Boston: My Favorite American City

As a child I was obsessed with the historical period of the Revolutionary War, I was particularly fond of fictional books set during the Revolutionary War. At the age of about 8 or 9 I began reading a series of books the "Little Maid" series, published between about 1910 and 1940 by a writer named Alice Turner Curtis. These books all had a little girl between 8 and 12 as the central figure, a little girl who in some small way was able to assist the cause of American freedom. Each book focused on a community that saw some  significant action in the Revolution, and they had titles like: A Little Maid of Massachusetts Colony, A Little Maid of Lexington, A Little Maid of Boston, A Little Maid of Bunker Hill. Not all the books were set in Massachusetts, there were several in other New England colonies and towns like New Hampshire, Philadelphia, Narragansett Bay and Providence and one or two set in southern colonies. But the ones I love the best (and often re-read) were set in Massachusetts in or around Boston. As I got older I exchanged the fictional children's books for serious revolutionary history, and my interest still was mostly focused on the people and events from Massachusetts. 

In college I had a half dozen friends who all hailed from eastern Massachusetts, either from one of Boston's suburbs or Boston itself. One friend in particular, Charlie was full of wonderful stories about growing up in and around Boston. He talked about the city, the history, the architecture, but a lot of his stories dealt with the Red Sox and Fenway Park.  Perhaps some of you remember the movie Fever Pitch (Drew Barrymore and Jimmy Fallon, 2005)? Charlie wasn't quite as obsessed as the character of Ben in that movie, but he was definitely a Red Sox fan. Between my life long interest in Revolutionary history and especially the events in western Massachusetts, as well as all of Charlie's stories, Boston had become something of a mythical place that I really wanted to visit. 

It was May of 1975. My first semester as a graduate student in the Department of Higher Education at the University of Kentucky had been interesting, even pleasurable, and had come to an end. There were at least two weeks until the summer session was to start, so there was time for some vacation. Several very close friends from college were in Boston, or very close to Boston so I would have places to stay for free, and hosts to show me around. I did not yet have a car, but I could still get very cheap (not free like when I lived at home) stand-by tickets on United Airlines from my parents. So I contacted my parents and my friends and off I went. 

This was my first trip to Boston, so I was in high anticipation. My very first impression of Boston was a positive one: the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority had a terminal right there at the airport, an easy walk even with a large suitcase, from the arrivals baggage claim. I'd heard a lot about the MTA (or MBTA depending on who you talk to), from my friend Charlie. There's a folk song he taught me, about a man named Charlie who "rides forever 'neath the streets of Boston" for lack of a nickel to get off the train.  

 

So I came prepared with plenty of change. At that time, the fare to get on was just 35 cents, but my destination point, out on Commonwealth Avenue after the train emerged from underground was one of those places where you had to pay an extra dime to get off the train. I really came to love the MTA over the next five days, as I rode it all over Boston to see all kinds of things. Unlike many cities with which I was familiar the MTA wasn't just used by poor and low income people. Everyone, doctors, lawyers, legislators, housewives, college students, school kids, used the MTA. It was busy and bustling and vibrant transportation system in 1975. 

My hosts for this trip were my friends Carol and Stuart both Oberlin grads, married and in medical school. It was the end of their first year, and they had lived out near Boston College, near the Commonwealth Avenue MTA line in an apartment that they realized after one year of med school was not big enough for both of them to have space to study effectively, so they were hunting for a new apartment, and I got to participate in some of that search. My silent presence actually made it easier for them to get the real estate agents to accept they needed a 2 bedroom apartment.  

Over the years I'd heard many parodies of the Boston accent, but despite knowing many people from Boston had never heard one, until that real estate agent that Carol and Stuart and I met with, she actually said that she had "paht [parked] her cah [car] at the Gahden" (it not clear what "Garden" she meant since the Boston Garden was some distance away). Hers was of course not the last Boston accent I heard over the next six days and I loved it. 

Aside from the apartment hunting, Carol had a number of fun things planned for us. The two most memorable were Boston Pops concert and a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts. I remember the Pops venue, lined with drapes and the floor level with little tables, we sat in a balcony above the floor, and enjoyed the music. I could not tell you any specific piece that the Pops played, only that all of them were familiar and almost certainly at least one was by Gershwin. I just remember loving the sensation of being buoyed by brilliant, bouncing music, a smile on my face the entire time. Afterwards we treated ourselves to hot fudge sundaes at Brigham's - very decadent! 

The stand out memory from the trip to the Museum of Fine Arts is of course the Sargent portraits, especially the portrait of Madam X, so beautiful in that amazing black gown. But I spent most of my time with the impressionists, especially Monet. The MFA has one of the largest collections of works by Monet outside of France, many of which it acquired before and at the time of Monet's death. No one paints light quite like Monet. [Monet Grainstack (Sunset) from MFA]

 

After a few days, the demands of medical school occupied most of Carol and Stuart's attention, so they provided me with a home base and I contacted other friends who helped show me more of Boston's treasures. First up was my friend Charlie who had just graduated from Oberlin a little behind the rest of us, because he interrupted his four years to engage in good works. He would be heading off to graduate school at University of Michigan in the fall in biology or ecology.  Charlie had me meet him at the Boston Commons, where we enjoyed a leisurely walk and lots of talk, and a ride on one of the swan boats. 

