New York

When we docked in New York harbor I got on the line of soldiers waiting to sign out. But I saw my parents waiting on the dock and I couldn't very well send Renate down alone, so I got off the line, took her hand and we strolled down the gangplank. The corporal (sorry “specialist 4”) signing out called “hey, where ya goin'?” “Home,” I answered, “see ya tomorra,” thus picking up my old Brooklyn accent.

I enrolled in Brooklyn College at night, in the day working at a variety of jobs. I took courses in physics, political science and anthropology, the last being the only one I found interesting. Renate got a job right away with Swissair reservations based on her previous experience working for SAS in Germany and her excellent English.

At the streetcar and traffic center a few blocks from Brooklyn College there was an Air Force recruiting station. A Staff Sergeant welcomed me like his long-lost best friend when I walked in claiming curiosity about volunteering for flight school. My idea was to enlist for four years, learn to fly, then get out and get a job as a commercial airline pilot, although I didn't tell him that. He told me I would keep my army pay-grade, that in that respect it was like re- enlisting, but in this case for flight school. I'd have to take a physical and appear before a board, but all that's just bureaucratic. (I found out not only here but also when applying for civilian employment that the words “intelligence analyst” had a positive effect.) I filled out a form with all my data and he said he'd call me when he had all the exams and interviews scheduled.

A week later he did call me at home. He said that unfortunately the Air Force doesn't accept married men for flight school. I understood that. After all, you'd have to be totally focused on training for six months without a wife complaining of boredom.

However, the sergeant said, I could join the Air Force anyway at the same rank and pay grade as in the army, and apply for pilot training from within, as it were. Wives are not an impediment for applicants who are already airmen. “Thanks sergeant,” I said, “but no thanks. It's been nice talking to you.” [click] He must have already known all that from the start, and the rest was all an act to get me signed up.

Thinking about it later, I realized that my choice to become a pilot in the U.S. Air Force would have been terrible had it been possible. That was around 1959. The Vietnam war had not yet heated up. It was only after President Kennedy's assassination in 1963 that President Lyndon Johnson sent 200,000 combat troops to Vietnam, having decided to win once and for all. Kennedy had intended to withdraw the small number of trainers already there, because he considered the war unwinnable. By that time I would probably have been one of the pilots dropping napalm on Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos villages. So I escaped not because of a conscious choice, but because I was married. Good karma.

I also considered applying to the FBI, but figured they are just glorified cops, and I probably wouldn't have been accepted anyway so I skipped that. And the CIA, where I thought I would be accepted — intelligence analyst with German and Russian languages under my belt. The only possible negative aspect was that my wife was not an American citizen. But that could have been remedied by her becoming one. But I used it as an excuse for avoiding the CIA, which I didn't despise yet, but certainly didn't like the arrogance I'd seen in them in Germany. Good choice.

I worked as an insurance investigator for the Retail Credit Co. checking whether the poor people who applied for 50 cents a week life insurance actually existed and for automobile insurance to make sure that the applicant doesn't have an undeclared son under 25 who also drives the car. (The premiums were higher if they did). Renate's employment as reservation agent for Swissair was certainly more interesting and came with the added benefit of free or very reduced fare to wherever Swissair flew — which was just about everywhere.

I began to seriously look at airlines as possible employers. Those days the best place to look was the New York Times classified section. I spotted an employment agency ad for airline ticket agents, so I went for it. Again, the foreign languages helped. They sent me to American Airlines at LaGuardia airport in Queens. A Chief Agent interviewed me and hired me on the spot. The only problem was that it involved shift work, so night school at Brooklyn College was out. No problem. Good Choice.

The job was interesting and even fun, but also often challenging — during delays and cancellations due to bad weather for example. I also made a couple of good friends, whom I will describe now because the experience of their friendship was (possibly) meaningful many years later.

