HOLLYWOOD — For thirty-nine years, if you drove a cab out of a garage off Santa Monica Boulevard, the first voice you heard each shift and the last one before you clocked out belonged to Ruth Ann Kessler, and it came out of a two-way radio bolted to the dash.
Mrs. Kessler, who dispatched for a Hollywood taxi company from the 1970s until the trade collapsed under her, died May 20 at her home in East Hollywood. She was 84. Her son said the cause was congestive heart failure.
A dispatcher’s job, in the years before an app did it, was equal parts geography and crowd control. Kessler sat at a console with a microphone and a board of pinned index cards, holding the whole city in her head — which driver was near which fare, which streets were closed, which hotel doorman tipped the drivers who took his calls first. She matched cabs to callers by memory and instinct, faster than any grid could, and she kept forty drivers in line while she did it.
The drivers were, by most accounts, not easy men. Kessler ran them with a dry patience that brooked very little. “She’d send you across town and you’d complain, and she’d let you finish and then just say the address again,” said Emmanuel Boughton, who drove for the company for eighteen years. “You went. Everybody went. She was fair, she remembered who’d had a slow night, and God help you if you lied to her about where you were, because she always knew.”
Ruth Ann Kessler was born in Barstow in 1940 and came to Los Angeles as a young widow with a child to support, taking the dispatch job because it paid and kept her off her feet. She stayed because she was good at it. She worked nights for most of her career, the shift nobody wanted, and became the reason drivers came to request nights themselves.
The smartphone-hailing companies ended the business in the 2010s, and she watched the fleet shrink cab by cab until the garage closed. She was not sentimental about the machinery of it, her son said, but she missed the drivers, and a few of them still called her at home for years afterward, out of habit, just to hear her tell them where to go.
She is survived by her son, Gary Kessler, of Whittier; a daughter, Lynne Prado, of Portland; four grandchildren; and a great-grandson born this spring.
Her old microphone, retrieved from the garage before it was cleared, sits on a shelf in her son’s house. It was never connected to anything again. He kept it, he said, because for most of his childhood it was where his mother’s voice lived when she was at work, telling half of Hollywood, one car at a time, how to get home.