When I was a tadpole, the whole family went to National Airport at least once just to watch the planes take off. It was pretty exciting, with the gigantic windows and massive airplanes and gut-rumbling roar, and also we didn’t watch TV. We also stood and looked up from our back yard when the commercial planes lumbered over. It was nothing but prop-planes until I was at least six. Nobody could imagine what was keeping those things in the air. (The answer is the pilots are trained never to look down. If they looked down, that thing would go straight to the ground like a cartoon coyote off a cliff.)
This was all pretty exciting for my parents too. Mom remembered pilots barnstorming in their biplanes in North Dakota. Dad remembered playing mumblety-peg with the Wright brothers. His great-grandfather revolutionized the wheel by knocking off the corners but, true to family tradition, failed to secure the patent.
We old, is my point.
I remember the first few times I flew in a jet by myself as being a transcendent experience. You’d have to pack pillows around yourself to keep from rolling around in the seat; your seat-mates were too far away to converse with; even if you were not quite eighteen and sort of small, a nice lady in a pencil skirt and pillbox hat would hand you an entire complimentary bottle of Mateus wine to go with your steak and potatoes. The entire world rolled by out the window like your own bright future.
It was not a future in which I envisioned, in any way, being excited at the prospect of being able to keep my shoes on during TSA screening. And yet, according to my sister, who did just that on a flight the very next day after her 75th birthday, that’s one of the perks of turning 75 now.
It’s not that the TSA screeners care if the line moves along any faster. They don’t have a plane to catch. The Transportation Security Administration refers to this as “expedited screening through risk-based intelligence-driven security that allows TSA to better focus resources on passengers who more likely pose a risk.” In other words, grandma, you don’t look like you could bend over far enough to set off your shoe bomb. You’d let out a loose warning fart halfway down and even the worst of your cohort is more likely to go the poisoned-cookie route than anything flashier. The TSA crew is skeeved out by your black orthopedic shoes with your swollen ankles puddling over them and your nylons rolled all the way down, and the subject has already come up in union contract negotiations. It was an easy call.
More perks. If you alarm during security screening, you may be required to undergo a pat-down, but you can request to be seated during this portion of the screening, which eliminates the cavity search. It all adds up: there aren’t that many perks to turning 75. I Googled it. Number one on the list is “fewer garden-variety ailments.”
That means you’ve already had all the colds. Now you’re all lined up for the big-ticket ailments. You’re going down. At least TSA isn’t going down on you.
It’s not the world we imagined back in the fifties. The world has changed. We should have gotten the hint when the good old National Airport was renamed for the dude who broke the air traffic controller union. Irony is not dead, but our time’s coming.
Irony: the opposite of wrinkly.
I wanted to be an airline stewardess when I grew up (that right there is an indication of my age: “stewardess”) but I literally grew out of that idea. I’m too tall to stand up straight in most metal flying tubes now.
Not sure if this is irony or not, but the construction of the Orange County airport in SoCal was fought against by the very actor for which it was later named.
Also, was that darling photo taken in a traveling van? I have a baby picture much like it, and my mom told me a van would come to the neighborhood for picture taking, much like mobile groomers do nowadays.
That very actor sent us on a road to ruin! Weird to think how much worse it’s gotten. Weird to think he was smarter than 45, even in dementia. And no, I don’t think so–pretty sure my Dad took that picture and that’s our wallpaper.
Congratulations on turning 75! A friend of mine dropped dead year at 67 because he was a rich idiot who never went to the doctor or had regular screening procedures that sort out the kinds of things that killed him.
My dad was an aeronautical engineer who worked for the Navy. We got to watch fighter planes being catapulted from three hundred feet away. A jet with its afterburners going isn’t so much perceived as noisy as a palpable force you feel right to your core. I suspect that’s why my hearing sucks.
Thanks! I’m *merely* seventy. My sister is 75. I only correct the record so I get all the years that are coming to me.
Weird, why am I anonymous?
Hey! If you intimated that I was older than I am, you’d be anonymous, too!
It used to cost ten cents to get out on the ‘observation deck’ at Newark airport. It was the go to ‘cheap date’ in my teens. Once we wised up and drove just outside the chainlink at the end of the runway to watch, for free, they shut that whole ‘observation’ business down. We old.
