These Boots Are Made
For Talking

The older I get, the more things seem to come and go in cycles.

About 15 or 20 years ago, there was a rather large woman who hired herself out to various business owners in Boone to protect their parking lots. If you mistakenly parked in one of the lots she monitored, this particular woman would arrive on the scene, strap on some baseball catcher’s kneepads, and go to work. Her occupation involved putting a large steel wheel lock, or boot, on cars that weren’t supposed to be there.

Quaint it ain’t. Downtown Boone is getting to be known as much for wheel locks as it is for its fine shopping and dining establishments. Photo by Jeff Eason

I know this because it happened to me. I had a friend who had been renting an apartment upstairs in the building where the Boone Saloon is today. After spending the afternoon helping her pack her belongings into a U-Haul for her move to Asheville, I returned to the parking lot behind the building to find a note on my driver’s side window and a big yellow metal thing on my left front tire.

The note informed me that I shouldn’t be parking in that private lot. It apparently didn’t matter that I was there visiting and helping a legitimate tenant of the building. And it also didn’t matter that it was during the weekend and the lot was more than half empty.

At the bottom of the notice was a number to call to get the boot off my car. And there, in parentheses, at the bottom of the note, was the message: “It costs $25 to get the boot removed. $50 if you cuss me.”

I paid the $25 and resisted the urge to spend another $25 by going into a long expletive-laced tirade while the Wheel Boot Woman was removing the lock off of my car.

Obviously, this line of work did not make the Wheel Boot Woman too popular around Boone. In fact, she became something of a celebrity (in a notorious sort of way) among the students at Appalachian State. There were T-shirts printed on campus with crazy cartoon likenesses of the Wheel Boot Woman along with sayings such as “Top Ten Reasons Why The Wheel Boot Woman Should Leave Boone.” And believe me, those T-Shirts did not use the word “Woman.”

Eventually, the Wheel Boot Woman did leave Boone. I believe what happened is that the people who hired her came to the realization that the public relations disaster involved with wheel booting outweighed any advantage of having a full-time monopoly on all their parking spaces. I really don’t know what happened to the Wheel Boot Woman after that. I like to think that she moved on to another career that took full advantage of her charisma and physical presence. A job with the roller derby or prison system comes to mind…

Fast forward two decades and wheel locks are once again in the news here in Boone. We here at The Mountain Times receive at least one or two letters to the editor on the subject each week. I can tell you that many of them have not been printed in the pages of this newspaper due to their inflammatory tone toward the Town of Boone and the businesses that are now hiring wheel lock security services.

Quite frankly, it has become a public relations nightmare for Downtown Boone. Everyone understands that parking is at a premium, but many of the letters that we have received have been from visitors to the town who were planning on shopping at numerous businesses from a single parking space and were booted because of where they went first.

One wonders why Boone has this problem while Banner Elk and Blowing Rock do not. Do those towns and their businesses cooperate better when it comes to managing parking spaces? Do those towns value their visitors more than Boone does? Do they better understand the probability of a happy tourist returning than one who has just shelled out $60 to have a boot taken off their car?

I understand the desire for business owners to protect their private parking spaces. I also respect the wheel lock companies’ right to make a living to protect these business owners. But the Town of Boone is quickly getting the reputation as a place where predatory wheel booting practices take place more for profit than for the principle involved.

It is a practical issue, but is also an emotional issue. As John Travolta’s character Vince Vega says in the movie Pulp Fiction, “You just don’t mess with a man’s vehicle.”

Here’s hoping the Town of Boone and its business owners can resolve the issue to everyone’s satisfaction before visitors begin boycotting the downtown area.