Charlie took me to Bailey's for a hot fudge sundae. It was in an old, elegant ice cream parlor just half a block off the Common on West Street. I don't think it still exists today. Everything in the shop was white and silver. There were small marble topped tables with wrought iron legs and chairs. The ice cream sundaes were served in silver pedestal bowls, on top of silver plates with long-handled silver spoons. The fudge sauce was thick and exquisite, so very dark chocolate. It was one of those rare sundaes where the sauce was abundant enough to last through every bite of ice cream. 

After the Sunday we went back to the Commons to the Freedom Trail and walked a ways, our first stop was the Granary Burial Ground where we looked at the famous graves, including "Mother Goose." Then we walked on to Kings Chapel, then down School St. to the Old South Meeting House where the Boston Tea Party was planned. We also checked out the Old State House and the Boston Massacre site, before ending our day with a wander through the wonders of the Faneuil Hall Marketplace (lots of Boston accents heard there!). We went back to the Commons to the MTA, he headed back home to Wellesley and I found the line back to Commonwealth Avenue. I was in love with the old Boston, all the trees, and the old buildings of warm red brick. Everything was so easy to reach by walking or on the MTA. 

My last full day in Boston, I spent the afternoon with another Oberlin friend, Katherine, she was in graduate school in Boston. Katherine was one of the most widely educated people I've ever known, she had studied geology, French literature, religion, and was extraordinarily creative and funny. Unfortunately she was one of the victims of Covid in December of 2020, before vaccines became available. Knowing how much I loved art and books as well as she did, she arranged for us to visit the private library, art museum called the Athenaeum.  The Boston Athenaeum was founded in 1807 to contain great works of learning and science in many languages. The building the Athenaeum is currently in was built between 1847 and 1849, it opened in 1849. The building is architecturally gorgeous, here's a recent photo (I did not have a camera in 1975 nor were cameras allowed for visitors then). 

 Through out the library there are amazing paintings on the walls and sculptures punctuating the space. It felt both warm and cozy and visually breathtaking. [For more information about the Boston Athenaeum click  https://bostonathenaeum.org/visit/ ] One of the charming aspects of the library is that its windows (those shown in this photo), look out over the Old Granary Burial Ground - the one I had visited the previous day with my friend Charlie. Katherine and my afternoon at the Athenaeum was the perfect end to my first (but hardly last) visit to Boston. 

The next morning, I once again used the MTA to get to the Boston South Terminal where I boarded an Amtrak train for New York City, to visit another set of friends. But Boston was stuck in my soul and I would come back again and again. Sometimes the visits would be to friends (although different ones) and quite a few times I would come to Boston for Sociology conferences, sometimes to present a paper, others just to hear what others had to say. The lure of the old streets of Boston and its old brick buildings never really faded. 

 

The Virginians: Visiting the relatives Part 3

 My father, Carroll Greer, was born early in the second decade of the 20th century, he was the fifth child, second boy of the family with three older sisters and one older brother (11 years later the sixth sibling, a sister was born). He was born in a bustling commerce town, Troutdale, in the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, born of the timber boom at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. 

His father Charlie Parks Greer was a businessman, an entrepreneur and also the first mayor of the Town of Troutdale, his mother Emma Sue Weatherly Greer, the daughter of a minister. His siblings from oldest to youngest were Mary born of the fourth of July in the first decade of the 19th century, Charlie, Edith, Mildred, then a decade after Carroll came Sue in the 1920's. 

My grandfather Charlie built two houses in Troutdale on top of a big hill overlooking the town. The larger of the two houses a Victorian with lots of detail was the house that he, his wife and children lived in, always referred to as "the big house". He also build a smaller, one story cottage for his mother-in-law great grandmother Weatherly which was usually referred to as the "little house." During most of my life time it was the little house that was maintained and used by the family for visits to Troutdale. I didn't even see the outside of the big house until my Aunt Mary moved into it in the mid-1960's. 

In posts to come I will write a lot more about my father's family and about the town of Troutdale, Virginia, because in the 1970's I made Troutdale the focus of my master's thesis in sociology, and the entire southwestern Virginia region the focus of my dissertation research in the early 1980's. Today, however, I will be focusing on the experience of visiting my father's family in Virginia while I was a child and a teenager. 

My parents, Carroll and Jo, were both Virginians and although I grew up in California (and was born in Florida), I always thought of Virginia as "home," and the place I was "from." The fact that my father, a blue collar machinist, worked for an airline meant that our family got to "go home" regularly during a time when air travel was not really an option for working class people, or even many middle class people. 

