The Best Things Often Come in Small Packages!

I recently celebrated my eighty-second birthday. My wife, Linda, and others, too, will readily attest to the fact that buying a gift for me is not an easy lift! Not that I am at all particular or lacking interests which might suggest buying opportunities – quite the contrary on both counts.

At eighty-two years of age, I have had time to accumulate a lot of “stuff” – more than I have space for, anymore. My youngest daughter and her family surprised me at my family birthday celebration with a little jewel of a book on aviation, titled Flight Today & Tomorrow. As Ginny is well-aware, I have accumulated a significant library reflecting the long aviation legacy I inherited from my father, but she knows me well and immediately knew that she had stumbled upon the perfect gift for me. She, like my wife and I, loves to shop at B Street Books in downtown San Mateo for used book “finds.” There have been numerous of those over recent years, and this is one of them.

This little book was published in 1953 (at $2.75) and somehow managed to remain in mint condition (including the unprotected dust jacket) for all those years. That fact, alone, makes it an attractive and collectible “find.” More importantly, as the title suggests, this little book brims with aviation nostalgia – an early preview of where aviation and space flight were headed from the perspective of that early date. I was entering my teens in 1953, smitten with the joy of building model airplanes and anything to do with aviation. That enthusiasm for airplanes and aviation was my father’s special legacy to me, and this little book brings back many related, nostalgic memories.

In 1953, high-speed jet travel remained a dream for the public: the ultimate conveyances in luxury travel, at the time, were the venerable Lockheed Constellation as flown by TWA, the Douglas DC-7, and the double-decked Boeing Stratocruiser; the latter is pictured on the front cover of this little book along with the Navy’s Douglas Skyray jet fighter and the experimental rocket airplane, the Douglas Skyrocket. The airlines would not enter the jet age until the maiden international flight in October, 1958 of Pan American Airlines’ Boeing 707.

This little book brings back three very vivid memories for me. The first took place at SFO (San Francisco), around 1953, the year of this book’s publication. My parents, sister, and I were at SFO to see family friends, Howie and Jean Larson, depart for a luxury Hawaiian vacation via United Airlines’ Boeing 377 Stratocruiser, the ultimate in air-travel across the Pacific. Both Howie and my father were long-time United employees. Financially, there was no way that my family of four could undertake such a luxury trip, and we were duly impressed as we accompanied the Larson’s out to the gate (literally a “garden gate” under a covered walkway out on the tarmac) and watched our friends climb the stairway to the big, blunt-nosed silver and blue United Stratocruiser. In those days, everyone was dressed in their finest apparel for such flights – what a departure from today! Any flight was an exciting adventure in those days, especially to a then-romantic, trans-oceanic destination like Hawaii. There were smiles and waves from the stairway leading up to the plane; soon the doors were closed, the stairway withdrawn, and the four big piston engines, one by one, coughed and belched to life right there in front of us. The pilot revved the engines, and the big silver and blue bird pulled away from the gate heading for the taxiway and wonderful adventure in the then still-pristine Hawaiian Islands – a memorable scene at SFO.

It would have required an extremely prescient imagination to have anticipated in 1953 what air-travel in 2022 would look like – a mere sixty-nine years later!

The second recollection inspired by my new little book was of a late afternoon in San Mateo, California, at the dawn of aviation’s jet-age. There, from my family’s own backyard, we could clearly identify the maiden American Airlines transcontinental flight of a Boeing 707 jet airliner on final approach to SFO! I believe that was in early1959 – the beginning of long-anticipated domestic jetliner operations for the nation’s airlines and, truly, the dawn of a new age. This little book anticipated all that was about to happen, and I vividly recall witnessing the exciting reality, first-hand, from my boyhood San Mateo backyard!

Then, there is my third warm recollection this little book has engendered. On numerous occasions in the mid/late 1950’s, I would drive the several miles up the Bayshore Freeway, take the airport exit in Millbrae, wheel into the large, open-air parking lot (with lots of empty spaces) and commence a one-minute hike into SFO’s beautiful, spacious new terminal. In those days, there was only ONE main building – no tangled jumble of different domestic and international terminals like we have today. Into the terminal and up the stairs to the second-floor outdoor mezzanine deck, and I was set for an hour or so of watching airplanes come and go from the gate areas just below me – a time and place for a young lad to think thoughts and dream dreams, it was! In those simpler times, there were no security barriers impeding my way from the parking lot up to the outdoor mezzanine deck – imagine that!

The back cover of Flight Today & Tomorrow features a rendered vignette that conveys the excitement of aviation, back then. A nicely dressed young couple is pictured at an airport observation deck guard-rail enjoying the tarmac/runway spectacle spread-out before them. Yes, yes, that was me in my teen years doing what I loved to do at SFO’s new terminal – watching, from the spacious outdoor upper mezzanine deck, the big, graceful, triple-tailed TWA Connies (Lockheed Constellations), United Airlines’ big DC-7’s, and numerous smaller aircraft come and go from their gates on the tarmac below me. Often, I was the lone figure out there on that upper deck, just watching, to my heart’s content, the rhythms of the airport operations on display before me. Occasionally, another soul or two with time to pass between flight connections would linger on the deck for a while, and then disappear. On a few rare occasions, I would tack on to my observing pilgrimage to the mezzanine a visit to the terminal’s airport coffee shop. There, from a table by the large picture windows overlooking the field, I would order a slice of delicious lemon meringue pie and a cup of coffee (or two) as I watched the action on the outside tarmac. What a special outing that always was! Alas, such beautiful, uncrowded adventures are no longer available to today’s teen-agers.

This little book’s back-cover portrayal of a young couple enjoying the very same tarmac sights and sounds that so enthralled me in my youth resonates with me while generating a warm nostalgia. So much water under the bridge since the nineteen-fifties! So little remains of the conditions that enabled those happy SFO adventures and opportunities – a less hectic and uncrowded environment, for one.

My capstone on that wonderful SFO era came when I graduated from San Mateo High School in 1958. My good friend and fellow trackman, Jim Moorhead, and I each had dates for the big, all-night “Grad-Night” party scheduled at the swanky Peninsula Golf and Country Club. We double-dated to the party (I drove) and had a marvelous time at a first-class “final bash” for the SMHS graduating class of 1958! I distinctly recall the four of us wearily heading out to the parking lot around 5:00 am and seeing the bright sliver of a new moon hanging in a dark blue, but lightening, night sky. We felt obligated to take the girls straight home (parents always worry) after such a long day/night, and we did so. The excitement of the all-night party still lingered, however, as did the immense realization that we were all about to embark on a whole new existence involving college/university life. To decompress that morning from so much on our minds, Jim and I ended up on the mezzanine deck of SFO watching the airplanes come and go as well as a bright sun rising in the morning sky over the field – literally signaling the beginning “of a new dawn.” And so it was.

Flight Today & Tomorrow is an ambitious little book that tackles much having to do with aeronautics and flying, and it does so with numerous, hand-rendered illustrations that lend a “personal touch” to the subjects conveyed by its contents. I am very fond of this bright little fugitive from the dusty shelves of a used bookstore in San Mateo because it vividly recalls my youthful love of airplanes and aviation – enthusiasms that germinated and thrived right there, in San Mateo, where I grew-up. It now rests on a bookshelf surrounded by many other fine books on aviation. Thank you, Ginny, Scott, and boys for my birthday gift!

      

SFO (San Francisco International Airport) as it was back in 1960 – at the beginning of the jet-age. The same view would be unrecognizable, today. It’s called “progress.” Is unmitigated regional growth with its inevitable congestion truly progress?