When I was five or six—so this would be around 1954—we’d drive out to the airport on occasional weekend nights, for entertainment. It was cheap, that may have been its primary lure—my parents were ever-scrabbling lower-middle-class citizens; an entire evening of family fun for the price of airport parking couldn’t be naysaid. And it wasn’t, after all, any airport; no, this was O’Hare, the parvenu of airports, and the great gray slab that welcomed you as you came in off the expressway proclaimed its globally special status: “The World’s Busiest Airport.” Forked around my father’s neck, onto his shoulders, straining to see the far red winks of celestial tonnage.
But it wasn’t just their fearful monthly battle with expenses—my parents weren’t settling for second-best, in an effort to scrimp. The complicated pageantry of O’Hare was truly wondrous to them, and its foreign ports of call (Los Angeles, Pittsburgh . . .), truly exotic. There were men in immaculate uniforms, who knew the secrets by which these flying battleships touched down like window ledge pigeons. There were women out of the movies—high heels and troweled—-on eyelinered sidelong looks—whose lives were as large as flight plans. You could see a man in a turban! Mysterious lights blinked, people were paged from out of nowhere into private glamor or tragedy, and of course there were the planes themselves, humming on the runways with self-confidence and brio.
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