Only two of my father's siblings, uncle Charlie (with his wife Jerrie) and aunt Mildred (and her husband Chap French) lived in Virginia throughout my entire childhood. Neither Charlie nor Mildred had any children, which meant that they indulged us niece and nephews greatly when we visited. They both lived in Roanoke, VA which is where we would visit them every time we came to visit my mother's family. Visits to Roanoke also resulted in visits "home" to Troutdale which was further southwest, deeper into the mountains and rural. My Aunt Mildred owned the two family homes in Troutdale, her husband Chap had purchased them for her and she welcomed any family members who wanted to visit to stay there. However, Mildred primarily maintained the little house and that was where many of my childhood memories are centered. 

Carroll's youngest sister Sue left Virginia as a young Navy nurse during World War II and never returned, instead having a farm in Washington state not far from Seattle with her husband Frank  Schiller a Navy man she met during the war, so we visited them separately and less often. Sue and Frank had two children, Milton (whose first name was actually Frank) who was about six or seven years older than me and Susan who was exactly the same age (only 2 days difference). Milton (or Frank as the army called him) enlisted in the Army after high school and was sent to Vietnam in the early 1960's when Americans were primarily described as "advisors." He received technical training and his primary job was building and maintaining radio transmission towers. He got to spend a lot of time traveling around the Vietnamese countryside and did not experience much military "action." I can remember him visiting us while in uniform in San Mateo, since we were near the San Francisco airport that was the port through which most military came and went to Vietnam. 

His oldest sister Mary, who never married was a career woman, a nurse. Mary did nursing on horseback in the Appalachian mountains in the 1930's and became an Army nurse during World War II. After World War II she worked at an Army hospital in Hawaii for some years before leaving the military and moving to Washington state to live on Sue and Frank's farm in Washington. She stayed there until the mid-1950's. When I was four we drove north from San Mateo, through the redwood forests of California, through Oregon to Washington and visited both Aunt Sue, Uncle Frank, our cousins, and Aunt Mary there. By 1960, Aunt Mary moved to Roanoke, VA and we would see her when we came to Roanoke. Later in the 1960's Aunt Mary moved to Troutdale and lived in the big house. She stayed there through the early 1970's as well. It is in fact largely due to my Aunt Mary that I got involved in the research that I did in graduate school. 

Aunt Edith, who had also worked as a nurse for many years (including doing horseback nursing during the 1930's) was married to Frank Merker who was a psychiatrist who served as the head of VA mental hospitals and they moved around the country depending on Frank's postings. They had one daughter, Matilda, who was eight years older than me. Aunt Edith and Uncle Frank were at a VA hospital in southwestern Virginia (probably Western State Hospital in Staunton, VA) when I was really young, then they were at a VA hospital in Roseburg, Oregon. After that they were at the Coatesville VA Medical Center outside Philadelphia. When I was in graduate school my Uncle Frank retired from the VA, but went to work as the administrator for the Virginia State Mental Hospital in Marion, VA and he and Aunt Edith renovated the "little house" or "Mildred's House" where they ultimately settled. We visited Aunt Edith and Uncle Frank in all those locations while I was growing up. 

So I only had three cousins on the Greer side, two of them substantially older than myself, compared to the dozen first cousins on my mother's side of the family, not to mention the first cousin's once removed and all the second cousins. Moreover, given the age differences it wasn't until I was an adult that I really got to know two of them. I also didn't really appreciate most of my Greer aunts when I was young either. My Greer relatives were loud and querulous. They had strong opinions and liked to argue about things. I often felt that my aunts were critical of me as a child. A lot of those feelings were inforced or encouraged by my mother who had her own serious insecurities about my father's sisters. My aunts were more worldly and more cosmopolitan than my mother, they had spent more time working, three of them as nurses all working and traveling the world (Africa, China, Europe). They were also, all but Aunt Sue, older than my mother by more than a decade, as was my father. They were more outspoken, more open in their opinions, more blunt, more direct, all things that made my mother and her family uncomfortable.  

When we made our family vacations to Virginia, the trip to Roanoke was more of an adventure. It was a long enough distance that we had to find our own transportation from the Washington, DC area (or from Jo's family's home in the Tidewater) to southeastern Virginia. Several of those trips made substantial, long lasting impressions on me. Before the late 1960's when United Airlines and others started buying up commuter airlines to use for short trips, flying into Roanoke was not an option. The earliest trip I remember was by train. It was an overnight trip and we had a sleeping compartment. It was my first real train ride, and made a huge impression on me. Mostly though I remember being sleepy and how snug the sleeping compartments were, with their tiny washrooms. I was so young that the memories are mostly a pleasant, slightly incoherent jumble of motion, noise, lights, warm sheets, and sleepiness. My mother was softer, quieter, more "polite" in interaction, but when there was no one around but her children, especially just me, she had lots of negative things to say about people, including my aunts. I was an adult before I realized how sly, cunning, and sometimes outright nasty my mother could be about people behind their backs. 

