Ride of your life

After, well, who knows, 30, maybe 40 different jobs since he left home at age 16, Mark Armstrong was ready to try something different.

So, at age 60 with no experience, he chose taxi driving. Little did he imagine one day people would call him a Baton Rouge icon and “one in a million.”

After all, how many men do you know who have given tours of Baton Rouge and the surrounding areas to Bob Hope and George Clooney and countless big-timers in between? Who take ordinary tourists around town and leave them so enthralled they call or write thank-you notes to the Baton Rouge Area Convention and Visitors Bureau for recommending Armstrong as their driver?

You might live here and have had Armstrong as your driver, perhaps to the airport. You never forgot that ride and the stories that entertained you. But more likely, you’ve never heard of the 75-year-old man who might be our city’s greatest ambassador to visitors.

“He is the kindest, best around there is. There’s nobody like him,” says Carla Bergeron, a 17-year travel counselor for the BRACVB who has been giving out Armstrong’s name and number almost the entire time.

“He’ll call us numerous times during the year just to say thank you for us giving his name out. People will call us and just go on and on to tell us how great he was and he made their tour so enjoyable. He’s just one in a million.”

One day in 1990, Armstrong called Bennett Mackie, whose Mackie’s Airport Cab Service was the biggest in town, to talk about the business.

“He said I would do real good with my outgoing personality,” says the 5-foot-8-inch Armstrong, who flashes a great smile despite missing quite a few of his front teeth.

“He liked to talk to people, and people liked the way he talked,” Mackie says. “I knew he would be a success.”

At the time, Armstrong was the bell captain at the old Bellemont Hotel that in its day was a Baton Rouge icon itself. But the work was hard, and there was something about the taxi business that intrigued him.

“He thought he might want to drive for me, but I couldn’t give him a cab, so he got his own car,” Mackie says.

Armstrong bought himself a Ford station wagon and went to work, mostly at the airport. But that didn’t sit well with the other cabbies. Armstrong—“I was the only white dude out there”—said he sometimes came back to a taxi with scratches on it or even flattened tires.

“He got a lot of discouragement from other cab drivers,” Mackie recalls. “I told him to just hang in there and come on to the airport and do his business and don’t worry about what they do.”

Armstrong didn’t stick around. Instead of waiting for fares at the airport, he cultivated business with the hotels.

“I told them to call me. I don’t care where I am, I’ll come get ’em.”

Which is why service-industry folks such as Rick Farrell of the Baton Rouge Marriott say, “He’s an icon.”

Not at first, however. Armstrong admits he really didn’t know Baton Rouge like the back of his hand. Nor its trivia. People, he recalled, asked questions like how deep is the Mississippi River where the ships dock, or how much rainfall does Baton Rouge get.

“And about Huey Long. I didn’t know. I was trying to be a tour guide. So I called the mayor’s office. And I got some books, and I started reading up on it. The channel in the river is about 45 feet deep, by the way, and those freighters are about 1,100 feet long.”

“I learned everything, and then I started getting compliments.”

It took a long time to find his niche.

Armstrong was born on June 11, 1933, “before the Pyramids,” he cracks. He was born in a charity hospital to a mother ready to give him up for adoption. But at the last minute, he says, she dropped the pen on the legal papers, and “she put me in a basket and hitchhiked from Houston, Texas, to Palatka, Fla., near St. Augustine.”

Armstrong stayed with his mother until he was 16, but then his wanderlust kicked in.

“I’ve always been a maverick,” he says. He didn’t, as he said everyone else did, want to marry his high school sweetheart and work in the mill. “There wasn’t anything there for me, so I hitchhiked my way to Atlanta, Ga.”

He stayed in Georgia for more than 32 years, first living in Athens for a year before ending up in Atlanta. During that time he served in the U.S. Army, stationed in Killeen, Texas, got married and divorced twice, had a daughter, and did such things as work in an Italian restaurant, sell cars, work in a mail room, run a coffee service and “I was the youngest dance instructor, at age 17, for Fred Astaire studios. I was real good.

