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

But I’d have to say the one thing I miss most is standing on the tarmac in the evening. There’s something magestic about the airporot at night. Here you have this one square mile parcel of land, in the middle of a city, and at night its surpriseingly quiet. The airport is almost entirely black, except for the runway lights. It’s as if a tornado had lifted the christmas tree in Daley Center, and scattered its lights over this field. And the blue lights, twinkling in the evening air, have always been my favorite.

I recently had a chance to travel out of Midway. My wife and I took our children on a vacation last Spring. I had travelled through Midway countless times, but this trip was different, for sitting on my lap was my 10 month old son, Pierce, named after another Pierce. As the jet taxied towards the runway, I gazed out at those pale blue lights, and thought of my grandfather. I reflected on how he had taken off from this airport 75 years before, when it was still a farmer’s field, and the thrill of flying was new, and how soaring over Chicago, the city that he had loved, brought him the freedom he had left Ireland to find.

As the DC-9's engines whined, and the jet thundered down the runway, lifting off into the air, my son squealed with delight, and I held him close, and gave him a kiss, and said, “Of course it’s fun Pierce, It’s in your blood.”

And I wonder if one pilot, already in the air, a flyer used to propellors, not jets, tuned in the field’s frequency and heard the tower give our DC-9 its proper heading, ensuring a safe flight for his great grandson.

And I cannot tell you how pleased I was, that a fourth generation member of the family took to the air for the first time from a farmer’s field, on the southside of Chicago once the crossroads of the world a name that honors victory in the Pacific. And a place, where at night, the lights twinkle blue.