John Rogan, Paul (Hoot) Gibson and I had been working together on the AA ticket counter for a while and we often went after work on the night shift for a couple of beers in a local pub; it was relaxing after many hours of tension dealing with passengers who were not always understanding of delays, over-bookings and cancellations, all things that were not our fault but which we were blamed for anyway. We were, after all, the visible faces of the airline.

The check-in and ticketing people were basically responsible for getting the passengers on the airplanes on time and selling and issuing their tickets. But one day that changed. We were transferred from operations to sales, which meant that along with the above, we were now required to be super-polite to our passengers who were, we were told as if we didn't know, paying for everything, including our salaries. So, you know: The customer is always right — even when he isn't. Sounds easy right? That depends on each individual's personality and attitude. For some it is easy, for others, it's not.

Hoot (Paul, that is) quit shortly after. He was an honest country boy who couldn't abide having to smile at and ass-kiss, as he put it, arrogant college students and shoe salesmen.

One night — I remember it clearly, not only because of the phone call but also because Robert F. Kennedy was checking in for a flight to Washington or Boston. It was an outside call, routed to our internal number. John answered. I saw him talking very seriously with someone. I took over the passengers he was neglecting, as well as my own. When he finished, he came directly to me interrupting what I was doing. “That was Jane Gibson,” he said, swallowing hard, “the hooter died, and she wants us to be pall bearers.” She had told John what he died of, some fatal disease, I forget which. He was our age — about 28.

I borrowed my father's car and we drove up to the nearest town, following Jane's directions. I don't remember the town's name; it may have been Glen Falls. It was a long time ago. We stayed in a hotel overnight, after drinking too much beer in the bar, and the next morning continued to Hoot's village, about twenty minutes away.

There was a church service, then we carried the casket to the hearse and followed it to the cemetery along with a long line of cars containing the hooter's family and friends. It must have been sad (I barely remember it), Hoot being so young and strong and good. It was a clear cold morning with snow glistening on the nearby mountains. It was where Hoot and Jane belonged, more appropriate for them than New York City. John and I barely spoke during the four-hour drive back. What was there to say? That life sucks?

A year or two later, after I had quit American Airlines in order to work for the International Air Transport Association (IATA) as a Compliance Officer, one day I had to fly to Buffalo on an investigation. I went to American Airlines at LaGuardia airport dressed in a business suit and carrying an attaché case, which would surely raise an amused eyebrow along with an ironic remark by John Rogan, if he happened to be working that morning shift. He wasn't. The rest of my ex-compañeros were duly impressed though. I asked about John and was told that he had transferred to air-freight. Good for him, I thought, no phony smiles needed there. I never saw him again, until the dream, that is.

Back at LaGuardia airport I became an acting PSM (Passenger Service Manager). It was one step above ticket agent, not really a manager, more a trouble-shooter. The “manager” part was a pin saying so on the left breast of the uniform. There was a PSM office, where mishandled passengers were soothed and sent on their way, if possible. It was also used as a waiting area for VIPs so they wouldn't have to associate with the hoi polloi. John F. Kennedy, who was often traveling between Washington and Boston, a connection in New York still being necessary those days, never used it, even when he was running for president. He preferred being among the other waiting passengers, smiling, shaking hands and being generally loved. His initials were JFK, but no one called him that yet. To fly from Boston to Washington you had to connect in New York, so we saw Senator Kennedy often — until he became a serious presidential candidate, and the secret service goon-wall closed him in — but not enough as it turned out.

It' s hard now to grasp how a politician could be so popular, and became more and more loved as time went on, except of course by the Cuban exile community in Florida, the mafia and the military-industrial complex. When he was assassinated though it became evident. The U.S. consulate in Buenos Aires had a line a block long for a week of people waiting to sign the condolence book. And there were similar scenes around the world.

