Atlanta’s 150 shiny yellow Checker cabs efficiently carry thousands of people every day to jobs, appointments, and the airport, usually without incident. But when long-time drivers gather in the back lot of the Checker Cab Company on Trabert Street, they can tell some stories. Waymon Dabney is in his 30th year as a Checker driver. He talks about Mary, who would ride around for hours, chang­ing her mind every few miles about where she wanted to go. Fortunately, she had plenty of money. Then. there was the intoxicated fare who insisted he want­ed to go to Alabama. The driver put him in a cab, put the car up on a lift, and spun the wheels for a couple hours until the passenger sobered up. A few robbers have even called a Checker cab for a getaway car. When the unsuspecting driver sees four or five police cars in pursuit, he knows there’s trouble. At least once a dye bomb planted in a bag of stolen money went off in a Checker cab. R.F. Hewatt Sr., one of eight sons of a sharecropper, started the Checker Cab story over 50 years ago. R.F. came home from the war in 1947 and bought a 1941 Plymouth, his first cab. Soon after R.F. Hewatt Sr. got started, he took on a partner. Their telephone was connected directly to the telephone pole. When a customer placed a call for a cab, someone went out to the telephone pole and took the call. When they had 15 cars, R.F. wanted to put radios in the cars. His partner wasn’t ready for that, so they flipped a coin, and the winner bought out the loser. R.F. won. R.F. Sr. used to go to the Checker Cab fac­tory in Kalamazoo himself to buy its famous roomy cabs and drive them back to Atlanta. Soon they won the right to use the Checker name. R.F. Sr. had connections. A photo hanging on the office wall shows R.F. a National League umpire, calling Willie Mays safe on base. This side job led to providing cars to lots of baseball folks. It was a major milestone when the compa­ny became self-insured in 1967. Unfortunately, the week after this bold step, one of their driv­ers took his fare directly to Peachtree-DeKalb airport, so directly that he ran into the side of a small plane and broke its wing off. 

When the plane’s owner called, R.F. Sr. said, “Mister, you don’t know it, but you just went into the cab business.” The company survived that setback and the Hewatt's became good friends with the plane’s owner. In 1963 R.F. Jr. became the first of the Hewatt boys to work full time for the compa­ny. The company had about 40 cabs then, and really started to grow around 1970. R.F.’s sons, R.F. Jr. and Charles, grew the business to over 200 cars. Their sister, Joyce Hewatt Ledford, works in the office part time, and her husband Homer Ledford is shop fore­man.

Office Phone (404)351-8255 - web page ext. 115