He’s The King Of Precision Parking
The Baryshnikov of parking attendants slides behind the wheel of a late-model Subaru.
“A little demonstration,” hollers Jimmy Novinsky, his voice bouncing off the thick concrete floor and walls.
Jimmy guns the engine and slips the transmission into reverse. With the grace and precision that comes only with many, many rehearsals, he zips the mauve sedan backward around a Jeep Wagoneer, three square pillars and into an impossibly narrow slot at the far end of the maze.
“I drive better backwards than most people drive forwards,” says Jimmy, a natural showman whose clipped accent is straight out of Brooklyn.
This is Jimmy’s world - a cramped catacomb beneath Spokane’s Paulsen Center, 421 W. Riverside, two stately buildings that predate the Great Depression.
Jimmy, too, is pre-Depression.
He is 76 years old, in fact, and about to celebrate his 46th year parking cars in this downtown labyrinth.
“I started work here May 1, 1950,” says Jimmy with pride. “Never had an accident down here. Oh, God, no. I’m better than that.”
If Jimmy were a boxer, his trim 5-foot-2, 115-pound frame would put him in the bantamweight division.
On a typical day, this pint-sized man jumps in and out of cars 80 to 100 times, jockeying each vehicle back and forth from positions that change with the demand of the moment.
“He runs like a 15-year-old,” marvels Paulsen Center owner Joe Dinnison. “He just goes and goes.”
Jimmy grins. “If there are other men my age parking cars,” he says, “I’d like to challenge them to a contest.”
Jimmy did some calculating a few years back and figured he’d parked a million cars. “That number’s gotta be a million and a half now,” he adds.
He’s given the gas to every automotive wonder from land yacht Packards to Japanese imports that would fit in a Packard’s trunk.
Whatever make or model, it’s always the same with Jimmy. No screeching tires. No wasted effort. Just continuous smooth motion.
You’d think a guy in this profession would have his pick of parking slots. Not Jimmy. He catches a bus each morning to get to work by 6:15 sharp.
Jimmy is a beloved character to the drivers who begin rolling in about 15 minutes later. He knows everybody’s name and greets each with warmth and concern.
Two attorneys, Bill Tombari and Joe Esposito, are huge Jimmy Novinsky fans. They once put off signing a new Paulsen Center office lease nine months to try to get additional vacation time for their friend.
Jimmy didn’t know a thing about it.
Although he is a familiar fixture, few Paulsen Center workers have heard about the pain he endured as a child.
Or that he drove a tank and lobbed artillery shells at the Nazis during World War II. Or that he married a concentration camp survivor.
He was born in Brooklyn on Dec. 2, 1919. Jimmy has vivid memories of suffering at the hands of an alcoholic stepfather.
“I hate to swear, but he was a bastard,” says Jimmy, pressing his lips in a tight line. “He beat me all the time. He beat my mother.”
The man, says Jimmy, would send him out at 3 a.m. to scrounge cigarette butts out of the street.
Jimmy took the abuse quietly, biding his time until he grew older and stronger. At about 16, he says he waited in his apartment one day for his stepdad to walk in.
When he did, Jimmy kicked the man. He didn’t stop kicking until his abuser was bloody and down. “I knew I had to run away,” Jimmy says. “I knew he would kill me or I would kill him and he wasn’t worth it.”
Jimmy hopped freight trains. He ended up in St. Maries, Idaho, where he says he signed on with the Civil Conservation Corps. “When you grow up in the concrete jungle you don’t know what it’s like to be in the outdoors. I worked in the woods and learned what an ax was.”
Like so many other young men of the time, Jimmy joined the Army the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. He served nine years, ending up a staff sergeant supervising some of the occupational forces in the Bavarian Mountains.
There he met and married Linda, the love of his life who had been imprisoned in a concentration camp.
Remembering the beauty of the Northwest, Jimmy brought his bride to Spokane where he landed his job parking cars. They were married 30 years. She helped her husband in the garage until her death in 1978.
Jimmy, who had lost his mother a week earlier, says those were the darkest days of his life. Only his job and deep faith in God kept him going.
Now at an age where most men have long retired, Jimmy has no plans to quit. He’s at peace here in the underground, parking cars with style and precision.
“I believe it’s the right thing to do,” says Jimmy Novinsky. “As long as I’m in good health, as long as I have a job to keep me occupied, what in the world more do I need.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo