Fortunately, there was a newsagent already doing business, and as I approached the counter intent on buying a Herald - my regular newspaper in those days - my attention was drawn to the Sun.
MO SIGNS FOR GERS was the front page headline, and I simply couldn`t ignore it. I picked up the paper, read the story on the front page, had a look inside where there was even more about this revelation, and then checked the back pages which were also about Maurice Johnston signing for Rangers.
The Sun knew - it had to. It wasn`t going to make a fool of itself on this scale so I checked the other papers which were laid out in the shop and not one had the merest hint that the signing of the century was about to take place.
Back in the car, I read and re-read the news. Despite being a newspaper cynic, I found myself believing the Sun`s story and I put the radio on to see if Radio Clyde had picked up on what was about to happen.
The Clyde news programme was unaware of the Sun`s scoop and I decided to head for Glasgow, surely one of the first to know that this was going to be a historic day in Scottish football.
Eventually, the news was touched on in radio news programmes and I decided to treat myself to a day off - to head for Ibrox instead. I was amongst the first there, but as the hours passed, more Rangers supporters arrived and everyone wanted confirmation of the "rumour".
After a number of hours at Ibrox, and without seeing the man in question, it was finally confirmed that Mojo was a Rangers player - and would not be heading back to his boyhood heroes, Celtic.
Several journalists were leaving by the main door, and had press releases in their possession. I asked one chap if I could have one, and he kindly offered me one of several that he had in his hand.
I saw Chick Young loitering aimlessly, and I asked him outright, "Did you know about this"? He muttered something about how he`d heard something only in the last few days. I took this to be a no.
On the Radio Clyde lunchtime sportsdesk, I believe it was Paul Cooney who opened with talk of sensational news and went straight to a story involving Junior Football or something equally trivial. Everyone laughed.
It had happened then, Rangers had quite deliberately signed a high profile Roman Catholic, something that hadn`t previously occurred. The club had employed R.C. players before, even before Celtic`s formation, and at the time of the Johnston signing there was an R.C. player on the club`s books - John Spencer - but this was Rangers signalling the end of an unwritten and unofficial signing policy by acquiring a high profile Catholic footballer - and one that Celtic had publicly set their sights on.
There was anger around on the streets of the west of Scotland on this momentous day, but the revelation had still not sunk in. The anticipated anger wasn`t from the Rangers support, which had reacted quite maturely to the news. It was the Celtic support which was seething at witnessing one of their own joining Rangers.
Not every Rangers fan was gladdened by the news, but the support at Ibrox in the following season went up. The Celtic support, however, was in a rage which hasn`t abated, even to this day.
It had been thought by some seasoned commentators that the Rangers public would boycott the club if ever a Catholic joined them, but the move passed off relatively peacefully, and was seen as Rangers putting one over on their great rivals.
The real revelation was that the Celtic support couldn`t handle what had happened - a Catholic joining Rangers. After years of telling anyone who would listen that Rangers FC was the devil incarnate for not signing an R.C., they were enraged when it finally happened - and still are.
The sectarianism allegation which had been laid at Rangers` door for years by its enemies had been a smokescreen for a sectarianism which lay much closer to home. The Celtic support had lambasted Rangers for decades for not signing a Catholic, but had then been infuriated when Rangers finally did what they had been demanding of it.
The stench of hypocrisy has never lifted from those Celtic supporters who had pretended to be offended by sectarianism, but who actually used it as a stick to beat their great rivals while hoping that the day when an R.C. actually joined Rangers would never come.
I think those of us who lived through this revelation will remember where we were when we heard the news, and we`ll remember too how it was publicly discovered that a consistent denial of sectarianism from fans of Glasgow`s eastenders was finally outed as the oldest lie in town - and the biggest lie of Glasgow`s sporting and social century.
