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

The story of Chicago is the tale of adventurers, of people immigrating from other countries or moving west from Eastern Cities, and finding a future along the shores of Lake Michigan. Carl Sandburg described Chicago as the "City of Broad Shoulders", but it was also the city of possibility to the many new arrivals. For the Irish, Chicago was a town where one could compete on a level playing field, not burdened by a penal system they had known in Ireland, which was rigged to favor those of power, privilege, and class. And it was such people of vision that turned Chicago into the World Class city that it is today.

This is the story of one Irishman's arrival to the big city, who came to seek the American dream, and found it in the skies above Chicago.

Pierce O'Carroll was born in Rathdowney, County Leix, on the border of Tipperary, in 1899. Son of a farmer, he was almost destined to spend the rest of his life working the land, except for an event that would change his life forever.

One day, as a young man of 17, while toiling in the fields, he heard the strange drone of an engine. He was startled to see a bi-plane flying overhead, the first airplane he had ever seen. In an instant, his life was forever changed, for it was at that moment Pierce O'Carroll chose to become a pilot.

He immigrated to the United States in 1925, and found work as a streetcar motor-man on Michigan Avenue. Yet, his dream of flying brought him to the Southwest side of Chicago, to Ashburn field, now a long since vanished airport at 79th and Cicero. After his first flying lesson, O'Carroll was looking forward to the next one. However, when he went out to the airport, his instructor was late. Pierce got impatient, and decided to take the plane up anyway. When the instructor finally showed up, he saw his student doing turns and rolls in the skies above. After landing, there was only one thing the instructor could say to O'Carroll: "You passed."

In 1926, the city of Chicago leased an onion field from the Board of Education at 63rd and Cicero and put down Cinder runways. This modest attempt was called Chicago Municipal Airport, known to us today as Midway Airport. O'Carroll opened a business called Monarch Air Service in a hanger on the field, which serviced airplanes for the still experimental enterprise of aviation. O'Carroll's only real competition was a small fledgling airline called United, which was located in the next hanger.

The Monarch hanger became a place where later aviation heroes, such as Jimmy Doolittle and Bill Lear could be found, swapping stories of their exploits in the air.

Aviation in the early barnstorming days was not the sleek comfortable mode of travel it is today. In fact, it was a grimy, tough business, of engines that could blow out at any time, and usually did. Once, O'Carroll was flying over the city, when his engine failed. He made an emergency landing in front of Soldier field, in the parking lot. A crowd gathered, to see him, his tool kit by his side, as he repaired an engine. Someone asked him how he was going to get the plane out of the parking lot. O'Carroll said he was going to bring it out the same way he brought it in, by taking it off, even though the path out was short, and marred by trees. He fired up the engine, and after a wave to the crowd, his airplane roared into the air, clearing the trees. A few weeks later, another pilot put his plane down in the same parking lot, yet he didn't have the nerve to take it off. So, he called O'Carroll, who did it for him.

Phil Felper, a pilot who first met O'Carroll in the 1930's, talked of his drive and vision. "Pierce would say, `If the birds could fly, I could fly.' A guy like him drove you."

In the 1930's, the only people who flew were either airmail pilots, or the very rich. But O'Carroll wanted aviation to be enjoyed by anyone, regardless of economics or class. He started a sightseeing business, which gave flights over the city on the weekends. People from all over Chicago would come out to a little wooden shack on the airport, where his wife Rose from County Meath would sell tickets, for $3.50. The DC-3, which could carry 21 people, would glide over the lake-front, as people marveled at the skyline on the first flight of their lives.

Sightseeing was one thing, but O'Carroll saw the true potential of aviation as a way to bring people on vacations to warm places on the weekends, and do it quickly and cheaply. He began to fly to Miami after World War II, and he made it affordable for his passengers. He began to realize his dream of making aviation accessible to the common man.

This new type of airline was known as non-scheduled airlines, or "non-skeds", and their arrival on the transportation scene was not universally welcomed. Although O'Carroll's flights were booked solid, as young honeymooners and families took their first Florida vacations, the more established airlines, (whose businesses were being undercut by these cheap flights) began to lobby Congress to regulate the non-skeds out of business.

O'Carroll began to feel the pressure of this lobbying, and not being shy, he sent a letter to President Harry S. Truman in 1950:

O'Carroll noted that the dream of open and free competition in the skies was beginning to erode due to government interference, and that the public would suffer the most from such bureaucratic intrusions. O'Carroll felt that this was in direct opposition to the dream of inexpensive air travel. O'Carroll relayed how he had spent the last "twenty-five years of the best part of a man's life devoted to an idea-progress in aviation to provide air transportation to the working man, his wife and family...I feel proud to be able to provide low cost air transportation."

Such competition, O'Carroll reiterated gave "the working man air transportation at low cost. Let's all work to provide air transportation at low cost, even lower than at present, if possible. It's the American way of life."

There is no record of a response to this letter, but the regulatory climate became so unfavorable to the non-skeds, that O'Carroll would get out of it in 1951; O'Carroll's dream of cheap fares for the common man had stalled.

Unfortunately, O'Carroll would never live to see the reemergence of low cost air-travel. It was not until 1979 that the government deregulated the transportation industry, and Americans of all economic strata would again have the opportunity to take advantage of inexpensive fares.

Ironically, this pilot, who had spent thousands of hours in the air during aviation's dangerous days, died on the ground. In 1961, O'Carroll suffered a fatal stroke in New York City.

Pierce O'Carroll loved Chicago, especially as he soared above it's majestic skyline in a DC-3. He was gratified of the fact that, as he once wrote that , "I have flown more first riders over the city of Chicago than any pilot in the United states, and I am proud of it."

And even in death he flew, back to his beloved city. It was a dark December night, when the plane with his casket aboard came in for its final approach, the runway lights, like the beams of lighthouses on the ocean, guiding this ship of the air to its port through the fog.

The controllers in the tower were ready; they had been waiting, and watching. For when his plane’s wheels touched down, and the aircraft rolled to a halt, a switch was thrown, and the runway lights dimmed, a tribute from his friends at Midway to this Tipperary farmer who had been born before the Wright Brothers took off at Kitty Hawk, and died in the era of rockets.

After the priest recited the Latin prayers at the graveside, and the crowd of mourners began to break up, the muffled roar of a aircraft’s engine could be heard, as it came into view over Holy Seplicure cemetery, as Pierce’s friend Joey Bishop circled the gravesite, and before departing, tipped his wings, a final goodbye, from one pilot to another.