A couple of years later when I would have been about six, we made the trip by bus, Greyhound Bus to be precise. This was not a very pleasant trip because I was suffering from some stomach "bug" and felt nauseous much of the time, but the memories are very vivid. This was 1957, in Virginia, when bus transportation was still segregated, waiting rooms, bathrooms, and drinking fountains were segregated as well. This was the first time I was old enough to notice this and question it. It was summer probably late July or early August and very hot and humid, since I was sick my parents were very anxious to get to our destination. The buses were very crowded and there was only two seats left in the "white" section of the bus. My father and mother wrangled with the ticket agent and then with the driver. I'm not sure how they managed it, but they allowed my dad and my brother Charlie to take the two seats left in the white section and my mother, myself and my baby brother Frank sat on the very back row of the bus with the Black women.   

One of the things that I remember clearly was that the seats at the back of the bus did not have cushioning like the seats in the front of the bus did. The seat was hard and uncomfortable. I remember the woman we sat next to, she was a little older than my mother, and so nice. She fussed and made over me because I was not well. She held my baby brother for a little while to give my mother a respite. When we came to the first stop on the trip, she recommended that my parents buy a cold soda, that the fizzies would help settle my stomach (she was right). Only my father got out at that first rest stop (and got the soda for me). 

Sitting in the bus waiting for it to start up again, I pressed my face to the window and looked at the station. One of the things I saw that I did not understand was that there were two drinking fountains, one said "whites only" and the other said "coloreds."  I did not know what a "colored" was at that time, so I asked my mother. Her response was to "shush" me and tell me to keep quiet, and she'd explain later. Which she did. She also later said that she thought me asking questions would offend the nice people around me who had been very kind. Thinking about it over the years I think she was wrong. But that was how my mother and her people did things, anything "unpleasant" was shushed and pushed down in public. That left me with the impression that "colored" was something very dirty and nasty and not for polite conversation. "Nice" people did not talk about such things. 

Later she (and my father) did explain, and did make it clear that she thought such segregation was wrong - which was why she was not just willing, but happy to ride in the back of the bus. My mother did not approve of the Jim Crow laws, believing them morally wrong, but she also didn't believe in "making trouble" in public.  My father's approach that this was not only something to talk about, it was something to oppose publicly, to make noise, to march and protest against and to vote for people who would change it. My parents agreed on values, but disagreed on tactics. I have struggled between those two different approaches my whole life. 

When we went to Virginia in 1963, June to be precise, my father rented a car. That was the first and but by no means the only time we did that. 1963 was the first time we visited after my mother's father had died, and we went to visit the Greer relatives first. The trip was memorable because the rental car, unlike our car at home, had a radio, and we were allowed to listen to music in the car. The station we listened to must have been an "oldies" station since the two songs I can remember that were Elvis's "Blue Suede Shoes" (from 1957) and "If I Had a Hammer" (from 1962) by Peter, Paul and Mary and my brothers (10 and 6) and I (12) sang along, and then continued to sing those two songs even when the radio was turned off. 

We had taken many family trips from home in California by car. We'd been camping up the entire west coast of the US from San Francisco to Vancouver, Canda, and we'd taken many shorter trips all around California. But we'd never been on a family car trip before where we had a radio and it was magical. Instead of singing all the old songs (like "Bicycle Built for Two" and "The Old Gray Mare" that we always sang) with my parents on road trips we got to listen to and sing new songs from the radio. 

Our destination was Roanoke, where we would stay with Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap French in their brick home on Maiden Lane, but spend time and often eat meals out with Uncle Charlie and Aunt Jerry who lived a few blocks away. I loved Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap's house, it was probably built in the 1920's and may have been bought new by Chap who was a generation older than Mildred and her siblings. When I was a child I knew that Uncle Chap was not only my "uncle" but by marriage but also my "great uncle" by marriage as before he'd been married to Mildred, he had been married to my great Aunt Lila Weatherly French, one of my grandmother's sisters. Chap was quite elderly, smoked cigars and had long been retired from his successful business career. We children were to keep out of his way and not bother him. However, Aunt Mildred loved children, loved adventures and projects so it was always a pleasure to be around her. Aunt Mildred was the kind of person who loved hardware stores because she was always building things and fixing things. 

That particular visit in June 1963 was especially memorable because of the news. At that time (between about 1962 and 1967) our family at home did not have television. The television we had was broken, and my parents decided not to fix it, or get a new one, preferring to spend money on travel and experiences, etc. So having a television on was notable in itself. But the big international news of that month was the death of Pope John XXIII, and I can remember being interested in the extended discussion of how a pope was chosen. All things Catholic were of particular interest to Americans at that time because our President John F. Kennedy was Catholic. 

