City’s cabdrivers hail busy New Year’s Eve

BANGOR – In more than 24 years of marriage, Mike Cooper has managed to spend the major holidays with his family, only missing one of his daughter’s birthdays when the tractor-trailer he was driving broke down.

This New Year’s Eve, the truck driver turned taxicab driver had to make some concessions. Shortly after midnight, knowing that nearby cab fares could be picked up by two other cabs he knew to be in the area, Cooper pulled into his driveway, jumped out of the taxi and ran inside his home, kissing his wife and wishing her a happy new year before heading out the door. It took about a minute and he was back on the road.

By midnight on the biggest night of the year for taxicab drivers, Cooper already had spent eight hours on the road, crisscrossing the city and reaching into the surrounding areas, picking up people.

Throughout the Bangor area, police departments and taxicab companies braced for extra activity and got it late Monday night and into the new year. Cooper estimated that as many as 50 cabs were on the roads Monday night, and Town Taxi had 13 of them, compared to the five it normally would have on a Monday.

Even all those cabs didn’t seem enough.

What started out with steady fares quickly became a backlog of calls as midnight came and went and people out celebrating the new year wanted rides home or to continue the festivities elsewhere.

At 12:30 a.m. 16 calls were waiting, and within an hour that backlog had increased to 27. As Cooper crossed the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge into Brewer and stopped at a red light, another cab pulled up beside him, a competitor, and offered Cooper a fare he couldn’t take, from Jimmy V’s in Bangor to Bradley. Cooper already was heading to Holden with passengers Adam Waite and his girlfriend, Rachel Sabbath.

Waite, 20, spent a quiet New Year’s Eve with friends, forgoing the hustle and bustle and crowds of New York City for a small gathering on Ruth Avenue in Hampden.

After the party, Waite squeezed into the back seat of a Town Taxi cab with Sabbath and two friends and talked about why he had no regrets for not making the trip to New York. Waite, a student at Bates College, acknowledged that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 and the possibility of more to come weighed heavily on him when thinking about the trip.

“I thought it was a large venue and if there was going to be an attack, this is where it was going to be,” Waite said. He made the decision not to go to New York the moment his girlfriend first mentioned it about a month ago, although he’s not discounting a future trip to Times Square.

Sabbath, 19, a Bates College student who hails from Macon, Ga., understood her boyfriend’s concerns, but couldn’t help being disappointed at missing out on all the activity.”I just wanted to do something big for New Year’s Eve, so I kind of wanted to be there,” she said, noting that her mother and brother were in New York celebrating the start of a new year.

For Jeff Ashey, owner of Jeff’s Catering in Brewer, the turnout of 200 people for the evening’s music, buffet and champagne toast paled in comparison to the 370 who celebrated at the millennium fete in 1999, although it was slightly up from the 180 people last year.

Ashey said that the average turnout had little to do with the terrorist attacks and more with New Year’s occurring early in the week, making it harder to motivate people to come out.

“I think that when you see it fall on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday you’ll see the big numbers,” Ashey said.

Across the Penobscot River at the Spectacular Events Center in Bangor, Jeannette Roberts, who handles bartending and other duties, said their offering of live comedians and music in three ballrooms drew more than 400 people. And although she said some people still may be feeling anxiety from the terrorist attacks, she doesn’t feel it affected the number of people who showed up to celebrate at the facility.

“The people who really wanted to celebrate New Year’s came out and really celebrated New Year’s,” she said.

Both facilities offered some kind of free ride service, stressing to customers that they should stay off the roads if they’d had too much to drink. Ashey said that 60 people took him up on courtesy rides home. Roberts said that judging by all the cars remaining out front Tuesday morning, many people had taken rides to the motels affiliated with the ride program, used other rides home or had taken cabs.

Extra police officers were on duty to handle the anticipated increased activity, with Bangor adding two officers to bring the total to 11 overnight, said Sgt. Jim Owens. Of the 30 incidents police were called to from midnight to 5:30 a.m., five involved arrests of drunken drivers. Among them was a Medway man who insisted on driving his pickup truck home, despite the efforts of several people who tried to stop him.

Bangor police were called to a residence on Bolling Drive about 5:15 a.m. for a report of loud noises and found several people trying to convince 22-year-old Brian Cassidy not to drive, reported Officer Erik Tall. The officer said he left after it appeared that Cassidy agreed to let someone drive him home with a second person driving his truck behind them.

A short time later, however, the police were called and told that Cassidy was driving away. Tall caught up with him on Union Street, north of Interstate 95, and reported that as he turned around to stop the vehicle, the pickup truck nearly struck a snowbank.

During field sobriety tests, Cassidy admitted, “I failed, just take me in.” He was arrested and charged with operating a motor vehicle while under the influence of intoxicants. An Intoxilyzer test registered his blood alcohol content at 0.13 percent, according to the police report.