One day in November a snowstorm suddenly struck New York City and a large part of the Eastern seaboard. It was my day off, but they phoned me to come in and help with the normal airport chaos when bad weather hit. I sort of liked working in the chaos, especially at double pay. I started at six in the afternoon and by 9 p.m. the airport was shut down for incoming and outgoing flights — which left a lot of wannabe passengers in the airport with no place to go. If they were initiating their journeys in New York, they could go home. The problem was with those who were returning home or connecting to some other destination. We had to re-book them (on already fully booked flights), find space in already full hotels (finally impossible, so they slept in the airport), try to calm the irate ones, who seemed to think that bad weather was the airlines' fault.

The Station Manager asked me to stay another six hours and relieve the Lost and Found agent, who was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Bad weather also tends to separate passengers from their luggage. To use the Washington, New York, Boston example, the pax who starts in Washington on his/her way to Boston makes it to New York on a delayed flight, sprints to the gate to make the departing flight to Boston and makes it, but his bag does not; it joins the many other bags in the Lost and Found area from that and many other flights which missed their connections. So, the poor schmucks arrive in Boston and wait for their bags until they realize that they're not coming, so they go to the Lost and Found agent, who fills out a form with the bag's description and, most importantly, the tag number. Those days the baggage tags were attached to the handle by a rubber band — I kid you not — and they often came off. The L & F agent gets rid of the passengers, telling them to go home or to their hotel and the bag will be retrieved and delivered to them asap. Which was true, if it was ever found. Then the agent sent messages by telex — if you don't know what a telex is ... was ... I don't have time to explain. There was no internet, no email, so telex was what we considered super-fast communication — to the L&F agents in other airports trying to trace the lost bags. A good L&F agent had to have not only knowledge, but also intuition.

The young woman I relieved, Peggy, had a supernatural radar. We once pondered over a VIP's bag which had somehow disappeared between Chicago and New York. Actually, he was a VIP because he told me I better find his bag “quick” or else, with an Italian accent. “Try Rome,” Peggy said. “Rome?” I objected. “We don't even fly there.” (American Airlines was still a domestic carrier then.) “Yeah, but let's try anyway; I got a hunch.” Knowing that Peggy's hunches were as solid as Swiss francs, I sent a telex to Pan Am L&F in Rome with all the information I had. The next morning, they replied that they had the bag, but didn't understand how it got there, because the tag read “LGA” (LaGuardia). They sent it to Pan Am at Idlewild airport (now JFK) and we had it delivered to the passenger's hotel — the Waldorf Astoria. A few months later he was found dead floating in the East River. Apparently, they didn't want to waste cement.

Anyway, there I was alone in the L&F office with piles of orphaned bags in the baggage area next to the office. I don't remember the exact time I received the call from the AA general manager in Boston. He was nervous. “Senator John Kennedy's bag is lost,” he shouted in his Massachusetts twang, later made famous by JFK himself. “Didn't you get our telex?” “Actually, no,” I said, “not yet.” A pile of unread telexes covered my desk sent from L&F agents around the system tracing lost bags. It always happened during storms. I was shuffling through them, when the one from BOS caught my eye because of the word URGENT! repeated a dozen times. “Oh, here it is,” I said. “What?” he screamed, “The bag?” “No, the telex.” “Well now that you have the description, find the fucking bag!”

I held the phone away from my ear and looked at it as the blood rose to my eyes. Then I spoke to the mouthpiece without placing the earpiece against my ear: “I'm hanging up now. If and when you are able to talk with civility, calm down and try again.” click.

I went out to the orphaned bags area with the telex in hand and soon found the large aluminum suitcase with Kennedy's name-tag on it. The phone was ringing again as I dragged it into the office. “This is Ted Jones (don't remember his real name) from Boston? What did you say your name was?” I told him. “Okay, Mr. Smith, I'm really sorry about that outburst. It's just that this is so important.” I couldn't see what was so important about one lost bag among so many, except that the owner was a VIP. “You see, Senator Kennedy is going to New Hampshire tomorrow morning, and you are aware of how important New Hampshire is in presidential elections?”

