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

President Bush’s visit to O’Hare International Airport on September 27 was an appropriate and welcome gesture in the wake of the September 11 attack on the World Trade Centers and the Pentagon. Bush flew to Chicago to reassure Americans that it is safe to fly. Incidently, the President is not the first national figure to fly to Chicago to try boost the confidence of a jittery public wary of commercial aviation.

In 1931, Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne, a mammoth national figure in an era before celebrity hype became an industry, was hired by one of the Hollywood studios as a consultant on a football film. Rockne was to travel to California aboard a Fokker Trimotor. Over Kansas his plane crashed, killing all aboard.

The nation was shocked by this high profile crash, and a majority of the few people that did fly commercially in that era immediately stopped doing so. The airlines then, as in the present aftermath of the September 11 calamity, were in crisis.

It would be the Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who would be the key to the airlines trying to convince a skiddish public to take to the skies again.

In 1932, a representative of American Airlines approached Governor Roosevelt, offering the use of a Ford Trimotor aircraft if Roosevelt needed it to travel to Chicago. Roosevelt, knowing the power of such a dramatic gesture, agreed, and when nominated that year, flew to Chicago to personally accept the Democratic nomination for President. His flight, which was done in hops from Albany, concluded at Chicago Municipal (later renamed Midway Airport), where he was met by thousands of supporters. In one dramatic gesture, FDR shattered one tradition, and bolstered an industry. He accepted his nomination in person, an act never before done by a presidential candidate, and more importantly to the airlines, demonstrated that flying was safe. Shortly thereafter, FDR was elected president, and the airlines bounced back.

Sixty-Nine years later, in the wake of the World Trade Center disaster, President Bush flew to Chicago and was met by thousands of cheering people, while the podium was flanked by two United and American Airlines jets. For America’s sake, let us hope that President Bush’s visit lifted the confidence of present commercial air travelers, as FDR’s flight did for a nation weary of economic Depression and frightened to fly. But Roosevelt, the “First Flyer” , demonstrated, in deed and in words, that in the skies Americans had nothing to fear, but fear itself.