Post by bennyp81 on Jun 20, 2005 9:55:15 GMT -8
Robert
User ID: 0317884 Feb 15th 12:37 AM
Los Angeles Times, Friday the 13th, 2004
COLUMN ONE
A Working Knowledge of Life
At 97, Arthur Winston has seen much change in L.A. But one constant has been his job: 70 years cleaning buses -- with just one day's absence.
By Kurt Streeter
Times Staff Writer
February 13, 2004
Strong and sharp and bearing down on 100 years of living, Arthur Winston has drawn a bead on what it takes to age well.
Cut up the credit cards.
They don't do nothing more than bring about worry. Worry will kill you.
Get off the couch.
Stop in one place too long, you freeze up. Freeze up, you're done for.
Work as long and hard as you possibly can.
Folks retire, they end up on the front porch watching the street go by. Despair sets in, you're good as gone.
He is probably older than you. If not, he has probably worked longer. If not, he has probably seen and struggled through more of society's changes, most of them experienced from a single vantage point: a sprawling South Los Angeles bus yard.
Known as Deke to some and Mr. Winston to most, he is walking history and living parable. A 97-year-old black man who turned the sting of racism into something sweet. A man who plans on loving every bit of life until his very last breath. A witness to the ways a city has changed, for better and worse.
In 1924, at age 17, Mr. Winston started cleaning trolley cars for the Los Angeles Railway Co., which morphed and merged nearly half a dozen times and is now the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
He quit that job for a spell, then went back Jan. 24, 1934.
He has never left. For 70 years and counting, Mr. Winston has worked for the transit agency as a service attendant, applying spit, polish and love to vehicles ranging from the current fleet of buses to the trolley cars that once made the Los Angeles transit system a marvel.
For as long as he has endured, he has been astonishingly consistent.
In 70 years, according to the MTA, Mr. Winston has missed just a single day of work - the day his wife died in 1988. The records show that he has never been late, never left early. He has never been so sick that a gulp of milk of magnesia couldn't stave off illness and let him drive down Arlington Avenue in the predawn darkness for yet another shift.
The closest to him in seniority at the MTA has 25 fewer years on the job, and weeks of absences. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor says he's never heard of anyone like Mr. Winston. The American Public Transportation Assn. searched and could not find anybody like him in the transit industry.
"Mr. Winston," says Donna Aggazio, a spokeswoman for the association, "appears to be one of kind."
You'd spot him easily if you saw him at the bus yard. There he is, zigzagging in the oily air across acres of asphalt, through scores of buses and dozens of co-workers, most of them five and six decades younger.
His walk is slow, but he can easily speed to a jog if he sees a 15-ton bus coming his way. He is slight, 5 feet 7, with skin the color of a cigar leaf. He hears what he wants to, has a straight back, a firm grip and keen, almond-shaped eyes.
In South L.A., Mr. Winston is something of a celebrity - the result of being around so long that he seems to know just about everybody (or everybody's great-grandparents). People fuss over him. The barber refuses to take his money. Men in their 60s and 70s stop to tell Mr. Winston they have been emulating him since they were boys.
When he walks into soul food restaurants, where he feasts on oxtail, collard greens and gumbo, heads turn, forks drop and people whisper: "There's that man; they say he's worked 70 years."
At First African Methodist Episcopal Church - one of several churches he attends, depending on his mood - the congregation rises and claps when they spot him. From the pulpit: "We have a special guest, the oldest employee at the MTA, 97 and still going! Mr. Winston, raise your hands so everyone can see you!"
At work, it is much the same. "We wouldn't know what to do without him," says his boss, Alex DiNuzzo. "Once he arrives, we sort of know everything is going to be all right today."
Mr. Winston lives with his 26-year-old great-granddaughter and 2-year-old great-great-grandson in a small, well-kept home just south of the Santa Monica Freeway. He wakes at 4:30 each weekday morning, cooks up his Malt-O-Meal, takes time putting on his uniform, then drives his 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass to the yard.
He parks at a spot reserved for him. (Don't let anyone park in Mr. Winston's space, for that person will surely hear about it.) He clocks in. Then he sets about supervising a crew of nine men and women who do the heavy lifting - carrying tools up ladders, whooshing grime out of buses with powerful hoses, lugging carts of ammonia, soap and mops around the yard.
Sometimes Mr. Winston watches over the workers, just to keep them moving. Sometimes he helps check in buses. Sometimes he finds a dirty bus and starts working on it himself. Almost always, it seems, he is standing and walking.
"It ain't hard," says Mr. Winston, blowing into his hands to keep warm on a recent morning. "Just keep moving. Keep from freezing up."
