WHERE IT ALL STARTED

 In 1963 six native-New Mexican brothers founded Parking Company of America. The Chaves brothers were apple farmers from Pajarito, New Mexico, a small river community on the banks of the Rio Grande south of Albuquerque. Their father became determined that his sons should go into a more reliable and lucrative business than farming, for all it took was a single bad year or a single hailstorm to destroy an entire year's work.

One day the elder Chaves noticed a classified ad in the Albuquerque Journal for a downtown parking lot that the city was looking to rent out. The lot occupied the current site of the Albuquerque Public Library on Copper between 5th and 6th Streets. Mr. Chaves showed the ad to his two youngest sons Richard and Alex who quickly secured the lease, and within days he was in business parking cars. Soon after, the brothers got together and secured the lease to the second Albuquerque lot.

At that point they decided to enshrine their grand vision into the company's logo, bordering it with the outline of the United States and adorning it in patriotic red, white, and blue. With only two small lots in Albuquerque, they daringly named their fledgling business "Parking Company of America." Many members of the family attribute the company's phenomenal success to this aggressive and lofty vision. Logo and vision both endure to this day.

From the founding in 1963 to the early 1970s, Parking Company of America was the fastest growing parking company in the world. And by 1975 Parking Company of America had already begun to fulfill the vision of its founders. By then it had a substantial parking operation in twenty-five major cities. By the 1980s it had become - in its own right -the largest privately owned parking company in the world. Crucial to this growth was the decision by the brothers to fan out across the country and each to establish his own proprietorship in his own region. This became a permanent strategy which extended to the family's next generation and remains in effect to this day.

Business development in the early days focused on efficiency, and nothing brought more efficiency than the mechanical parking meter. The brothers invented it, and it became the standard of the industry. It was a flat, rectangular vault with numbered money slots on the front face, each of which corresponded to a numbered parking space. The rear of the meter could be opened by the attendant where payments could be viewed and confirmed at regular intervals throughout the day. The meter became a powerful asset, and after it was patented, it could easily be duplicated on any lot anywhere in the country. It was so effective in fact that it became the defining characteristic of the franchise system that the Chaves brothers later implemented.