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Flashback Fridays--Airline Fourths of July

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Aviator C

This edition of Flashback Fridays is a bit more personal than most, but with the Independence Day holiday right around the corner, I got to flashing back on how my airline career has been intertwined around July 4th.

Even though I grew up in an airline family, I couldn’t remember a July 4th airline connection upon first reflection.  I did remember that I got to see my first major league baseball game on July 3, 1963, and it was Sandy Koufax pitching against Bob Gibson and the Cardinals in Dodger Stadium.   Besides the two Hall of Fame pitchers, I also saw Hall of Famer Stan Musial pinch hit.  The Dodgers won 5 to 0: Koufax pitched a complete game: and it took less than two hours to play—definitely not a bad July 4th memory.

But on further reflection, I remember airport sightings of tearful goodbyes and joyful homecomings of servicemen going to and returning from a place called Vietnam.  Unfortunately, those same scenes are playing out in airports 50 years later, and they serve as a reminder that the freedom we celebrate on July 4th comes with a price.

As to my own airline career, it has a special connection to a very special Independence Day.  I became an airline employee a few weeks before America celebrated its 200th birthday in 1976.  Several airlines either offered a special bicentennial livery like Braniff with its Alexander Calder designed 727 or a modification of their standard livery like my airline, Delta.  Delta had modified it’s “‘widget” logo on the front of the aircraft with stripes and stars, with the legend, “We the People, 1776-1976.”  Eastern had decal banners on all of their aircraft that said "1776...'what so proudly we hail' 1976."  Even railroads had locomotives in special bicenntenial liveries.

July 4th seemed a little climatctic the next few years, but when I transferred to Oakland, on July 4th I would watch fireworks exploding all over the Bay Area from our operations trailer at the airport.  When my wife and I moved to Portland, we had several memorable Fourths.  The best one was sharing this quintessential American holiday with our neighbors from Belfast, Northern Ireland.  On another Fourth in Portland, I was on a flight that offered an aerial view of fireworks across the city.

The number of my “Southwest Fourths” are almost in equal to those at Delta.  While working on the North Concourse at Love Field at what is now our Source of Support group, we could see fireworks from our windows.  On July 4, 2004, Southwest used three aircraft to take several hundred Employees to Philadelphia to march in the city’s annual Fourth of July parade.  Probably the most memorable Fourth of July that I can remember was being invited by Colleen Barrett to be part of a group attending Willie Nelson’s 2005 Picnic in Fort Worth that featured Bob Dylan, along with Los Lobos and the Doobie Brothers.

How fitting if I could end my career during the nation’s tercentennial (yup, I looked it up—that is the 300th anniversary), but that’s not gonna happen.  There’s a chance I might still be working in 2026 on the country's 250th birthday—I’ll be 73. (I think that's the bisesquicentennial.) No matter if I am retired by then, I am like the George M. Cohan version of “Yankee Doodle Dandy” because my airline career was born on the Fourth of July (almost).

Happy Fourth of July, and we will have some more traditional Flashback Friday material next week.

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