Roanoke was urban, but it was a very different urban from California. The neighborhood of Maiden Lane, had many characteristics that I would see years later in Oberlin, Ohio, Lexington, Kentucky and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, that were holdovers from times when people had horses instead of cars, and when land values were much lower. Houses sat close to the sidewalk or street with little or no front "yard" and all had wide and deep front porches to sit on hot summer days and nights. They also had long backyards that ended at an unnamed alley. By the 1960's most of those alleys were paved, and they were used by the garbage or sanitation crews to pick up bags left in cans at the very back of the yard. Trees or bushes often marked the end of the backyard rather than a fence. This kind of arrangement is normal to anyone who grew up in cities or towns east of the Mississippi, but was quite exotic to those of us who grew up in the planned suburbs of California built in the 1940's and 1950's.  

Since the house was built in the 1920's in a city, it was built with electricity and indoor plumbing as integral. But the light switches were "funny", little push  buttons rather than the mercury flip switches with which we were familiar. The doors that locked all had keyholes on both sides, and in the morning one had to unlock the front door with a key rather than turn a latch. Aunt Mildred had a funny system of keeping the key to the front door (and backdoor as well) on little leather leash that attached to the door handle, so that if there was an emergency no one would have to go around searching for the key. 

Aunt Mildred and Uncle Chap lived in the very first block of Maiden Lane, the same block as a church (these days called The City Lights) that had a huge neon sign "Jesus Saves" that was on the corner of Maiden Lane and Wasena Drive, where Uncle Charlie and Aunt Gerry lived. One could easily walk from one house to the other, but we generally piled in all piled in a car to make the visit. Charlie and Gerry lived on a short stretch of Wasena where the opposite side of the road Ghent Park and the Roanoke River. 

Uncle Charlie had gone to college and studied engineering and surveying. I don't know if he got a degree or not. He had a long career doing surveying for Norfolk and Western Railway (N&W) which was headquartered in Roanoke. Charlie had lots of funny stories to tell about surveying railroads in West Virginia in the late 1920's and 1930's including one tale about having dinner with a large Hatfield family, during which he was proffered a huge plate of fluffy biscuits and told "take one, take two, take durn near all of them." Aunt Jerry was unusual of all my aunts, the only close female relative I knew who continued to work full-time throughout her marriage. Jerry was a librarian, with a degree in library science. She was at one time a head librarian. 

As I mentioned before, Charlie and Jerry, like Mildred and Chap did not have children. Jerry also wasn't particularly fond of cooking, so she and Uncle Charlie ate out a lot, mostly at cafeteria style restaurants. While I'm sure those existed all over the country including in San Mateo, I always associated going to a cafeteria style restaurant with Roanoke, as that was the only place I'd ever been to one until I was an adult. There were two very nice one's within easy driving distance and I can remember quite a few meals eaten with Charlie and Jerry at cafeterias. It was delightful as a child not to have to eat what everyone else was eating, but to be able to pick exactly what you wanted. 

Occasionally, Charlie and Jerry would take us out for breakfast at a sit-down restaurant. I can still remember the steaming, fragrant pancakes and the multiple kinds of syrup. Those experiences convinced me that breakfast was the very best meal to eat out, and I still believe that to this day. Which is why every week, my husband and I go out to eat for breakfast at our local, independently owned, family style restaurant, the Pine Mountain Grill. 

There's more to tell. But it will be another post. 

Flying - Part 2

 

In 1960 United Air Lines purchased its first passenger jets, the DC 8 made by Douglas Aircraft. The company through a huge party for all of the workers at the San Francisco Maintenance Base and their families. The party was held inside one of the huge new hangers designed for the jet aircraft. There was food and live music by The New Christy Minstrels. The acoustics inside the hangar were amazing, especially when the band got the entire audience to participate in a round of Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore.  The highlight of the party was the opportunity to walk through the new DC 8 and see all the new features of the aircraft. 

The plane was so large, much longer than a DC 6 or DC 7 propeller plane, and somewhat wider as well. The initial DC 8's had only two rows on each side with only two seats together, just like the propeller planes, but the isles were wider, and the cabins felt much more open. Even someone over six feet tall could fully stand up in most of the plane. 

There was one small catch: pass passengers (i.e., employees and their families riding for free) were barred from riding on the jets when they were initially put into service. The ban did not last all that long.

 As I wrote in the first installment about flying as the child of an employee, all commercial air travel was tightly controlled by the  Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), a federal government regulatory agency that determined which airlines got which routes and how much could be charged for the various levels of service. Airlines were not able to compete with each other on the price, as the price of flights was determined for all airlines by the CAB. The CAB kept prices high so that they would adequately cover all the costs of regular maintenance, up-keep, and all the labor of pilots, stewardesses, and ground crew. The lowest cost coach fare for a round trip ticket from west coast (San Francisco) to east coast (Washington, DC) in the 1960's was about $550. Adjusted for inflation that is the same as about $5,600 today (2025) which is substantially more than a person would pay for a first-class round trip ticket today. In other words, air travel was out of the reach of most Americans in the 1960's. Affluent people, business men, and air line employees were the only frequent fliers. 

