Graeme Milne, retd, still loves working with parking meters, 60 years after he first started. Photo / Warren Buckland
Graeme Milne, retd, still loves working with parking meters, 60 years after he first started. Photo / Warren Buckland
On his first day of work, aged 15, Graeme Milne's boss walked up to him and deposited a parking meter in front of him and told him to "make it work".
That was October 1958 and Milne was an apprentice watchmaker to WH Wilms, Hastings.
Now he is 76, andafter working as a parking meter maintenance man for 60 years for the Hastings District Council and 40 for the Napier City Council Milne's parking meter has finally expired (so to speak).
He's fully retired inHastings but, ever the worker, will still help out in Napier from time to time.
"In 1958-59 we worked out of a tin shed in Karamu Rd next to Ross Dysart & McLean, and backed onto the Albert Hotel," Milne said.
"The meter mechanisms at that time were 'clock'-based wind-up and we serviced them for John Hill who was dealing with them then, and fixing them was my first day of learning about clocks."
Hastings City back then had about 1300 parking meters from the Catholic Church to the-now Pak n' Save on Heretaunga St West.
From north to south they went from Lyndon Rd to St Aubyn St and all the streets in between.
It was one of the first cities in NZ to have parking meters.
"Not so long after starting my apprenticeship I was asked if I would be interested in winding up the Hastings City Council's work clocks, which involved six old 'Station' clocks and the mayor's grandfather clock," Milne said, "a job which I did every Monday in my lunch hour until the new building in Lyndon Rd was completed."
He recalls getting a call from the mayor at the time telling him the rugby clock at Nelson Park was broken, and asking if he could fix it.
The new parking meter, Hastings. Photo / Warren Buckland
"Upon looking at the job, the clock being many metres up in the air, I said my head for heights was not very good," Milne said.
"A couple of days later I got a call telling me to go to Nelson Park as they thought they had found a solution to my problem.
"Upon my arrival, sitting there with the ladder extended to its fullest was a fire engine," he laughed.
In 1959 he started maintaining Hastings' parking meters after work each night - on his bike - and in 1966 he started up his own business from home where he serviced watches and parking meters.
"In 1967 decimal conversion came about and all the parking meters had to be converted to take the new coinage.
"But because of the cam system used in Venner parking meter to gauge the size of coin value and the new 1 cent and 2 cent pieces were so close to the 1 shilling and sixpence, the public soon got used to the fact they could use 1 cent and 2 cent pieces to get maximum parking."
Three years later, in 1970, all the Venner parking meters were removed and replaced by the Duncan parking meter system, which overcame the coin value problem.
The amount of spaces were reduced from 1300 down to about 700 and in 1989 electronic parking meters arrived in many variations, going fully electronic in 1995, he said.
"After taking over the collection of monies from the parking meters, around the late 1970s, I was then approached by Napier City to take over their maintenance and collection of parking meters, and to improve and upgrade their system," Milne said.
"I was then able to run the two cities in tandem and save costs to Hastings and Napier councils. I loved it."
And what are his thoughts on the new paperless meters in Hastings, which replaced the lollipop meters?
It's an inevitable change, and one the council had to do, Milne reckons.
"It's new technology, you have to move with the times," he said.
