Answer Man: A Cab of a Different Color

I have lived my entire 57 years in the D.C. area and during all of that time our so-called "Yellow" Cabs have been painted orange and black, and not yellow. Can you explain why?

Bruce N. Shulman, Silver Spring

Trying to answer this question is like trying to get to the center of an onion. You peel and you peel and all you find is riddle wrapped in enigma. Plus, your eyes are watering.

Answer Man can only speculate on this age-old question, a question that Post columnist Bill Gold asked in 1969 and Bob Levey asked in 1982.

Neither answered it. No one connected with the company has any idea, either.

Not Vaughn Williams , who has owned D.C. Yellow Cab since 1995. Not Vaden Pitts , who owned it for 20 years before him. Not Ralph E. Ruth Jr. , who in a 1948 Yellow Cab pamphlet is celebrated as the company's youngest driver and who today lives in Arlington. As far as these gentlemen remember, Yellow Cabs have always had orange doors, trunks and hoods, with black roofs and fenders.

"That's the color scheme that they were assigned by the taxi commission many, many years ago," said Vaughn Williams.

Maybe so -- Answer Man couldn't confirm this -- but why ? There are yellow cabs in the District, even if they are not Yellow Cabs. Dial Cabs are bright yellow. Fairway Cabs are pale yellow.

Alexandria Yellow Cabs are, thankfully, yellow. But in the mid-1980s, the Arlington Yellow Cab company changed the color of its fleet from "a kind of bland yellow" to a "bold yellow," according to Charlie King , the company's president. What he calls bold yellow, someone else might call orange.

Before we get to why the District's Yellow Cabs aren't yellow, let's explain why nearly every American burg big enough for a stop sign has a Yellow Cab Co.