Mr. Winston says he learned the value of work while growing up in a dusty Oklahoma farm town, before the boll weevil devoured the cotton crops in 1919 and the family took the train to Los Angeles.
It's good enough, his daddy taught him while they plowed the fields together, just to be "a working man."
Working men, Mr. Winston says, are simple and humble people. They use the money they earn wisely. They do not rush. They arrive 15 minutes before every shift. They keep their uniforms crisp. They see to it, even if the boss doesn't ask and the job doesn't call for it, that no bus leaves with grimy rims. And they absolutely do not fuss or mope or complain.
These values, he says, have allowed him to survive.
Though one of his credos is that one should not spend too much time dwelling on the past, Mr. Winston will tell you that, when he started working at the bus and trolley yard, the bosses would fire a black man in a flash. Whites and blacks didn't mix then.
There were separate bathrooms and separate lunch rooms. Mr. Winston started out earning 41 cents an hour and made that much for nearly his first 10 years. His white co-workers got 51 cents and regular raises.
"It was ugly," he says. "But there was nothing we could really do about it. Not a thing."
Mr. Winston wanted to be a driver. Blacks weren't allowed to drive. They weren't even allowed to be mechanics. They were allowed to clean the buses and trolley cars.
By the time opportunity opened up and he could have trained to be a driver, Mr. Winston was approaching middle age. His wife, Frances, ran a seamstress shop. They were settled. It was too late, he figured, to learn a new job.
So he stayed and he worked - day by day by day. He also watched things change.
By the mid-1950s the trolley cars were pretty much gone. The companies that owned the rail routes were swapping trains for buses, figuring they could make more money.
The way Mr. Winston sees it, the trolleys stopped running at just the wrong moment. Just when the civil rights movement was blossoming, with a new openness afoot, Los Angeles lost its trains and became a city of distant, disconnected neighborhoods.
South L.A., he says, has not been on sure ground since. The 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s were stormy, but he worked the whole time, taking advantage of the fact that service attendants didn't have a mandatory retirement age.
There were low points. Riots. Rising crime. The death of his wife and of his father, who lived 99 years until "sickness got him," says Mr. Winston. "Thirty-three days later, he was gone."
There were high points too. The Olympics, when the city, taking gridlock seriously for once, boosted its bus system and Mr. Winston worked double shifts. The rebirth of the commuter train in Los Angeles. (Mr. Winston is adamant that if he were running the MTA, he'd build monorail routes all over the city.)
The highest point of all came in 1997, when the MTA decided to name the bus yard after an elderly service attendant.
Today, the agency has 15 bus and rail yards, also known as "divisions." Most are identified by numbers - Division 1 downtown, Division 15 in the San Fernando Valley. Only one is named for a person: The Arthur Winston Bus Division, off 54th Street and Van Ness Avenue.
"I guess, if you take things day by day, you live long enough. And if you live long enough, you see things you never thought you'd see," says Mr. Winston, walking around the yard, looking for specks of dirt on windshields. "That's sort of how it is with them naming this place after me…. Of course, I'm not leaving just because it's got my name on it. If I did, you'd probably see me freeze up and get sick. If I got sick I'd probably die … in about 33 days."
Moments later he hops inside MTA bus No. 4717. Something's wrong. He can smell it. He eyes the floor. A passenger has vomited on an early morning run, forcing the bus back into the yard for a cleaning.
"Gotta get this thing better, so it can get back out on the road," he says, sloshing warm water and soap on the floor. He stoops. He scrubs. He mops and polishes the floor and vinyl seats. He gets down on his knees and uses a metal putty knife.
Finished, he steps off the bus, smiling.
"How many times have I cleaned up something like that?" he ponders. "Oh, thousands of times. Too many to count."
========
I had the honor and privilege in meeting and talking with Mr. Winston yesterday. Everything said about him in the Times Column One article is true. He is a quiet, humble and very likable person, a smile always seemed to be on his face. My understanding was that Kurt Streeter spent a whole day with Mr. Winston, not believing he puts in a complete shift. We were both standing during our conversation, I asked him if he wanted to sit down, and his answer was no. His mind is still very sharp, he moves around better than most people half his age, he credits not smoking or drinking, but eating anything he wants for his prolonged existence. Talking and looking at Arthur Winston, you would swear he is in his late 60's or early 70's.
Watching Mr. Winston talking to others at the South Bay Governance Council meeting yesterday, Friday the 13th, he continued to stand and walk around, he has a very firm handshake grip and gives a hug to all the girls. Always a smile on his face.
As a point of information, the "one-day off for the death of his wife" is misleading. He also took paid bereavement leave and other paid time as well when his wife died, not just one day off as the article implies.
