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

During Midway Airport’s hey-day during the 1950's many celebrities took a table in the elegant Cloud Room, run by Marshall Field’s overlooking the tarmac. However, the Cloud Room was not the only concession operated by Field’s at the airport. There was also the smaller, and overlooked Blue and Gold Café, a coffee shop on the first floor. The Blue and Gold Café, although more of a diner, had the same spectacular views of the tarmac and the propellor aircraft revving up on the tarmac. Yet it too, was a hangout for stars.

It was 1950, and James O'Hara, whose father was a police officer at the airport, worked as a teenager at the Blue and Gold café as a cashier. In the wee hours of the evening, it could be a lonely post. However, Jim usually had company, namely Frank Sinatra.

Sinatra, who had achieved fame from his earlier bobby socks era, was making forays into the movies. Yet as his career rose, Sinatra’s marriage had hit the rocks with wife Nancy, and he had become obsessed with Ava Gardner, the fetching beauty of such movies as Show Boat, The Barefoot Contessa and Night of the Iguana.

Sinatra had been courting Gardner by chasing her all over the country. Thus, he found himself waiting for planes at Midway Airport often. His refuge was the Blue and Gold Café.

Young Jim O’Hara, like his Dad, was not overtly impressed with celebrity, but understood that a star like Sinatra needed privacy. Jim, while going through receipts, would close his register at the back of the café, and shut down a couple of tables to customers after a certain time at night. Sinatra, who was beginning to be a regular, would sit next to O’Hara and read the paper, smoking his cigarettes and drinking coffee. He would occasionally look at the young O’Hara and ask, “What’s a kid like you doing working so late?” But he seemed to appreciate O’Hara’s discretion in allowing him privacy.

An interesting observation from O’Hara was that whenever Sinatra came into the café, he was never noticed by the other customers. Perhaps this is a testimony to the fact that travelers all look the same, absorbed in their own passage.

Sinatra and Gardner eventually married in 1951. However, they would split in 1957. The Blue and Gold Café and Cloud Room are gone as well, shut down after the airlines moved to O’Hare in 1962-63. Now, in most airports, such places have been replaced with coffee carts or joints where one eats a hot dog standing up. Stars of Sinatra’s star wattage now fly by private jet, never setting foot in a terminal with other passengers. Yet in Midway’s terminal in the 1950's, movie stars and regular folks could sip coffee and read the paper side by side, in the wee hours of the morning.