What this meant in practical terms was that the new big jet aircraft that United and other airlines now flew non-stop across the country were frequently only partially full, and at some times nearly empty.  As a result the ban on pass riding employees on the jets ended pretty quickly. The airlines realized that filling those seats with employees on vacation looked better for business than having a sea of empty seats. Riding on a pass as an employee came with some rules and responsibilities, one of which was how one dressed. Employees could be barred from flights if they or their family members were not sufficiently dressed up, especially since it soon became common practice for employees to be placed in the first class section, as those seats were less often filled than coach class. So I was always wearing dresses and dress shoes while flying. When I was in college I sometimes envied my friends who were paying for their tickets because they could get on a plane in blue jeans and a sweat shirt, but I always had to be dressed up. 

Most of my memories of flying on jets are memories of flying first class and all that entailed in the 1960's and 1970's. This included not only family vacations from California back to Virginia to see relatives, but also my four years of solo travel while going to college in Ohio. Cross country first class travel was leisurely and luxurious. Meals in the first class cabin were served on real china plates with real silverware, actual crystal glasses, and sparkling white, cloth napkins. The food was served hot from china serving dishes on a cart directly to your plate. Often one of the entres was roast beef, where a large roast (enough to feed dozens of people) sat on a wooden carving board on the cart, and the stewardess would cut the amount you wanted from either the end the was more well done, or the end that was more on the rare side. When you were old enough (as I was in college) the stewardess would pour you wine in a crystal goblet from the several bottles available on her cart. The food was always delicious. 

The first year that my family and I traveled by jet was also in the first year that Dulles International Airport was open (it opened in November 1962 and we traveled there in the summer of 1963). The Dulles International Airport was the first airport specifically designed for jet planes, and only the second airport directly owned and operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (the FAA). It was initially authorized by President Eisenhower and took 12 years from authorization to opening. Eero Saarinen was the architect who designed its sweeping roof and modern lines. It was by far my favorite airport, so open and airy and modern. And it had the first "digital" clocks I'd ever seen. where the numbers were on cards that clicked over with each minute. 

The most unusual thing about Dulles was its "mobile lounges". Jet planes did not taxi up to the terminal building at Dulles, but sat out away from the building on the tarmac. Passengers would present their tickets at the gate inside the terminal and then be ushered into a large room with comfortable seating all around it. The room had many windows so that passengers could watch what was happening on the tarmac.  

One of my most memorable travel experiences happened at Dulles, to be honest I cannot remember if it was on our first trip in 1963, or a later trip in 1965, although I expect the latter. We were at the end of our vacation, tired and ready to go home. The plane was unusually full, so there was some question about whether or not we would be able to get on. Also unusual was that the president of United Air Lines, William Patterson was also on the flight. I can remember him standing and talking with my father in the mobile lounge. Patterson helped to make sure that we got on the flight, even though we had to be separated and scattered throughout the plane. There were five of us and they were able to seat my mother and my youngest brother together (he would have been 8 at the time), my other brother (12) and me (14) were sitting alone among strangers, as was my father. The plane was full, every seat filled even in first class. And something went wrong. 

I'm sure they told us what it was, but I don't remember it specifically enough, just that there was a crucial part that wasn't working. At first they thought that they could fix it. So they held all of us on the plane while the maintenance crews worked. That took a while. Then the word came that it could not be fixed, that it had to be replaced and the part had to be flown in from somewhere else. That would take some time, but it would take less time than it would to free up another jet and fly it in. It was summer time, and very hot and humid and on the ground, the planes own air conditioning system wouldn't work. 

Mr. Patterson took control of the situation. He told everyone what was going on, told people that he was ordering ground HVAC trucks to come and hook up to the plane, ordering more food and drink, making all drinks free. If anyone wanted to leave they would happily accommodate them, but to my knowledge no one left the plane. If they did they did so quietly without any fuss. The air conditioning got hooked up, the plane cooled off, the food and booze started to flow, and a really big party got going. No one got belligerent or angry, although some adults got quite tipsy and silly. There was lots of laughter and joking and storytelling.  We were on the ground, on the tarmac for four hours total before being cleared for take-off. In our family we always talked about the time the passengers got high before the plane took off. Can you imagine any of that happening today?

Unlike during the era of the propeller planes, the DC 6s and DC 7s, during the era of jet travel my family never experienced being "bumped" and only that one time at Dulles ever had difficulty getting on a flight. During my four years of college when I traveled back and forth between San Francisco and the Cleveland Hopkins Airport, I also never really had difficulty getting on a flight, and usually ended up in first class. However, my sophomore year, I decided that instead of going home for fall break I would go visit relatives in Virginia. That experience was very different. Planes from Cleveland to DC (or to other cities on the eastern seaboard like NYC or Boston) were very frequently full, and not easy to get on for a pass-passenger, even though such flights were far more frequent than the cross-continental ones. 