I asked if he plans to retire, and the answer was no. As long as his health hold our, he will continue to work. Arthur will be 98 March 22, 2004.
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Robert
User ID: 2037954 Feb 19th 5:34 PM
I've put together some pictures of Arthur Winston; the file size is about 2M.
www.onstarld.com/bob/arthurwinston.htm
=====
From Metro website:
www.metro.net/press/2004/01_january/mta_012.htm
CONTACT:
Rick Jager/Marc Littman
MTA MEDIA RELATIONS
(213) 922-2707/922-2700
www.metro.net/press/pressroom
e-mail: mediarelations@metro.net
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PHOTO BY ROXANNE TAN
MTA's Most Senior Employee, 97-year-old Arthur Winston, Celebrates 70 Continuous Years of Employment in L.A. Public Transit
After working on the job for more than seven decades with only one absence, MTA's Arthur Winston will celebrate his 70th continuous years of employment with MTA and its predecessors on Friday, January 23, 2004.
97-year old Winston has actually worked for Los Angeles public transit agencies for a total of 74 years, having briefly left 1928, returning a few years later. He was honored for his longevity back in 1997 by the MTA Board of Directors, which named the agency's bus operating division in South Los Angeles after him.
"Arthur inspires us all, not only here in Metro South Bay, but throughout the agency," said MTA's Metro South Bay Service Sector General Manager Dana Coffey. "His dedication to work, loyalty to the MTA and his fellow team members, and his remarkable safety record make Arthur the legend, icon and model that he is."
At the Arthur Winston Division, he is a service attendant leader, directing a crew of 11 employees who clean, maintain and refuel Metro buses.
Arthur Winston was born in Oklahoma on March 22, 1906 before Oklahoma was officially recognized as a state. He came West and attended Jefferson High School here in the Southland, graduating in 1922.
Winston was first employed by the Pacific Electric Railway Company in December 1924 and worked until mid-1928. He resumed his employment with the agency on January 24, 1934. He has missed only one day of work since then which occurred when his wife died in 1988.
In 1996, Arthur Winston received a Congressional Citation from then President Clinton as "Employee of the Century". In his more than seven decades of service, he has received many honors for his work ethic and longevity on the job.
MTA-012
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User ID: 0317884 Feb 15th 12:37 AM
Los Angeles Times, Friday the 13th, 2004
COLUMN ONE
A Working Knowledge of Life
At 97, Arthur Winston has seen much change in L.A. But one constant has been his job: 70 years cleaning buses -- with just one day's absence.
By Kurt Streeter
Times Staff Writer
February 13, 2004
Strong and sharp and bearing down on 100 years of living, Arthur Winston has drawn a bead on what it takes to age well.
Cut up the credit cards.
They don't do nothing more than bring about worry. Worry will kill you.
Get off the couch.
Stop in one place too long, you freeze up. Freeze up, you're done for.
Work as long and hard as you possibly can.
Folks retire, they end up on the front porch watching the street go by. Despair sets in, you're good as gone.
He is probably older than you. If not, he has probably worked longer. If not, he has probably seen and struggled through more of society's changes, most of them experienced from a single vantage point: a sprawling South Los Angeles bus yard.
Known as Deke to some and Mr. Winston to most, he is walking history and living parable. A 97-year-old black man who turned the sting of racism into something sweet. A man who plans on loving every bit of life until his very last breath. A witness to the ways a city has changed, for better and worse.
In 1924, at age 17, Mr. Winston started cleaning trolley cars for the Los Angeles Railway Co., which morphed and merged nearly half a dozen times and is now the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
He quit that job for a spell, then went back Jan. 24, 1934.
He has never left. For 70 years and counting, Mr. Winston has worked for the transit agency as a service attendant, applying spit, polish and love to vehicles ranging from the current fleet of buses to the trolley cars that once made the Los Angeles transit system a marvel.
For as long as he has endured, he has been astonishingly consistent.
In 70 years, according to the MTA, Mr. Winston has missed just a single day of work - the day his wife died in 1988. The records show that he has never been late, never left early. He has never been so sick that a gulp of milk of magnesia couldn't stave off illness and let him drive down Arlington Avenue in the predawn darkness for yet another shift.
The closest to him in seniority at the MTA has 25 fewer years on the job, and weeks of absences. A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Labor says he's never heard of anyone like Mr. Winston. The American Public Transportation Assn. searched and could not find anybody like him in the transit industry.
"Mr. Winston," says Donna Aggazio, a spokeswoman for the association, "appears to be one of kind."
