Yellow Cab

Soul food aficionados walked up to the restaurant, with its lemon-yellow front destroyed by fire and soot blackening its signs offering chopped cheese steak subs and chicken wings, and cried as if they'd seen their childhood home in ashes. The Yellow Bowl in the 1200 block of Greenmount Ave., one of Baltimore's oldest black-owned restaurants, was destroyed yesterday by a grill fire that erupted at 5:21 a.m. as a cook served early-morning customers."Oh my Lord, oh my Lord! There goes the best place in the whole city," mourned Charlene Jamison, a 40-year-old secretary and lifelong customer, as she looked through the shattered window at the charred counters.

Thirty-three Baltimore taxicab permits were auctioned off yesterday after the companies that held them defaulted on loan payments. Nine cab companies, all members of the Royal Taxicab Association Inc., had put up their combined 90 permits as collateral for a financing agreement. When they didn't make payments on time, the financier, Medallion Funding Corp. in New York, repossessed the permits. In an auction on Jan. 13, 45 permits were sold. Forty-five more were available yesterday, but 12 were not purchased and will be offered again Feb. 2. Just as the bidding began yesterday at Alex Cooper Auctioneers Inc. in Towson, a lawyer who represented the nine companies stood to protest the proceedings.

Maybe this kind of luck happens every Opening Day. Probably does. Just have to be there, at the game, near the game or just listening to the game, maybe, for it to happen.Of course, everybody was already a little luckier this year before the first ball was even pitched at Oriole Park yesterday. The sun was warm, the breeze was just enough. There would be no postponement of this Opening Day, as there had been each of the past two years.It only got better as the day went on.2: 03 p.m.: When they spot each other across the crowded BWI Airport terminal, each knows he has found a soul mate.

Chappie Manning does the math on 47 years of working as a Baltimore cabbie and comes up with nearly 3 million miles, more than 100,000 gallons of gas and countless cabs.Not to mention the naked passenger who wanted to go to York Road (but got there only after putting his pants on), a smash-up with a drunken driver and the two armed men who carjacked the 79-year-old Golden Gloves middleweight boxer.His bosses at Yellow Transportation Inc. -- astonished to discover that Manning had been driving for them nearly a half-century -- insisted on throwing a surprise thank you party yesterday to honor his dependability and character over such a long fare.

They know fatal shootings can happen in their line of work, but the third time in a month was more than some hardened city taxicab drivers could take."

A 70-year-old cab driver remained in critical condition yesterday at Maryland Shock Trauma Center after being shot in the head during an apparent robbery in Southwest Baltimore on Friday.The Yellow Cab driver was identified yesterday as Gorman S. Johnson Sr. of Hanover, in Anne Arundel County.Johnson was shot inside his cab at Leeds Street and Palormo Avenue about 8: 15 a.m Friday. Police said the driver did not notify his dispatcher that he had picked up a passenger.Police were looking for a man wearing a dark baseball cap and blue jeans who was seen running north on Palormo carrying a duffel bag.Johnson was the third taxi driver shot in Baltimore in the past four weeks.

At high noon yesterday, in the middle of downtown traffic, more than 35 Baltimore City taxi drivers conducted a unique horn symphony -- using their cabs for instruments.In a 30-minute "Hail to the Taxis" motorcade that began at Camden Yards and circled around to Harborplace, the taxi drivers blasted in unison the horns of their ticker tape-decorated cabs.Drivers from city cab companies -- including ABC, Arrow, Diamond, Independent, Royal and Yellow -- took part in the first-ever Baltimore City Taxi Appreciation Day declared by Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke.

Labor unions representing police, blue collar and clerical workers in the city have ratified three-year pacts, Annapolis Mayor Alfred A. Hopkins announced yesterday.The length of the contracts for the three unions is a departure from the traditional one-year agreements and should result in reduced legal costs for the city, Mr. Hopkins said."We feel these agreements represent a new step forward in labor stability on behalf of our true employers, the citizens and taxpayers of the City of Annapolis," the mayor said in a written statement.

Elizabeth Buie once drove a yellow cab but now it's painted black and it seldom leaves from the front of her home. After 37 years of hunting fares, the East Baltimore great-grandmother has called it quits.For Ms. Buie, there are no more six-day work-weeks cruising the streets, no more early mornings sitting in a cold car and no more haunting stares from odd passengers."I'm just going to do what I want to do from now on," said the 76-year-old Baltimore native who began driving a city cab in 1956 as a way to help her family financially and just never decided to stop.

The country was slipping into the Depression in April 1930, the same month a young graduate of Western High School answered a help-wanted ad."Jobs were hard to come by in 1930," says Frieda Greiver, 84, who spent 44 years as bookkeeper at the Sun Cab Co., a Baltimore institution that is to be taken over by its longtime rival, Yellow Cab ."I went for the job and found there was a room full of women waiting to be interviewed. I walked into an office ahead of all the others and I walked out with the job, at $17.50 a week, a lot of money for a girl who had very little work experience," says Greiver, who possesses total recall of her career in Sun Cab's front office.