I set out for fall break in the early morning, and did not get on the flight for which I'd registered. I had to find a payphone, call and re-register to stand-by for another flight. This one in about 3 hours. Lot's of college students who were not children of airline employees also used standby as a way to get cheaper paid tickets, so many of my fellow students were stuck in the airport with me waiting for a flight. There was a young man, who was a couple of years older than me, a senior when I was a sophomore, that was also stuck waiting for an open flight to Chicago. We had worked together in the college cafeterias for more than a year, but had never had time for a long conversation. I think we probably talked on and off for a total of five hours that day, through several missed flights. 

He finally got one to Chicago, but I reached the end of the day without getting a flight to Washington, DC and I was panicking. I didn't have any way to get back to the college, not much money, and my next possible flight was the next morning. It looked like I might have to stay in the airport all night. I found a pay phone to re-register to standby for the first flight in the morning. The woman working in reservations asked me for a phone number for contact, and I started to cry. I told her, my situation, stuck at the airport with no place to go, and an amazing thing happened. She said that she worked there at the airport, and that I could meet her when she got off work, ride the metro-train into Cleveland and stay overnight at her apartment, sleep on the couch and then ride the train back in the morning with her for my flight.  

I remember her kindness, but I don't remember her name or even what she looked like, although I do remember her roommate - a very vivacious blonde. I remember the metro-train, how clean it was, how smooth and quiet it was. I remember the apartment, the couch I slept on and the poster on the wall. The poster was picture of a single large tree in the middle of a field with low hills behind it and the words "Let it Be" on it (the title of a Beatles song). I also remember how miserable it was not to have clean underwear, and how I never, once since that day ever went anywhere without a clean pair of underwear in my purse.  The next day, I got on the first plane and was on my way to visit with relatives - a story for another day. 

One last memorable plane ride: my very last one as a pass-passenger. I graduated from Oberlin College at the end of May 1973. I would not qualify for any more passes as an adult child, not in college after this my last trip, home after college. Unlike most of my friends, I did not go home immediately after graduation. The dorms were closed, but I was dating a man 15 years older than me who lived in town, and had moved in with him for a week. I had a couple of other friends who also lived in town, including a family that I had started as a babysitter for and become one of the family. I had ties to the town that went beyond the college and I wasn't quite ready to give them up yet. One of my friends, not the man I was dating, was a lawyer who who worked for the city of Oberlin as their local prosecutor, and he had plans to travel to San Francisco for a legal convention a week after my graduation. So part of the reason I delayed was so that I could have companionship, rather than fly alone which I had done for four years. 

On the day of our flight to San Francisco, the plane was not full, so I had no difficulty getting on it, but as was customary, the flight attendants wanted to move me to first class. My friend, Chuck, however, had a coach ticket and so I told I wanted to stay there, and someone else could get the bump to first class. This was only the second time I'd ever gotten to travel with a friend, and was really enjoying our conversation. I was a veteran traveler and Chuck had flown a number of times, but both of us were very much startled by the rather large bump and noise, almost like a small explosion, that occurred during our take-off. After we had gained some altitude, and leveled out a bit, the pilot came on the intercom and told us what had happened. At least one, and perhaps more of the tires on one of the landing gear had blown just as the plane lifted off. This presented no problems at all for us in our trip across the country, but could mean danger in landing in San Francisco. The decision was to continue on, alert San Francisco and take appropriate cautions on landing. 

The trip itself was extremely pleasant and unremarkable, I really enjoyed Chuck's company, we spent most of the time talking about shared interests and shared friends. But as we approached San Francisco, the pilot came back on to tell us what to expect. While everything might be okay, San Francisco was scrambling all its firefighting equipment and lining it up along the runway, just in case. The pilot warned us we would see not only fire trucks but also large numbers of ambulances, and that we would go through all the procedures of an emergency landing. In all my 22 years of flying I had never been through an emergency landing, although I knew after all those years exactly what to do. We had to take our glasses off, stow everything away, put our heads down and brace against the seat in front of us. Chuck and I expressed our appreciation to each other for having a friend to go through this with. 

The landing was the roughest I've ever experienced. Missing two tires on one side, lead to a very bumpy, rocky ride, but the plane stayed level, the fire trucks and ambulances were not needed, and we walked off the plane safe and sound. 

I have flown dozens of times after that last pass-passenger flight, but always as a paying customer. Moreover, plane travel has changed drastically since the 1970's. The CAB was eliminated in 1977. Airlines have been free to set their own rates, and also free to go bankrupt. My last trip by plane (probably my last ever plane travel) from Kentucky to San Francisco in 2013 was even first class, but it is nothing like it once was. 

Flying - Part 1

DC 6

As a child, I flew fairly frequently, not because my family was affluent, but quite the opposite, because U.S. airlines found that by giving their workers free travel they could pay well below the usual pay scale for various occupations. My dad was a licensed machinist, a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) union, who worked for United Air Lines (UAL) at their San Francisco main maintenance based from the time I was 6 months old until I was 25 years old (and he was 65).  

