Word: tolls
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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From his 3-ft. by 6-ft., glass-walled, air-conditioned booth on the Washington-New York highway, Toll Collector William Piergalline has a smashing view of the Delaware Memorial Bridge, whose twin, gray-green spans arc gracefully over the Delaware River. But Piergalline, 54, a squat, salty, seven-year veteran of the Delaware River and Bay Authority, rarely notices his surroundings. Like the other toll collectors who, along with six automatic coin receptacles, handle the 16 lanes of the bridge's two Delaware-side toll plazas, he is much too busy raking in the cash. Sixty cents...
Piergalline belongs to a large fraternity. The U.S. has 152 such toll bridges, tunnels or highways. They account for nearly 2.2 billion transactions a year. Particularly in Eastern states, motorists have grown accustomed to, if not content with, toll collectors. It is natural to assume that tolltakers are bored by what has to be the world's most monotonous job. Not so. Not on the Delaware Bridge anyway, if the long waiting list for jobs is any barometer. Shifts are regular: the same eight hours daily with two 15-minute beaks and a half-hour lunch five days...
...both sides of the river. Some are Jersey shoppers bound for Delaware, where these is no sales tax. Some faces, like those of the truckers who regularly haul furniture up the coast from the Carolinas or run Eastern Shore chickens to New York, tend to become familiar to the toll collectors. Supervisor Ronald Cantino, 34, kept seeing a Jersey girl who commuted to school near Wilmington. First he asked for her phone number, then for a date. Finally he married her. Now they have children...
...malicious" letter to his son, which contained a great deal of information about the Cox family--too much, in fact. Though Cox says he himself has grown accustomed to the threats, in this case the terrorists (probably from within the government's security forces') took too large an emotional toll on his son for the family to stay in Argentina...
...strain of this double life takes its emotional toll. One does not see many smiling, relaxed people in the streets of Buenos Aires, and according to one psychiatrist, since 1976 cases of "psychosis" have escalated three-fold. "The tension of 'when will they come for me"?, the anxiety of not being able to trust people, the pain of losing loved ones and not being able to do anything about it is too much. It's like being in a war zone 24 hours...