Dave recalls just such a dead-end chainlink fence dealie at the end of the runway as a hot makeout spot. You know, B.M. (Before Murr).
We had ‘submarine races’ to watch, down by the ocean. Took me years to figure that one out 😉
My uncle invented the inflight service cart. (Don’t see those anymore.). And he introduced champaign flights to Mexico City (Western Airlines). Those were the days. I remember him telling us that with the new jets, you had to put your hand to the floor to feel any vibration. My parents dressed up to take a flight. And I could fly home from college on a half price student fare. We old now. 😆
It’s kind of remarkable how many things got invented and what wonders we have been introduced to and how we’re all living like kings and queens and nonbinary royalty probably, and yet things are worse than they were. We of our age really hit the damn lottery.
I too just reached the daunting age of 70. After 40 this is the one that got me the most. 40 meant I was supposed to be a “grownup” (still am not) and 70 means “old.” But if I’m not grownup, I can’t be old, right?
We lived in Penfield, NY when I was 9 and we also used to go watch the planes take off at Rochester Airport for entertainment. It’s amazing how easily we were entertained back then.
I’m 67, but I only felt “old” two years ago, when I had arthritis set in. Before then, I would go hiking — which I LOVED — but, sadly, no longer. I can’t do any REAL gardening, which I also loved. I’m slowing down more and more. Aging sucks. Paul says that it beats the alternative. I tell him…. yeah… I’m not sure about that. Fortunately, there is always alcohol!
As I watch Alzheimer’s steal every last memory of her life my mother ever had, I have to agree that the alternative isn’t necessarily something that needs to be beat. I think I’ll be looking for ways to embrace it in 15-20 years time. In the meantime, alcohol is certainly a nice way to cozy up to oblivion. Pardon me while I top up my wine glass….
BTW: 68
I got nothing. I’m extraordinarily lucky in that nothing really is wrong with me that wasn’t always wrong with me; I’m in no pain, and the little aging things are not big things. Still, it’s sobering (in one way) to realize you probably have 20 years left tops, and the last 20 FLEW by.
At the Portland airport, there are plane spotters (like train spotters) who go out and spend whole days with their binoculars and notebooks, recording the planes arriving and taking off. I went out there once when the biggest cargo plane in the world came through, carrying an entire cement factory bound for Siberia. There were food trucks and families with the barbecue grill set up and toys for the kiddies.It was a Big Deal!
You mean, now? There are plane spotters now? A cement factory? Whuh?
I remember the flights from PDX to Anchorage, in the early 70’s…in Sept there were a lot of hunters going up for moose/caribou season.
Guns, rifles were stored in overhead, in the 727’s, and during the 4 hour flight people would get them out, pass them around to admire and comment. I’m not making this up.
I also lived out on Oregon, around 65th and Glisan when the Burnside Bomber made it’s landing short of the airport. Alas, I think 10 people died in that one.
In the late 90’s to 2010 I flew a lot. I think the average was around 200K a year. I had ‘premier status’, lol, on most of the airlines. It got me some free drinks and occasional first class seats.
I don’t miss flying at all, the last time was 2017, and i doubt I’ll fly again, at least willingly.
Nice post, Murr.
Thanks. I remember that flight that crashed on Burnside. Trying to remember when, without looking it up–the eighties?
On your cue, I’m not looking it up either. Must have been either 77 0r 78? Moved to Anchorage in ’80.
So many memories and touchstones….thanks again!
Another fabulous piece of writing!! I refuse to call the DCA airport (in Arlington, VA…) anything other than ‘National’ and never the ‘R’ word.
It’s still National to me too, but that’s deliberate. The fact that I still sometimes call Portland’s Martin Luther King Blvd “Union Avenue” is pure boneheaded memory problem. Because it hasn’t been Union for forty years.
Anybody else remember flying “student standby”, as I did several times during college in the early ’70s? With student ID (and a modest fee, I think) you could get an airline card that entitled you to last-minute, cheap passage as long as a flight had a vacancy. I don’t remember what the per-flight charge was, if any, but it wasn’t much. Of course, you couldn’t reserve a spot in advance, but in order to gauge your chance of success you were encouraged to call the airline beforehand to see if they had seats free on the flight you wanted. Then you could just show up at the airport and go to the check-in desk. Of course, flights weren’t booked nearly as tightly (pun intended) in those days as they are today.