For the first fifteen years of my life, my father and all the other IAMAW workers for the airlines were paid substantially less per hour than machinists in other industries. The airlines argued that they provided workers and their families with free air travel, an untaxed benefit in those days, and therefore did not need to pay their employees more. This was successfully challenged by the Great Airline Strike of 1966, but that is a story for another blog post. This post is about what it was like to be a frequent flyer in the 1950's and early 1960's, as a pass-riding employee family and child. 

The earliest trip I can remember would have been when I was three and a half, when my brother Charlie was just over a year old. That meant that we needed three seats on the plane, two for mom and dad, one for me, and Charlie would have to sit on mom's lap. As an employee family riding on a free pass, we were always on "stand-by" meaning that we would call in, tell the reservations agent our intentions as the flight we wished to take, but have no actual guarantee of getting on that flight. We had to show up in person at the gate and wait until everyone else was boarded, and if there were enough seats left over we got on. If not, we stayed at the airport and waited for the next flight that might take us in the direction we wished to go. 

Charlie and me in 1954

The uncertainty meant that my parents had to plan for food, drink and diapers for Charlie. They had to be ready to take naps in the airport. Because we were low income we could not afford to buy things at the airport (or on the plane where meals were not free), so we brought our own food - sandwiches or sometimes cold fried chicken and lots of fruit. Sometimes we got on the first flight, sometimes we waited for hours, but we always eventual got a flight. 

The first plane I remember riding in was a DC 6 which had four propeller engines, two on each wing (see photo at top of post). Made by the Douglas Aircraft Company from 1946 to 1958, it was the primary work horse of U.S. airlines during those years. The body of the DC 6 is not much narrower than modern jets (excluding "wide-bodies") and there were only two seats on each side of the plane, so a family like ours that needed three seats was always in at least two rows and as the last comers, often not rows near each other. The seats on those small DC 6's were wider and more comfortable than what you find on today's jets. The isles were quite a bit narrower. 

The DC 6 did not have a highly pressurized cabin. It did flew at a much lower altitude than present day jets do. That meant many things for a child: amazing views of the world below the plane because we were much closer to it; skimming just above the clouds most of the time, but sometimes actually flying through clouds which always felt mysterious and fabulous; and a really significant change in pressure on take-offs and landings that was really felt in your ears. One of the tasks of stewardesses (yes, stewardesses, they were always young, unmarried women) was to pass out chewing gum to every passenger both before take-off and again just before landing. Chewing the gum would help people adjust to the changes in air pressure and relieve the pain in their ears. It was also a task that stewardesses were glad to hand over to a bright, cute blonde child who felt very grown-up going from row to row offering people gum. There were other small tasks that the stewardesses might give me to do, but the one that sticks in my mind the most is the handing out of gum. 

Not only did the DC 6 fly lower than today's jets, but it was slower, had less fuel capacity, and had much less range. In addition to the technical issues that limited range, all civilian air traffic was controlled by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) a government regulatory agency. The CAB controlled which airlines got which routes, how much they could charge for each route, and how many hours that pilots and cabin crews could work. In the 1950's the CAB limited airline crews to 8 hours of work per 24 hour period. NO overtime allowed. An airline that allowed a crew to work longer than eight hours, even if it was just a few minutes could be heavily fined by the CAB. So if one was traveling from one coast to another in the United States, one could not do so in one plane with one crew because it took too long. 

Now my family's trips by plane were always from San Francisco (where we lived) to visit my parents' families in Virginia, where we were from. In the 1950's those trips were never non-stop. The best flights had only one stop in a major hub like Chicago, but often the only flights we could get on were shorter hops, like to Denver or Salt Lake City, and then required at least two more hops to make it all the way to Virginia (to National Airport, now Reagan in DC, or Friendship, now BWI Thurgood Marshall, in Baltimore). 

Multiple stops and plane changes were probably irritating for paying customers, but they could be seriously problematic for stand-by flyers like ourselves. It was not uncommon to lose our seats to paying passengers at an intermediary stop. Sometimes that meant a few hours of sitting in a strange airport waiting for another flight, on rare occasions it meant an unbudgeted and difficult to afford overnight at a hotel. When I was six and our family had expanded to five members, Charlie was four and baby Frank was less than one, we had a trip where we were first "bumped" (removed in favor of paying passengers) in Salt Lake City. This was not problematic as one of mom's brothers lived nearby in Ogden. So we had an unscheduled but delightful visit for several days with my Utah cousins. Then come Monday we got a flight from Salt Lake to Chicago and got bumped again. The next flight that was at all possible was at least 12 hours away the next day, so all five of us including a wailing baby ended up in a very cheap Chicago motel room with no air conditioning in August. Not a pleasant memory. Luckily we found a flight the next morning and were in the arms of family again in Virginia. 

In my second installment I will talk about how the introduction of jets changed our experiences as pass riding passengers.