You'd spot him easily if you saw him at the bus yard. There he is, zigzagging in the oily air across acres of asphalt, through scores of buses and dozens of co-workers, most of them five and six decades younger.
His walk is slow, but he can easily speed to a jog if he sees a 15-ton bus coming his way. He is slight, 5 feet 7, with skin the color of a cigar leaf. He hears what he wants to, has a straight back, a firm grip and keen, almond-shaped eyes.
In South L.A., Mr. Winston is something of a celebrity - the result of being around so long that he seems to know just about everybody (or everybody's great-grandparents). People fuss over him. The barber refuses to take his money. Men in their 60s and 70s stop to tell Mr. Winston they have been emulating him since they were boys.
When he walks into soul food restaurants, where he feasts on oxtail, collard greens and gumbo, heads turn, forks drop and people whisper: "There's that man; they say he's worked 70 years."
At First African Methodist Episcopal Church - one of several churches he attends, depending on his mood - the congregation rises and claps when they spot him. From the pulpit: "We have a special guest, the oldest employee at the MTA, 97 and still going! Mr. Winston, raise your hands so everyone can see you!"
At work, it is much the same. "We wouldn't know what to do without him," says his boss, Alex DiNuzzo. "Once he arrives, we sort of know everything is going to be all right today."
Mr. Winston lives with his 26-year-old great-granddaughter and 2-year-old great-great-grandson in a small, well-kept home just south of the Santa Monica Freeway. He wakes at 4:30 each weekday morning, cooks up his Malt-O-Meal, takes time putting on his uniform, then drives his 1978 Oldsmobile Cutlass to the yard.
He parks at a spot reserved for him. (Don't let anyone park in Mr. Winston's space, for that person will surely hear about it.) He clocks in. Then he sets about supervising a crew of nine men and women who do the heavy lifting - carrying tools up ladders, whooshing grime out of buses with powerful hoses, lugging carts of ammonia, soap and mops around the yard.
Sometimes Mr. Winston watches over the workers, just to keep them moving. Sometimes he helps check in buses. Sometimes he finds a dirty bus and starts working on it himself. Almost always, it seems, he is standing and walking.
"It ain't hard," says Mr. Winston, blowing into his hands to keep warm on a recent morning. "Just keep moving. Keep from freezing up."
Mr. Winston says he learned the value of work while growing up in a dusty Oklahoma farm town, before the boll weevil devoured the cotton crops in 1919 and the family took the train to Los Angeles.
It's good enough, his daddy taught him while they plowed the fields together, just to be "a working man."
Working men, Mr. Winston says, are simple and humble people. They use the money they earn wisely. They do not rush. They arrive 15 minutes before every shift. They keep their uniforms crisp. They see to it, even if the boss doesn't ask and the job doesn't call for it, that no bus leaves with grimy rims. And they absolutely do not fuss or mope or complain.
These values, he says, have allowed him to survive.
Though one of his credos is that one should not spend too much time dwelling on the past, Mr. Winston will tell you that, when he started working at the bus and trolley yard, the bosses would fire a black man in a flash. Whites and blacks didn't mix then.
There were separate bathrooms and separate lunch rooms. Mr. Winston started out earning 41 cents an hour and made that much for nearly his first 10 years. His white co-workers got 51 cents and regular raises.
"It was ugly," he says. "But there was nothing we could really do about it. Not a thing."
Mr. Winston wanted to be a driver. Blacks weren't allowed to drive. They weren't even allowed to be mechanics. They were allowed to clean the buses and trolley cars.
By the time opportunity opened up and he could have trained to be a driver, Mr. Winston was approaching middle age. His wife, Frances, ran a seamstress shop. They were settled. It was too late, he figured, to learn a new job.
So he stayed and he worked - day by day by day. He also watched things change.
By the mid-1950s the trolley cars were pretty much gone. The companies that owned the rail routes were swapping trains for buses, figuring they could make more money.
The way Mr. Winston sees it, the trolleys stopped running at just the wrong moment. Just when the civil rights movement was blossoming, with a new openness afoot, Los Angeles lost its trains and became a city of distant, disconnected neighborhoods.
South L.A., he says, has not been on sure ground since. The 1960s, '70s, '80s and '90s were stormy, but he worked the whole time, taking advantage of the fact that service attendants didn't have a mandatory retirement age.
There were low points. Riots. Rising crime. The death of his wife and of his father, who lived 99 years until "sickness got him," says Mr. Winston. "Thirty-three days later, he was gone."
There were high points too. The Olympics, when the city, taking gridlock seriously for once, boosted its bus system and Mr. Winston worked double shifts. The rebirth of the commuter train in Los Angeles. (Mr. Winston is adamant that if he were running the MTA, he'd build monorail routes all over the city.)
