Back in the 1930s my father invented and named the Chicago boot, a device to prevent movement of an automobile if the adjacent parking meter had not been paid in full. That anyone in those troubled times would worry about people chiseling nickels out of the Chicago traffic administration seems, in retrospect, slightly balmy. Yet my dad was so fascinated with his idea that he announced he was going to patent it. That put a stop to a lot of family carping because, even in a middleclass household such as ours, everyone knew that if you got a patent on something, you were on your way to easy street.

What my father had in mind was a kind of steel-jawed trap set flush into the pavement at the curb. A car entering a parking space would trigger the jaws, which would then clamp to either side of the right-front tire with a loud thwonk. What didn’t seem to worry Dad was the danger to pedestrians who might accidentally step on the thing (he dismissed this with an airy “Well, if you weighed two tons, you might have a problem”) or the possibility of tire and rim damage if the trap was improperly rigged or the driver less than perfect in maneuvering the car.

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