LJ Archive - 05/23/05: "Our Spirit Will Lift You"

"You really don't notice the planes after a while. I mean, what with the train yard back there, truck terminal behind the house, and sundry urban sirens, explosions, and industrial noises, it sort of just blends in.”

I don’t know how many times I’ve said that to people I’ve met, describing where I grew up in Chicago. Of course there is a measure of facetiousness in that statement: like when Elwood Blues tells Jake that he’ll “hardly notice” the Chicago Transit Authority elevated train rattling the bed and knocking the pictures off the walls as it roars by a mere eight feet outside the window, every ten seconds.

Instead of the “El” though (it had always forsaken our end of town), we had a newly-revived economic dynamo called Midway Airport. Our house was just a few hairs westward deviant from the southwest approach, and 300 yards south from the end of the runway.

So yeah, you noticed. If you were smart you kept one eye out the back window, scanning the sky for a speck that would quickly resolve into a DC-9 or 737. You did this, not only to know when to raise the volume on the TV, but also to make sure that speck was following the same course as all the others and not about to rearrange a few houses instead.

But we forgave this, because it meant the heritage of our community was rebuilding, after being raped by politicians and progress when O’Hare opened its tarmacs in 1955.

Midway was the world’s busiest airport in 1954, but by 1959 it was a mere shadow of its former glory. Twenty years later it was a desolate square mile of decaying hangers, antique Cessnas, and forgotten promises. Our neighborhood listed aimlessly, the industrial park of the boom times slogging along at a snail’s pace. When I was born, there wasn't much going on in the area; as just another nondescript collection of anonymous buildings and workers feeding the beast of the city, I've heard the words depressing and forlorn used fittingly many times. But that changed on October 31, 1979. A small company embarked on an inauspicious concept, and over a decade near- single-handedly transformed a dead blight into a throbbing hotbed of activity. They named themselves Midway Airlines, after the airport and community they would serve and support.

Naturally then, one of the earliest images to impregnate a memory in my head was that logo, on the first jetliner I watched on approach for landing. It was dark outside, and my parents were directing me to the blinking lights on the wingtips, as the plane drifted in like a UFO. I didn't really understand what it was, but the tail was lit up, and I saw an abstract image emblazoned on a fin. Insignificant perhaps, but it stuck with me, and I couldn’t appreciate then what it really symbolized to the community.

It was revival, an awakening of purpose and dreams.

I used to ride my bike by the airport and watch through the chain link fence as planes queued up; my pulse racing as the whining jet engines accelerated to a thundering roar and sent each plane hurtling toward me one by one, blasting off in a shot over my head, climbing into the air above, tracing a long deliberate arc back over the airport, out of the city and into parts as then unknown but to the heavens.

I dreamed of the day I myself would pilot one, taking friends and strange companions to places they had never been, serving their needs, inspiring a community. I still entertain that thought, and it’s no coincidence that I moved near the airport here in Frankfort: they have a flight school. Someday… someday. I took a test flight last summer, and once we settle into a routine with our infant daughter I hope to pursue it further.

Midway Airlines eventually became a victim of its own success: important enough to be squashed by predatory designs of larger carriers, but not before they passed the torch to Southwest and inspired a community to embrace its roots. Today the Airport is nothing at all like the depressing wasteland my parents and relatives tell me about, and yeah, you’re going to notice the planes. (It’s so bad that the city is paying to replace the windows in every house within a 2-mile radius, and the chain-link fences were replaced by sound-deadening concrete years ago).

The El didn’t pipe its last artery from the heart of Chicago's "Loop" into our neighborhood until 1993 - our neighborhood was the quiet little stepchild that Chicago’s centenary transit icon had all but ignored after O'Hare opened 40 years prior. But on Halloween 1993 - a non-coincidental tribute to Midway Airlines’ first flight 14 years earlier - the Orange Line reconnected us amidst great fanfare. Property values have skyrocketed, the Loop is psychologically closer than ever before, and my old stomping grounds are rife with exciting, dynamic change.

This may seem like a pointless ramble about planes and trains, but I urge you to think for a minute about your own background. What are your dreams, and what got you where you are today? How many unsung heroes paved the road before you? What kind of butterfly flapped its wings and bred a hurricane of subconscious aspiration?

Look below the surface of your own dreams - Never forget your roots. From that first undated memory to my aspirations today, it’s obvious that those planes and the people who flew them have impacted who I am in no small way. I might never fly after all, but the inspiration applies to any endeavor.

The clamor of an airport reminds me all the time. And perhaps, if I'm lucky, I may yet honor the spirit of the normal joes who dared to dream before me, forging a legacy that inspires others a quarter century later and beyond...