I remember! Things were way cooler then. In general. My goodness.
My fondest memory of airlines is that routes and fares used to be regulated!
Gotta say the cigarette situation on planes (and everywhere else) was not as good as it is today.
Dad used to take me out to the Flightline at TUL where he was Sr. Mechanic for AA, and got into a book and later a movie (Airport) because of his antics. He’s the one who rocked the plane out of the way so Dean Martin wouldn’t crash.
Now where was I? Oh yeah, he’d let me sit in the pilot’s seat.
Absolutely awesome.
Remember walking out onto the tarmac to climb the boarding stairs? And people dressed to the nines for traveling, complete with cigarettes and cigars? I’m almost 78, flew my first flight out of Eugene to Seattle. WE old.
I do remember. There are places you still do that, of course. But those accordion tunnels were quite the innovation.
Meals, beverages, blankets and inflight magazines!!! No people wearing pj’s,
I once brought a giant box of frozen salmon on board on a flight back from Alaska. It didn’t quite fit in the overhead bin so the stewardesses stashed it somewhere up front for meWhen I arrived in PDX it was missing (grrrrr). It was delivered- with fish still frozen solid- by the USPS 2 days later. Still a mystery—- where did the airline staff hide it when I handed it to them? Were they contemplating serving it to us (they did occasionally serve salmon),,,, Was the postman a relative of the stewardess?
A good story on airlines AND the post office. Perfecta.
I still watch planes going overhead and wonder where they are headed, it’s a novelty again after the covid shutdowns when a sighting was rare.
Years ago when my older son was 1-2 years old, he loved the F1-11 jets and could feel them coming before we could hear them. He’d climb down from his highchair and race out to the back porch and stare at the sky until they zoomed into view and then straight back out of view again with that ear-shattering roar/whine.
OMG! I hardly pay attention to planes passing overhead. But during the aftermath of 9/11, when air travel was shut down… the silence was fucking weird. We noticed it, and were freaked out by it.
I noticed and LOVED the lack of airplanes after 9/11 and lack of vehicular traffic after COVID. Here, we have fighter jets going all the time out of PDX. They’re over my house almost every day. I think THAT’s weird.
I was in Butte MT on that day, scheduled to fly out to SLC. Didn’t go, obviously. For the next couple days the skies over Butte were clear, and free of contrails. It was weird, Butte is on a route that most planes from either Seattle or Portland pass overhead going east. It was eerie.
A very long time ago, I went to the airport in Syracuse, NY, to fly to Memphis using student standby. As my father turned to go to the terminal, a busload of men in suits, so probably business men, pulled ahead of us. There was no room on the flight I had hoped for; the busload of men filled it. The plane crashed someplace in PA. I was young, so was not concerned for ME. Of course I wouldn’t have been on a plane that didn’t make it.
Whoa.
I used to go to the airport to watch planes all the time. Observation deck long ago and when that was gone, wandering the concourses for an advantageous window. Post 9/11 that is no more as well. Best memory is when a British Airways Concorde came to our city for a charter flight. I took the day off work and with a couple dozen other excited souls stood on the top parking deck to watch. The pilot treated us to a couple of low altitude flybys (you could read all the numbers on the plane). For all its faults that finally did it in, it was a beautiful thing to behold.
I’ve forgotten what did it in. Must’ve been something important, or more important than bollixing up pigeon migrations.
There was a road alongside LA International that was about 20 feet from where the plane touchdown. This wasn’t a family outing, but became a definite stoner outing: get loaded lie on the hood of your car and watch the planes skim over your head very close. Very noisy. Very cool. This has been immortalized in a number of teen movies.
I used to bicycle near the airport a lot and when those planes came down I ducked. And they were still probably a hundred feet up.
I remember going out to O’Hare airport to watch the first 747’s float in for a landing – just awesome. Flying on one of those planes when they first went into service was a 5 star experience.
Just so you know, I’m very old…
No! It was definitely a 5 star experience!