Chicago's Midway Airport: The First seventy-five Years by Christopher Lynch Lake Claremont Press Phone: 773/583-7800 www.lakeclaremont.com

Midway airport, on Chicago's southwest side, is the site of firsts. It was Chicago's first official airport, and for decades it was the busiest airport in the nation, and then the world. The story of Midway can be viewed as a reflection of America, encompassing heroes and villains, generosity and greed, boom and bust, progress, and decline, and in the final analysis, rebirth.

Yet even though Midway is familiar to many Chicagoans and travelers from across the country, the airport’s origins, reaching back to the dawn of manned flight, are generally not known. Most people are not aware that at one time, Midway had a railroad track that ran through the center of the field, a real impediment and danger to pilots. It would take an act of Congress to have this track removed, a fitting metaphor for how air travel would supersede that of train travel. Readers will also find it astonishing that an elementary school stood for decades, just feet from an active runway of the busiest airport in the world.

The airport would always be a playground of the rich and famous. In 1927, Charles A. Lindbergh, who had just completed his famous flight to Paris, landed in Chicago in The Spirit of St. Louis, and as he taxied the aircraft off the field, he was flanked by a large police motorcade.

Midway was where airlines like United would begin, in a small hangar on Cicero Avenue, and where passengers were, more often than not, accompanied on their journey by a sack of mail. It was also a place where many giants of the Twentieth-century would work, like George Marshall, who was stationed there with the 108th Army Air Corps in the late 1920s. Marshall, of course, would go on to be the architect of the Marshall Plan, rebuilding Europe after World War II. Another hero, air racer James H. Doolittle, was a familiar site at Chicago’s airport, even before he rose to fame as leader of the daring raid over Tokyo during World War II.

Midway was more than a mode of travel to the residents that lived around it. To most people who grew up on the southwest side of Chicago, the airport, founded in 1926, was always there, a presence as permanent as that of Lake Michigan. In the early days of aviation, visitors would go to the airport and gawk in wonder at these flying machines. Boyfriends would take their girlfriends on dates to the Cloud Room run by Marshall Fields in the airport’s terminal.

In 1949, Chicago Municipal Airport would be renamed Midway Airport, in honor of the Battle of Midway, the naval contest that was a turning point in the Pacific. The renaming of the airport was a very gracious and meaningful gesture on the part of Chicago toward the proud veterans of that war.

To many in Chicago, Midway continues to summon up memories of happy reunions, as well as sad good-byes. And for thousands of residents, Midway now means a paycheck, as it has become the economic engine of the southwest side.

The story of Midway is a great American saga that has never properly been told, and yet, continues to make history. Recently, the City of Chicago has shown its commitment to Midway with a $761 million expansion and renovation of the terminal.

Through photos, mementos, news clippings, and primary interviews, I have collected the stories and identified the themes that makes the account of Midway so important to the City of Chicago.