“Yes, I know,” I said. “Symbolic.”

“That's right — and not only the senator's toothbrush is in that bag, but also his speech, which will be heard by the whole country. So, you can understand how important it is that we get that bag to him asap.”

“I can see that, Mr. Jones, and I really like Kennedy, but we're closed.”

“Oh my God! It stopped snowing here hours ago.”

“Here too,” I confirmed, “but the airport closed for landings before it closed for take-offs, so we have no planes left.”

“What about 621?” he asked desperately. 621 was our late- night milk-run to Boston.

“Canceled. The early morning flights will be canceled too. Always happens, no airplanes.”

“Shit.”

Yeah, I thought, this guy probably promised Kennedy he'd move heaven and earth — mostly heaven — to get his bag to him.

“There's always the train though,” I said. I knew there was a midnight milk-run from Grand Central up to New England because in the past when there were no flights to Boston and Hartford, we'd sent passengers there. But this wasn't a passenger, only his bag.

“The train? Of course. Can you do that, Mr. Smith, get the bag on that train?”

“Call me Frank. I don't know,” I admitted. “First, I gotta find out if the train is running. I'll call you back.”

“No, I'll hold.”

I hung up. Then I found Grand Central Station's number on our list and called. As expected, everyone at the other end was in a bad mood, but Kennedy's name worked wonders — as it had with me, now that I think of it. Finally, I was talking to the dispatcher and explaining the situation to him.

“If you can get that bag here on time, it'll go,” he said. “Bring it to me, O'Neill, in the dispatcher's office.”

I looked at my watch. It was 11:15. “How much will it cost?” I asked.

“No time for that. I'll give it to the conductor. Colored guy, loves Kennedy too.”

The problem now was how to get the suitcase to Grand Central Station. I couldn't go, I was alone with the phone ringing off the hook and hundreds of lost bags to reunite with their owners. I decided to try the baggage handlers, although without much hope. You see, American Airlines had terrible relations with unionized employees. The president, C.R. Smith, hated unions. And the unions and its members hated him. The workers did their job, but with the absolute minimum of effort and according to the union contract. The union, by the way, was the Teamsters. They tried to recruit us as well, but we (white collar types) wanted no part of it. Luckily, every time our blue-collar colleagues got raises through contract negotiations, we got more without a peep.

They had work-shifts on duty even when there was nothing to do, and there were bound to be several guys playing cards now. I had pretty good relations with them because I didn't try to boss them around. They only took orders from their own bosses. I bent down and crawled on the belt through the baggage entrance. The Lead Agent and three others were drinking coffee and playing cards. The airline didn't see fit to give them uniforms, so they looked like a bunch of guys hanging out in a bar.

“Hiya, Smitty,” the Lead said. “No bags here; we dumped them all in the area.”

“Just wanna hide a while, Cassidy,” I said. “The telephone, telexes and people are all driving me nuts.”

“Gimme three,” one of them said, and threw down three cards. There were only coins in the pot, but coins were worth a lot more then.

“And now I get this call from the manager in Boston ...” I told them about it. When I mentioned Kennedy, the youngest one, trying to sound tough, said, “Who da fuck is dat?”

“John F. Kennedy, you ignorant Polack prick,” Cassidy said. “The next president of the United States.”

“A course, I know dat,” the kid said. “Just sayin', dats all.”

“Send it by taxi,” Cassidy said.

“Yeah, but with who? I can't go, and I can't just hand it over to some taxi driver.” Lead Agent Cassidy, about 40 years old, looked at the three working class young men seated around him. “Anyone interested in going to Grand Central with Senator Kennedy's suitcase? With his fuckin' speech in it, which can help him become the president of the United States of America?”

“I'll go,” a skinny kid with big ears said, and jumped up.

“It's voluntary,” Cassidy said.

“I said I'll go, boss.”

“What's your name?” I asked the kid (actually we were about the same age) after he had picked up the suitcase and we were heading for the terminal exit.