The highest point of all came in 1997, when the MTA decided to name the bus yard after an elderly service attendant.
Today, the agency has 15 bus and rail yards, also known as "divisions." Most are identified by numbers - Division 1 downtown, Division 15 in the San Fernando Valley. Only one is named for a person: The Arthur Winston Bus Division, off 54th Street and Van Ness Avenue.
"I guess, if you take things day by day, you live long enough. And if you live long enough, you see things you never thought you'd see," says Mr. Winston, walking around the yard, looking for specks of dirt on windshields. "That's sort of how it is with them naming this place after me…. Of course, I'm not leaving just because it's got my name on it. If I did, you'd probably see me freeze up and get sick. If I got sick I'd probably die … in about 33 days."
Moments later he hops inside MTA bus No. 4717. Something's wrong. He can smell it. He eyes the floor. A passenger has vomited on an early morning run, forcing the bus back into the yard for a cleaning.
"Gotta get this thing better, so it can get back out on the road," he says, sloshing warm water and soap on the floor. He stoops. He scrubs. He mops and polishes the floor and vinyl seats. He gets down on his knees and uses a metal putty knife.
Finished, he steps off the bus, smiling.
"How many times have I cleaned up something like that?" he ponders. "Oh, thousands of times. Too many to count."
========
I had the honor and privilege in meeting and talking with Mr. Winston yesterday. Everything said about him in the Times Column One article is true. He is a quiet, humble and very likable person, a smile always seemed to be on his face. My understanding was that Kurt Streeter spent a whole day with Mr. Winston, not believing he puts in a complete shift. We were both standing during our conversation, I asked him if he wanted to sit down, and his answer was no. His mind is still very sharp, he moves around better than most people half his age, he credits not smoking or drinking, but eating anything he wants for his prolonged existence. Talking and looking at Arthur Winston, you would swear he is in his late 60's or early 70's.
Watching Mr. Winston talking to others at the South Bay Governance Council meeting yesterday, Friday the 13th, he continued to stand and walk around, he has a very firm handshake grip and gives a hug to all the girls. Always a smile on his face.
As a point of information, the "one-day off for the death of his wife" is misleading. He also took paid bereavement leave and other paid time as well when his wife died, not just one day off as the article implies.
I asked if he plans to retire, and the answer was no. As long as his health hold our, he will continue to work. Arthur will be 98 March 22, 2004.
-=‡÷«±»÷‡=-
-=‡÷ßÔß÷‡=-
-=‡÷«†»÷‡=-
Robert
User ID: 2037954 Feb 19th 5:34 PM
I've put together some pictures of Arthur Winston; the file size is about 2M.
www.onstarld.com/bob/arthurwinston.htm
=====
From Metro website:
www.metro.net/press/2004/01_january/mta_012.htm
CONTACT:
Rick Jager/Marc Littman
MTA MEDIA RELATIONS
(213) 922-2707/922-2700
www.metro.net/press/pressroom
e-mail: mediarelations@metro.net
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
PHOTO BY ROXANNE TAN
MTA's Most Senior Employee, 97-year-old Arthur Winston, Celebrates 70 Continuous Years of Employment in L.A. Public Transit
After working on the job for more than seven decades with only one absence, MTA's Arthur Winston will celebrate his 70th continuous years of employment with MTA and its predecessors on Friday, January 23, 2004.
97-year old Winston has actually worked for Los Angeles public transit agencies for a total of 74 years, having briefly left 1928, returning a few years later. He was honored for his longevity back in 1997 by the MTA Board of Directors, which named the agency's bus operating division in South Los Angeles after him.
"Arthur inspires us all, not only here in Metro South Bay, but throughout the agency," said MTA's Metro South Bay Service Sector General Manager Dana Coffey. "His dedication to work, loyalty to the MTA and his fellow team members, and his remarkable safety record make Arthur the legend, icon and model that he is."
At the Arthur Winston Division, he is a service attendant leader, directing a crew of 11 employees who clean, maintain and refuel Metro buses.
Arthur Winston was born in Oklahoma on March 22, 1906 before Oklahoma was officially recognized as a state. He came West and attended Jefferson High School here in the Southland, graduating in 1922.
Winston was first employed by the Pacific Electric Railway Company in December 1924 and worked until mid-1928. He resumed his employment with the agency on January 24, 1934. He has missed only one day of work since then which occurred when his wife died in 1988.
In 1996, Arthur Winston received a Congressional Citation from then President Clinton as "Employee of the Century". In his more than seven decades of service, he has received many honors for his work ethic and longevity on the job.
MTA-012
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