We often eat out after Dad has returned from a long business trip, to spare Mom another night of cooking dinner for ingrates. We are never shy about expressing our contempt for her homemade spaghetti sauce, made from real tomatoes grown in her garden. “Why can’t we have Ragú instead?” Dad’s trips last as long as two weeks, and Jim—dominating Little League baseball and football—feels his absence most acutely. The radio holds a terrible poignancy for Jim. I will press PLAY on a cassette recorder in the basement one afternoon to hear him earnestly crooning “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” If only there were a Bufferin that could race straight to the source of his red-hot pain.
This fear of jet-enabled abandonment is in the air, or at least on the air, in “Cats in the Cradle” (“When you comin’ home, Dad?”) and “Daniel” (“Daniel is travelin’ tonight on a plane…”). Dad is feeling the reverse sensation, the existential ennui of air travel, as expressed in “Big Ol’ Jet Airliner” (“As I get on the 707”) and “It Never Rains in Southern California” (“Got on board a westbound 747”). Dad doesn’t know these songs or any others, save the few drinking songs he learned while playing college football, which he teaches us while tapping the wheel of the Impala wagon on our Saturday drives to Hardware Hank.
Oh Purdue, Oh Purdue, how you make me quiver
With your old Sweet Shop and your Wabash River
How I love you with my heart and I love you with my liver
Oh Purdue (tap, tap), by the River (tap, tap)
Oh Purdue, what a hole, by the River (tap, tap).
He is happy behind the wheel of our butterscotch land yacht, and the names he calls other drivers become a kind of music: “nitwit,” “dingbat,” “ding-dong,” “idiot,” “imbecile,” “moron,” “bozo,” and “buffoon.” Dad is the Roget of motoring insult. Of these epithets, “bozo” is by far his favorite, a vestigial memory of The Bozo Show, airing daily on channel 9 in Chicago when his three sons were toddlers there.
“That’s right, bozo, don’t use your blinker. Let me guess which way you’re going.”
Errands with Dad are rewarding in other ways too. I get to choose a sucker from a little jar at the liquor store. Then there’s a coin-operated horsey outside the Ben Franklin five-and-dime that’s always out of order. The car wash is terrifying, a felt-tentacled monster, foaming at the mouth, that eats us up at one end and excretes us at the other. At the dry cleaners, I watch the shirts make their endless ovals around the carousel all day. They travel with a mechanical ease in exactly the way the slot cars in the basement are supposed to work, but never do, always having to be nudged with a finger and then flying off the track at the corners. Every single time Dad pulls the car into the garage after these errands, he says, “Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.” It’s the second half of a nursery-rhyme couplet that begins “To market, to market, to buy a fat hog.”
Before Dad leaves on a “business trip,” he crouches down and tells me, “Hold down the fort for your mother.” Should something happen to Mom or Jim or Tom, I am fourth in line to the throne, which is to say the Archie Bunker chair, and I feel that responsibility like a physical weight on my frail shoulders. I repeat our phone number to myself, in case of emergency.
On January 15, 1970, First Lady Pat Nixon christens Pan Am’s Clipper Young America at Dulles airport in Washington. The majestic flying beast is on its way to New York, where six days later it embarks on its maiden commercial voyage from JFK to London Heathrow. Some passengers have booked their tickets two years in advance. “This airplane is the finest piece of aeronautical engineering ever constructed,” says the captain, Robert Weeks. Among the passengers on the return flight from London to New York is Raquel Welch, of Fantastic Voyage, which is precisely what she has had aboard the 747. “Once you have flown on this plane,” says Emmet Judge, a passenger on that first flight, “it will spoil you for everything else.”
By summer of that year the 747 carries its millionth passenger. Everyone wants on, as the glamour and vastness of these planes are breathlessly reported. A passenger supposed to be flying across the United States on a TWA 747 has his flight delayed for fifteen minutes when he loses his daughter—on board! Coach passengers can choose smoking or no-smoking sections, movie or no-movie sections, R-or G-rated sections. Travelers on American Airlines can book a dinner table for four with swivel chairs and bone china. Paramount premieres The Adventurers on a 747 flying from JFK to LAX as stars Candice Bergen and Ernest Borgnine hold court in the upstairs lounge.
At the dawn of jumbo-jet travel, Dad makes his maiden voyage aboard the 747. It’s in that upstairs lounge that Dad and his boss drink a French liqueur called Green Chartreuse all night, all the way from Minneapolis–Saint Paul International Airport to Paris Orly, where a French employee of Mickey Mining fetches them at the gate. There is no such thing as airport security, even though hijackings have become commonplace. In the United States alone, more than a hundred fifty planes are “skyjacked” between 1961 and 1973. Fewer than seven months after its maiden voyage, that first 747, the Clipper Young America, is hijacked to Cuba.
Every night before bed I pray that Dad’s plane isn’t hijacked. One of the 1970s’ biggest hit movies, Airport—the first of the decade’s many disaster films—was shot at Minneapolis–Saint Paul International and involves a terrorist trying to blow up a 707 in flight. Is this what Mom means by an emergency? Will Dad recite our phone number—ay-day-date, too-weight-seven-two—in turbulence?
The Frenchman charged with escorting Dad and his boss to their first sales call of the day tries to speed them through customs, but the American executives from Mickey Mining just want to sit down. “We kept telling the guy, ‘No, we have to get aspirin,’” Dad will recall forty years after the fact. “But the guy couldn’t understand what we were saying and must have been wondering how these two Americans could arrive in Paris first thing in the morning absolutely shit-faced.”
Of course, the Frenchman speaks little English, and my father speaks not a word of French, beyond “Tar-zhay” and “grand mal.” Eventually he is driven, head aching, to his first sales call, perhaps muttering under his 110-proof morning breath, “C’est la Guy. C’est la Guy.”
On another trip, the 747 bears him to Berlin. After calling on Mickey Mining’s many Teutonic customers, Dad asks a 3M Germany colleague, “What’s a good schnapps to take back to the U.S.?”
“There are so many,” the colleague replies. “Shall we try a few?” Though Dad is scheduled to fly back to Bloomington the next morning, via London, he tries “a few zillion,” as he later confesses. A knock on his hotel door wakes him at three the next afternoon. It is his 3M Germany colleague. “We missed you at breakfast” is all he says.