he added.

The only time Marshall took extended leave was for two and a half months in 2003, when his second wife, Ida, died.

When Marshall started driving a cab in Fairbanks, taxis had no meters and the town was zoned for service.

“It was more or less like a bus service,” he explained.

Cabbies would pick up and drop off people as they went along the streets.

Marshall has always been careful about who he picks up. He knows a lot of faces and passes by characters who have a history of empty pockets when they reach their destination.

“Most people are pretty nice,” Marshall said, “You meet a turkey every once in a while, but you do that in any profession.”

Comfortably dressed in jeans and a beige and navy plaid flannel shirt, the tall, slightly-stooped cabbie is unfailingly polite to his fares.

At every stop he is in and out of the red, white and robin’s egg blue cab in a flash, opening doors and helping fares with packages and luggage.

Eagle Cab owner Bill Northrup said Marshall’s long-term knowledge of the greater Fairbanks community makes him a valuable asset, especially when dispatchers have questions.

“He’s probably the most courteous driver we’ve got,” Northrup said. “I’ve only heard his voice raised in anger twice, and I’ve known him 15 or 20 years.”

Marshall has a steady clientele of regulars.

“There are some people who literally won’t ride with anybody else,” Northrup said. “Somedays his personals take up most of his day.”

Rise and shine

Marshall is on the street at 4:30 a.m. driving bartenders home and picking up people bound for the airport to catch morning flights.

“I enjoy driving. I meet a lot of people. A lot of the folks I drive now are great-grandchildren of people I drove when I first started driving up here,” Marshall said.

“The best part of my job are that no two days are alike and visiting with people.”

The downside of the job, Marshall said, is listening to passengers foul language and people dissing their country.

“Americans don’t realize how fortunate they are to live in America,” he said.

“I’m a firm believer that if we weren’t doing anything (military actions) elsewhere, they’d be over here blowing things up.”

A hard business

The taxi business is a hard business to keep afloat, Marshall said. He owned Yellow Cab Co. for seven years and often put in 19-hour days. He sold the business on his doctor’s advice.

The business has changed during the years, he noted.

Tourism still brings in a lot of fares, but the days of meeting the trains aren’t lucrative anymore.

“The tour companies have taken over what used to be cab fares,” he said, “and they tell people ‘don’t go downtown or you’ll get mugged.’”

Marshall is quick with numbers from years of calculating fares and tips.

He immediately rolls off 7,514,000 miles when asked how many miles he estimates he’s driven.

“I keep a log book of beginning and ending mileage each day,” he explained.

What Marshall has never logged is the many interesting and unusual encounters with some of his passengers.

His longest pickup fare was during his first winter here, a 16-hour drive over icy roads from Fairbanks to Whitehorse, 937 miles total.

A Canadian contractor had flown to Fairbanks to pick up a an electric motor fan for a failed furnace in a school he had built. He had a deadline to meet or lose a bundle of money.

The weather was too bad for the return flight, so he plopped $600 on Marshall’s dashboard and sat back and let Marshall do the driving.

Then there was the time in 1974, when he picked up a Concorde flight crew doing winter testing on the supersonic passenger airliner. They offered him a ride and he accepted.

Marshall has no idea where they flew during the four-hour flight, but it was high enough at 49,000 feet to see the curvature of the Earth, he said.

Another event that stands out in Marshall’s memory, was delivering U.S. Congressmen Nick Begich and Hale Boggs to the airport to meet pilot Don Jonz.

“I helped out putting some things in the plane,” Marshall recalled.

It was the second-to-last flight of the ill-fated pilot and his passengers, who later disappeared on a flight between Anchorage and Juneau.

During the years, Marshall has driven around a raft of well-known politicians.

His most memorable meeting was an unusual encounter with President Ronald Reagan.

A lot of people don’t believe me when I tell them this story, Marshall said, before launching into the tale.

In 1984, the night after Reagan met Pope John Paul II in Fairbanks, Marshall said he was dispatched to the Captain Bartlett Hotel and told to wait around back.

After 15 or 20 minutes and no customers showing up, Marshall was just about to leave when he spotted two men climbing out of a first-floor window. They waved him over and asked to be taken to the Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream store on Airport Way.

Marshall immediately recognized the president and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. He settled them into the cab and arrived at the ice cream parlor shortly before its midnight closing. The president and Weinberger went inside and returned to the cab loaded down with $330 worth of ice cream.

Marshall returned them to the rear of the hotel where they had sneaked out, and the president paid the $28.20 taxi fare with a $50 bill.

“I told him that I was sorry I didn’t have any jelly beans for him,” Marshall recalled. “And he said, ‘Don’t worry, I have a stash.’”

“I was very impressed with him,” Marshall said.