Ohio Turnpike Toll Booth Article – Nov. 28, 1971

If you spend any time on the Ohio Turnpike, you’ve no doubt noticed that there are many unmanned toll booths when you exit the highway – such as the lonely one at Baumhart Road. It’s an annoying trend, in which people lose their jobs to machines, and the public loses the personal touch of human contact. (You can also lose money; once in the past year I dropped two or three dollars worth of coins in the bin to pay my toll; none of it registered.)

That human touch is important. I’m sure many people have gotten directions from a toll booth worker, or perhaps picked up a useful brochure or map.

I still chit-chat with toll booth workers quite often, and a few have mentioned that the eventual goal of the Ohio Turnpike Commission is to eliminate them entirely. I can’t find confirmation of this online, but I would tend to believe it.

Anyway, this is all a prelude to the great article below, which appeared in the Journal on November 28, 1971. It profiles two “lady toll collectors” on the Ohio Turnpike, and what may eventually be a vanishing bit of American life. It was written by Staff Writer Glenn Waggoner.

Incidentally, the photo caption of the woman toll booth collector is incorrect. Her name (which is correct in the article) is Cathy Hales. At the time of her passing, her obituary noted that she had worked for the Ohio Turnpike for 20 years before retiring in 1982.

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The Women Who Man the Collection Booth

The Busy Life of an Ohio Turnpike ‘Toll Cookie’

By GLENN WAGGONER, Staff Writer

TRAILER number 893B8, wherever you are, the license plate you lost is resting in a window at Ohio Turnpike Gate 8 in Elyria.

“Somebody lost it on the pike,” says toll collector Mrs. Cathy Hales. “We put it up there so if they see it, they can claim it.”

Mrs. Hales seems like a gray and green uniformed lady matador, without sword or cape.

Armed with a smile and 37 kinds of turnpike toll tickets, she sees that the hundreds of hard-charging vehicles get the right tickets or change while passing through one of the plaza’s four traffic lanes.

Her long, narrow toll collector’s booth is an island in a continuous two-way stream of cars, buses, trucks and motorcycles all intent on getting somewhere else and viewing the toll stop as an inevitable, though brief, nuisance.

“DO YOU KNOW what we’re called?” Mrs. Hales asked, drawing a blank look from the reporter.

“Toll cookies. That’s what a driver once told me.”

Mrs. Hales, who has been a toll cookie for three years, says in a good day she will take 900 vehicles off the pike, if she’s working in an exit lane, and put perhaps 1,300 on if working an entrance lane.

“We can put them on faster, because we just hand them a ticket. Making change takes a lot longer,” she said.

Mrs. Hales has been handed a $100 bill by a motorist getting off the pike.

“It just looked like a ten with another zero.”

Working an exit lane, she may handle $600 or $700 in an eight-hour shift – and that’s a lot considering it’s mostly nickels, dimes and small bills.

And getting 900 vehicles off the pike means at least 900 reaches out the booth window, not counting bends for MG Midget sports cars and stretches for Mack diesel trucks.

Mrs. Hales finds that as a toll collector, she’s expected by motorists to know how to get about anywhere from anywhere.

“I ALWAYS GET Mansfield and Massillon mixed up,” she noted. “The other day I sent a lady east who should have been going west.”

Her lunch break over, Mrs. Hales left the roomy office area of the brick toll plaza building and resumed handing out tickets in the first entry lane.

Plaza supervisor Robert Cooper and his assistant, James Macartney, came in. Besides handling the paperwork and administrative tasks at Gate 8, both spell the toll collectors during breaks.

No “unauthorized personnel” are allowed in the toll booths during working hours, which are 24 hours  a day, year round.

Cooper pulled some figures from his files showing the exit ranked fourth of 17 Ohio Turnpike interchanges in amount of traffic handled in October – 260,956 vehicles got on or off.

To illustrate the increasing traffic, he said in October of 1958, 76,391 vehicles used Gate 8. Summer has been the high turnpike traffic season.

Cooper said 302,413 vehicles used the gate in August, considerably more than use the pike now.

Plaza 8 has 10 full-time collectors and five who work part-time. Each week the toll collectors change among three shifts, which are from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m.

And each day, the toll collectors rotate from one lane to another, never spending two consecutive days in the same booth.

OF THE FOUR LANES, two are usually entrance lanes and two are exits, unless heavy traffic calls for an extra exit, leaving only one lane for entrance.

Another of the three lady toll collectors, Mrs. Ella Madden, came in for her lunch break as Macartney manned her lane.

Mrs. Madden was hired in 1968, the first woman toll collector at Gate 8. She was quoted by The Journal then as finding her job both interesting and enjoyable.

“It has been interesting. I like it just as well now as then,” she said.

Mrs. Madden was at a loss to point out an experience on the job that might be called her most unusual or bizarre.

“People are funny, period,” remarked Cooper.

“They do some strange things when they get in a car,” added Mrs. Madden.

She recalled one motorist who got off wishing to know if Akron was east or west – refusing to believe he was not at the Akron exit.

“There’s a man from North Olmsted who commutes here on a motorcycle and has a TV dinner on the back of his seat every day,” she said.

THE VEHICLES are classified for toll according to weight, although if a scale breaks down classification by number of axles is used.

Stowing her lunch box and heading for the door, Mrs. Madden added, “I’ve never run into a vehicle I couldn’t classify, and I hope I never do.”

Both Cooper and his neighboring supervisor for Gate 7 at Milan, Claude Latham, agree that motorists view the toll collectors’ job as dull, but say they’ve found it anything but bland.

“There’s something crazy every day,” said Latham. He told of a traveling circus that took a roadside rest by a turnpike plaza several years ago. An elephant was taken for a short walk, and he promptly sat down on the hood of a Volkswagen.

“Imagine trying to explain that to your insurance adjuster,” Latham joked.

Entrance lanes for cars have ticket dispensing machines, and Latham related how a toll collector at another exit was refilling the machine when two women in a car approached.

“Too bad there’s nobody here,” remarked the driver as she reached for her ticket. “I wanted to ask which exit to take for Cedar Point.”

“Take exit 7,” said the toll collector, who was unseen to the motorists.

LATHAM SAID the driver, slightly aghast, looked at the machine and then turned to her companion and said, “Isn’t that amazing?”

When wintertime auto trouble strikes on the pike, Latham said he’s had 10 people sitting in the plaza office, “waiting their turn with the wrecker.”

“But I’ve been with the turnpike since it opened, and only once was it closed that I know of,” said Latham.

“That was during the July floods in 1969, and water 2 1/2 feet deep came over the roadway just east of here. It washed a Greyhound bus off the road, so they closed it down,” he said.

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Here are a few vintage Ohio Turnpike postcards, courtesy of eBay.