Commuter Classic : Arthur Winston Is Still Going Strong After 62 Years With L.A. Transit Agencies

Arthur Winston seems to like his job. He’s been at it since the FDR administration.

Sixty-two years!

Winston, who turns 90 today, has worked for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and its predecessor agencies since trolley cars rumbled up and down the city streets.

He actually began working for the Los Angeles Railway Co. in 1924, when Calvin Coolidge was president, as a 41-cents-an hour janitor. “I worked about 17 years before I got 49 cents an hour,” he said.

He left in 1931 but returned in 1934 to the Los Angeles Transit Lines, and he has remained on the job, even as the transportation agencies have undergone mergers and name changes. He has worked for the old Metropolitan Transit Authority, which became the Southern California Rapid Transit District, which became the new MTA.

“You are as old as you think you are,” said the MTA’s oldest employee, who thinks and acts like he is a young worker eager to impress his bosses. He arrives for work at the South-Central Los Angeles bus yard at 6 a.m. sharp. In the last decade, he has called in sick one day--that’s right, one day.

Winston, who has become something of a legend at the MTA, earns $19.98 an hour supervising workers who clean and fuel the buses, sometimes scrubbing off the graffiti himself. The 147-pound Winston also often parks the 28,000-pound buses himself.

“Arthur will do anything you ask him to do,” said his boss, service operations manager Maceo Bethel. “And he will do a lot of things you don’t ask him to do.”

The spry nonagenarian says: “I haven’t been to a doctor in 50 years. If I went, he probably would find something wrong with me.”

His father lived 99 years. “I never saw him sick until the last 30 days,” Winston said. “I guess I’ll follow in his footsteps. If I do get sick, I’ll have 30 days.”

Steve Hearn III, a mechanic who is the second generation of his family to work with Winston, said he believes Winston continues working because he views his co-workers as family.

“He has something to look forward to. When he gets up in the morning, he goes to his second home,” Hearn said.

Winston, an Oklahoma native who put his two children through private school and loves to travel, said he also needs the money. “You can’t do a whole lot on a little pension nowadays,” he said.

In 1975, Winston worked so much overtime that he earned $29,764, making him RTD’s highest-paid union worker at the time.

Winston, whose wife of 65 years died in 1988, lives with his 19-year-old great-granddaughter Brandii Wright. She describes Winston as a man always on the go.

“He can’t just sit around the house,” she said. “He walks faster than I do sometimes. . . . If he didn’t have to go to work every morning, I don’t think he would know what to do with himself.”

“I’m afraid to sit down for any length of time,” Winston said in an interview a few years ago with MTA’s internal newspaper. “I’m afraid if I do, I’ll freeze.”

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Winston’s daughter, 65-year-old Norma Robinson, said, “I don’t know when he’s going to retire.”

The MTA has no mandatory retirement.

“It’s difficult for the younger people to keep up with him,” said his former boss, Rick Hittinger. “I recall one time when Arthur was a minute and a half late for work. He was upset. I said that the clock must be wrong.

Winston has ridden the new subway and likes it better than the old trolley cars.

“I like the subway better, oh yeah. We didn’t have but them hard seats in the street cars.” he said.

With no special plans to celebrate his 90th birthday, he’ll report to work as usual.