(sorry, didn't know about the blog, nor this informative posting, till now...)
I lived in Amarillo for 4 years. My first hotel job was at a hotel there that housed 2 crews for Delta (I think SWA was staying overnights at the Harvey Hotel IINM at the time). Later Delta would cut their layovers to 1 a day from 2. I was the one who had to go get the crews from the airport. My hotel was clear the other side of town from where the airport was/is. 27 miles round-trip! I'd go out early enough to be there when the flight landed and the crew would see me standing there waiting for them at the gate. They always liked that. One time, the guy at the Delta ticket counter even let me announce the arrival of that last flight of the day over the PA! I thought it was so neat to do that. Sometimes, if there weren't customers at the counter or bags to be weighed, the ticker counter person would let me weigh myself on the bag scale. I had to take my shoes off first though 😄 . The crews from Delta were some of the most memorable guests I've come across in over 2 decades of the hotel biz. The crews would always tell me how they'd really compete to get an Amarillo layover, because of the way my hotel treated them (we were near the big mall, we had nightly buffets in the hotel's nightclub, among other things). After I went on to the other 2 hotels I worked at in Amarillo, I didn't get to go to the airport there near as much (neither of them had layover contracts, although some nights, I'd get calls from the airport asking if we could do a one-time layover for Continental Express at my 2nd hotel--their flight couldn't go on to Lubbock for some kind of weather reason, usually fog). Sadly, Delta grew tired of how they were being treated by the bigwigs of my first hotel and took their business to the Holiday Inn where American's layovers were. Since I left Amarillo, Delta quit flying full-size jets and just served the market with prop-jobs or executive jets--this meant they wouldn't need to lay over in Amarillo any more. The airport has since been redone and renamed (for astronaut Rick Husband); no more east or west concourse--just one long back wall behind the terminal lobby.
I never got to see any of English Field's buildings up close, so this posting was a treat of sorts. I do remember passing by the special plaque in the current terminal at Amarillo's airport about how TWA was the first major carrier that served the airport. Amarillo was the first airport I had regular exposure to (although my mother told me of the times we'd see my dad off at Love and how much I liked that --at first, till the engine noises started bothering me, then she had to quit bringing me 😄 )... thanx Brian for posting this.
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