“Johnson,” he answered. “Charlie Johnson. We don't get nametags."

There was one taxi at the entrance. The driver's head was under the hood. He backed out and closed the hood. “Goin' to Grand Central Station,” I told him.

“Not with me, you ain't.” He was a black guy, very big. “I'm gone home, man.”

I repeated the Kennedy story again.

“Why didn't ya say so, lord sakes. Gimme dat bag.” He put it in the passenger seat alongside him and Charlie Johnson got in the back after I gave him ten bucks — the airline's money of course — for the round-trip taxi fare. I looked at my watch: it was 11:45. I ran back to the L&F office where the phone was ringing. I lifted and hung it up, then dialed the dispatcher at Grand Central and told him the suitcase was on its way but wouldn't make it by midnight, maybe a few minutes later. He told me they'd hold the train, just to make sure that young guy Jack Kennedy gets to be president. He laughed and said thank you ... to me!

I hung up and the phone rang again immediately. It was the Boston asshole of course. I told him to meet the train tomorrow morning and get the bag from the conductor. “And give Senator Kennedy my regards,” I said.

“You know him?” he said, astonished.

“Sure.” Actually, I did, in a way. Once when I was acting Passenger Service Manager because the real one was sick, I held a flight to Boston so Kennedy could catch it at the last minute. He'd thanked me profusely, which he didn't need to do. A couple of weeks later when I was back on the ticket counter, PSM badge gone, he remembered me and asked if I'd been demoted, and I explained that I'd only been acting PSM that day. He said he hoped I'd get to be a real one soon.

Sometimes I think there must be some kind of evil entity charged with getting rid of the special people who appear on this earthly scene now and then and who are destined to do really good, important things. They get streets and plazas, schools and museums, even airports named after them, but their ability for accomplishment is cut short. You know who I mean. People like Jack Kennedy, his brother Bobby, who I also knew, sort of, from the airport, Martin Luther king, Gandhi — and others I guess who never become famous. (On re-reading this first draft, I want to add another, much more recent one: Alexei Navalny.) Sometimes we just have to ask ourselves why.

One day IBM, together with American Airlines, began recruiting employees to assist in developing computer programs. It would take a few months during which the volunteers would work with IBM, still receiving AA salaries. When the development was finished and made operational, they could return to AA or stay with IBM. I wasn't interested. A few months later American Airlines installed the world's first automated reservations system, more efficient, less human. Ninety percent of our reservation agents were “downsized” and the rest, management, were distributed around the system, including to LaGuardia airport, thereby making chances for promotion slim. We received a few ex-managers and some people who had been with AA up to twenty years. I saw my ambition to become a real — rather than “acting” — Passenger Service Manager vanish overnight.

Around that time our first daughter, Beatrice, was born, making a career move more urgent. I answered a New York Times employment agency ad for an “international airline investigator.” After several years as ticket and check-in agent at LaGuardia Airport I knew something about the operating end of the airline industry, but not much else. The word “international” intrigued me. I thought about getting a job in Germany. The employment agency sent me to the compliance office of IATA — International Air Transport Association — at 500 Fifth Avenue.

The director of the IATA Compliance Office, Rudolf Feick, was a German immigrant who claimed that his officers were like his fingers, forgetting that he had only ten fingers, whereas there were about forty Compliance Officers scattered around the globe, and I was about to become one of them. My airline experience wasn't extensive, but I assumed he was impressed by my having been an intelligence analyst in the U.S. Army in Germany, and that I knew both German and Russian. He obviously had no clue about how inept military intelligence was and certainly still is. After a month's training, which mostly consisted of studying the massive Traffic Conferences Manual, Mr. Feick called me into his office and said “I want to transfer you to Buenos Aires. Talk to your wife, think about it and tell me tomorrow. The other posting open is Calcutta.” I was hoping for Germany, but Buenos Aires was at least better than Calcutta.