Checkernostalgia.

On the 12th of July 1982 the last taxi coming of the line in Kalamazoo drove straight to the Gilmore Classic Club Museum in Hickory Corners, Michigan. Stalled there is also a Checker model E from 1923 and a model Y from 1936. 225 employees lost there jobs that day. After 250.000 Checkers an age ended and started. First slowly but later with more enthusiasm (especially amongst them to young to have seen the real working Checker-cabs) the Checker nostalgia. Not that that was the intention of the Checker corporation: there were two clay models made two years earlier in the research and development dept. but the new checker never came further than that stadium. Checker wanted to use a lot of plastic, a general motors drive train and a new undependable rear suspension. They also planned, to have a payback of ten years on the new production line, to make the parts of the different models inter changeable.

A poor immigrant

June 18th of 1922 saw the start of the Checker myth. Morris Markin a poor immigrant from Russia who moved to the US in 1914 would set his mark on the future of the American taxi sector . After working as a Taylor for a year he bought a trouser factory. With the money he made he helped out a friend and bought a bodywork factory who produced taxi bodywork for a car factory in Commonwealth. That factory already delivered taxi's to the Checker Taxi Company in Chicago. Markin also worked himself into the Commonwealth plant and formed both small companies into the Checker Manufacturing Company. During the taxi wars of the twenty's (so they are not being held in Amsterdam only) he made his first model on a safe distance in Kalamazoo in 1922: model H2 with a Buda 4-cylinder engine. Soon after followed by model E(1923-24) F(1925) and K(1928). In that year Markin also bought the Checker Cab Sales Corporation in New York and within one year of the 21.000 taxi's in New York 8.000 were Checkers.