Midway Airport: The First Seventy-Five Years by Christopher Lynch Lake Claremont Press Phone: 773/583-7800 www.lakeclaremont.com

We first drove past the Standard Oil Hanger, a long and trusted customer for jet fuel for Monarch, with its fleet of corporate aircraft. On a clear day, executives boarding their jets could look east towards the towering skyscrapers of downtown Chicago, and see, glimmering in white, the Standard Oil building, its Italian marble a blinding white in the sun.

Businesses on the field, like Monarch, are known as "Fixed Based Operators," or FBO's. The small hanger on the west ramp that we were passing in the car was once owned and operated by Butler Aviation, once a huge presence in Corporate Aviation. Butler began by Paul Butler, an industrialist and flyer who carved out his own suburb west of Chicago, and named it Oak Brook. Butler came into aviation like a lot of rich people, as a hobby. His first hanger was on this field, and it was sold to him by my grandfather, Scotty O'Carroll. My mother remembered going to Oak Brook, then just a few homes on the prairie, where much of the deal was discussed. My mother's memories of that occasion are spotty, as most memories of early childhood usually are. However, she did remember the elegant upholstered chairs that they sat on, which to her experience were the softest on Earth.

Once Butler Aviation got going, it became Monarch's prime competitor, and Phil Felper ran the operation for Mr. Butler. Phil told me many times about meeting my grandfather on the field, and Phil would put on a thick brogue as he described the exchange, "Phil, I got a millionaire on one side of me, and another on the other side of me. What's a poor man like myself supposed to do?" And Phil would say, "Ah Scotty, your full of it!" This was pilot camaraderie. Phil also recalled the time that Paul Butler called up on the phone and asked if it would be all right with to send his son over to do some summer work. Phil said that would be fine. However, when the son, arriving in a chaffered limo, and got out with two Irish wolfhounds on a leash, Phil told him to go home.

We drove to the corner, where a chain link fence ran along 63rd Street as we turned and drove parallel to it. Within moments, we were geographically at 9 O'CLOCK, in front of the massive concave hangers, once the largest hangers in the world. Once leased by Monarch, the hanger now stored many of the City's trucks and snow plows that service the airport. I had heard rumors that this hanger had tunnels down below it that ran under the airport, built in the paranoid age of the Cold War, when it was thought that a person could survive a nuclear blast underground.

I had always admired these massive rounded hangers, which always reminded me of airplane hangers in the movies, that gave this side of the field a sense of military drama and mystery. They are also the first objects riders see from the Orange Line, the elevated train that runs from downtown Chicago to Midway. On its last leg, from Pulaski to Midway, the trains skim along high above the bungalow houses, like a low flying helicopter. And as the train banks before it descends towards the field, in the setting rays of the sun, these hangers can be spotted in the distance, their white arched rooftops gleaming white.

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