Joe Diamond, 99; helped create self-pay boxes for parking fees

Joe Diamond, 99, a Seattle parking lot magnate who helped devise a self-pay box for collecting parking fees that became standard around the country, died at his Seattle home March 3, three days shy of his 100th birthday.

Diamond Parking, which according to the Seattle Times obituary for Diamond now has 1,000 lots and garages in nine Western states, was started by Diamond’s older brother Louis in 1922.

Diamond and another brother, Leon, took over the company after World War II. Faced with a national labor shortage that made it difficult to recruit parking lot attendants, Diamond installed slotted coin boxes for unattended lots.

Diamond’s self-pay system had some problems, mainly with motorists who didn’t pay in advance, the Seattle newspaper reported. At one point, Diamond workers routinely chained 50-gallon drums to violating cars.

“That was kind of rough,” Diamond once told the Seattle Times. “Then I got to the point where I’d disconnect the battery so the car wouldn’t start. Then people would blame me for breaking their car’s mechanical system, so I quit that too.”

The son of a Russian tailor, Diamond was born in Los Angeles. His family moved to Seattle when he was a toddler. He graduated from the University of Washington and, later, the university’s law school.

In 1974, he won a reverse discrimination case before the U.S. Supreme Court, which challenged the University of Washington’s law school’s policy of accepting minority applicants over white applicants with superior grades.