Wanna go for a ride in Mark Armstrong’s Tiger Taxi? Contact him at 921-9199. He charges about $22 from the Marriott to the Baton Rouge Airport; $125 to the New Orleans airport for one to four people. A Baton Rouge area tour is $35 per hour; Armstrong charges $200 for an all-day tour of New Orleans. He also specializes in tours that include River Road plantations.

“I used to stutter and was very insecure, and through my dancing became real good. It gave me a lot of self-confidence,” he says.

But in the early 1980s, with his mother’s health failing, Armstrong went back to Florida and held jobs in Fort Lauderdale and then St. Petersburg, where he worked at a retirement hotel.

That job changed his life.

“There was a lady who was going through a divorce who came down to see her daddy,” Armstrong recalls with a smile. She lived in Montgomery, Ala., and her name was Joyce. They started dating, which they continued after Armstrong moved to Baton Rouge.

Which is a story in itself.

Armstrong was working for the La Quinta hotel chain and was asked if he was interested in moving to Baton Rouge to help launch the property on Acadian Thruway. “I didn’t even have a car, so Joyce drove me here. I stayed in that Red Roof Inn right next door for about six months.”

That led to him becoming bell captain at the Bellemont and the Great Hall, and that was where Armstrong capitalized on his gift of gab and outgoing personality. One customer with whom he bonded was the late A.C. Lewis. “A.C. Lewis, he was something else. He took a liking to me and so did his sheep dog, because I loved animals, and he could tell. So I got to chauffeur him around.”

When another job offer came about, Armstrong says Lewis convinced him to stay by getting him not only a raise but also a room in which to live at the Bellemont.

He lived there five years. “I took Bob Hope around, I drove George Burns, and Andy Williams and the comedian guy, what’s his name? Rich Little. Anybody like that because I chauffeured them wherever they had to go.”

In the meantime, he and Joyce would meet up in Mobile for long weekends. One day, however, she told him she was planning on marrying someone else. Luckily, she changed her mind, called Armstrong to tell him so, and they’ve been together ever since. They married in 1990, first living in a mobile home in Denham Springs before moving to St. Francisville. Armstrong still drives to Baton Rouge on a moment’s notice if one of the hotels needs him. It was from giving tours and driving to St. Francisville’s Myrtles that he found his home. He says 15 deer hang out near his house, and he boasts that his yard sometimes looks like Wild Kingdom.

“I love animals. I feed everything there is,” he says.

He doesn’t feed the fares, but he knows which restaurants to take them to. That’s why some major corporations hire him as a driver for visiting execs.

“Sometimes I hear about deals two months before they make it to TV,” Armstrong says matter-of-factly.

And it’s why a couple of tour guides, including Lonely Planet, recommend him and his Lincoln Town Car.

“He’s dependable,” says the Marriott’s Farrell. “When we call him, he’s here. That’s a long drive from St. Francisville, especially early in the morning, but I’d rather use him than anybody we’ve got.”

Armstrong estimates about 30% of his work is as a tour guide.

“He’s pretty much the only one we have who does what he does,” says BRACVB’s Bergeron. “He caters to small groups, like one to seven people, and is so good at it.”

His fares have included ESPN crews, countless politicians, NBC’s Soledad O’Brien, ABC’s Cynthia McFadden, Dick Vitale, Jean-Claude Van Damme, “a bunch of Olympic gold-medalist ice skaters,” Crosby, Stills and Nash, Hootie and the Blowfish, Billy Bob Thornton, P Diddy and Halle Berry, and, of course, Clooney.

“George Clooney mentioned me on David Letterman,” Armstrong says, beaming. “I had him laughing. He was here with Jennifer Lopez; they shot a movie. He could walk on water; he was genuinely nice.”

Oddly, Armstrong has no pictures of himself with the famous fares. All he cares about is if they have a good ride.

“You meet him one time,” Mackie says with a laugh, “and you never forget it.”