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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Rebecca Nappi : You won’t always fly in friendly skies

Rebecca Nappi The Spokesman-Review

I sat in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Sunday evening with two of my sisters and my niece, Laura. She came of traveling age after airline deregulation, and as we waited for our delayed flights, we sisters told Laura stories about the good old days of air travel.

We segued into memories of traveling by Greyhound bus in our youth. In that moment, I experienced a revelation. Every time you board an airplane, do not remember the Golden Age of airline travel. It’s gone forever. Instead, pretend you are embarking on a journey during that Golden Age of bus travel from long ago. As the busy, summer air travel season approaches, adopt bus-travel expectations. Expect that:

Things will smell.

My sisters and I wore nylons and dresses for our first airplane flights. Now, most people wear sweats. While people pile on the plane, and then while the plane sits on the runway, the air-conditioning is turned off. Passengers take off their shoes, now, in a desperate bid for comfort. Passengers also tote their own food onto airplanes. I carry egg sandwiches and oranges, and I have watched people consume meatball sandwiches and garlicky Caesar salads.

In bus travel days of old, people pulled out sandwiches of bologna and tuna fish. Sometimes, those sandwiches had languished for days in a person’s satchel. And on longer bus trips, people couldn’t shower, so they developed the wonderfully named “trucker’s bottom.”

The smell of not-so-fresh-people sharing a limited space was simply part of the bus travel experience. It’s part of plane travel now, too.

You must serve yourself and others.

Flight attendants in the Golden Age were young, perky women. Now, men and women work well into middle age. Something happens in your 50s that renders you incapable of plugging into people’s dramas. You encourage others to solve their own problems, because you’re tired of doing it for them. And you have a lot of clarity about what matters and what doesn’t.

In this age of bullies, drunks and potential terrorists on airplanes, I want older flight attendants looking out for us, because they aren’t going to put up with passenger crapola. But they also don’t have the time or the inclination to serve our every whim.

Buses rarely had attendants. Passengers helped one another. They shared food, and they held each other’s fussy babies. Adopt this helpful attitude, and the flight attendants who notice will be more likely to respond to your requests.

You will meet some creepy characters.

One summer, my sister CarolLynn took a bus from Eugene, Ore., to Spokane. She was a shy teen, afraid to hurt anyone’s feelings. She sat next to a one-armed older man. He asked her to hold his only hand the entire trip. She complied.

You expected to run into creepy characters on buses. Expect the same now on airplanes. My sister Janice and I reserved a window and aisle seat for the trip from Chicago, hoping we’d have an empty seat between us. No way.

But sitting in the middle seat was Zag Jeremy Pargo, returning to Gonzaga University after a visit home to Chicago. Janice was delighted to be seated next to someone so uncreepy that she gave him her coveted window seat. He said, “Thank you, Ma’am,” and after a five-minute chat, fell asleep.

Janice and I, meanwhile, popped our gum, shifted our 50-something bottoms around in Twiggy-size seats, dropped things on the floor and tried to reach them with our toes. The men in front of us reclined, trapping us in our seats. We laughed together about the Golden Age of air travel, because laughing, in the end, seemed much less disruptive than crying.