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Doug Clark: Widow finds humor, comfort in DOT’s toll bill snafu
This was a curious development for a couple of reasons:
Jack’s wife, Terrie, says her husband wouldn’t be caught dead driving in the Seattle area.
Jack Roberts is, in fact, dead.
Though he quit smoking in 1990, lung cancer took the Spangle man on a September day eight years ago. He was 67.
“He was absolutely the best friend I ever had,” Terrie said of her late husband.
“Everyone liked him. He’d pull up a beer and a bar stool and could talk to anyone.”
Not only was Jack a pal to all, he was also blessed with a wicked sense of humor.
Terrie believes nobody would be laughing harder about this posthumous toll bill than ol’ Jack himself.
“He was probably the funniest person I’ve ever known,” she said.
“He had a joke for everyone. Sometimes he’d tell the most off-color ones until faces would turn red, and yet people were still laughing.”
The toll fee has amused the Roberts clan and many of their friends.
“Send them (the Department of Transportation) an empty envelope back and tell them it’s filled with ghost money,” wrote one friend on Terrie’s Facebook page.
Roberts is buried in the Spangle Cemetery, close to one of his best buddies. Terrie likes to think the two are gabbing about all this over the grave that separates them.
Jack sounds like one of those salt-of-the-earth good guys.
Terrie describes her man as a “tall, skinny guy with a tummy who was balding at age 40.” Roberts served in the U.S. Navy and drove a road grader for Spokane County.
But driving on the West Side?
No way, Terrie says.
“Whenever we’d go visit his brother in Issaquah he’d hand me the wheel the minute we got over the pass.”
According to the invoice from Washington’s “Good To Go” toll program, a vehicle with a license plate registered to Jack had been photographed Oct. 9 at 3:49 p.m. on the Interstate 405 express lanes.
“Pay your bill promptly to avoid penalties,” stated the document that arrived by mail to Jack’s former residence in Spangle.
That’s normally good advice. Penalties for unpaid toll fees can balloon up to $40 after 80 days.
Yet screw-ups can and do happen.
You might recall the columns I wrote earlier this year about Dennis and Shirley Wendlandt.
The DOT was going after the Spokane couple for $53.10 in unpaid fines and a toll fee that was connected to a cargo trailer that bore a license plate registered to Dennis.
Trouble was, the Wendlandts’ trailer hadn’t moved from their front yard for years.
It was a mistaken license plate identity as it turned out.
Thanks to help from Rep. Marcus Riccelli, D-Spokane, who had read my column, the case against the Wendlandts was dismissed.
This time, however, I believe we can hold off on the legislative intervention.
According to Terrie, her husband stopped owning cars two years prior to his death. He was simply too ill.
Rather than fill out the dispute form, she decided to call the DOT last Friday. Terrie said she was lucky enough to reach an understanding employee who took a look at the photograph that spawned the fee.
Well. Well.
A careful inspection showed that “it wasn’t a Washington plate,” Terrie said she was told. The woman “said she was sorry.”
The widow of Jack Roberts is convinced that this will be the end of it. I, however, would wait until the mail arrives next month.
With red tape and bureaucracy involved, life is rarely so easy.
But for the time being there is one actual benefit that has come out of this snafu. It has rekindled a lot of great memories of the man that Terrie met years ago at a square dance in Spangle.
“He was what I called the social butterfly of the family,” Terrie said. “Jack always knew the latest gossip, and we’d catch up during afternoon phone calls.”
Truth be told, Terrie said part of her loves the image of her late husband cruising around the state, racking up toll fees and maybe even causing a traffic jam or two.
“I kind of like the idea of him popping around,” she said. “Every now and then I have dreams that we’re sitting on the couch and we’re just catching up on things. I think these are little gifts from God.”
Doug Clark is a columnist for The Spokesman-Review. He can be reached at (509) 459-5432 or dougc@spokesman.com.