Back when I was a small kid, going on a plane meant international travel. Depending on the country you used the national airline or one of the big names who had a hub at your country’s airport. For the US, that typically meant a plane ride on Pan Am, TWA or American Airlines. United sort of squeezed in there a bit later.
Slower Times
However, things weren’t so simple as just getting a ticket from a computer and showing up at the game. You had to have all your paperwork and passport documentation squared away (still do in some cases). Then, you either worked through a travel agent office or you went to the counter at the airport itself to buy a plane ticket. Depending on the length and amount of segments on your trip, you ended up with a colorful book of trip leg tickets that were torn off as you took a plane, leaving you with a carbon copy for a receipt. Everything was manually typed out, even up until the 1980s.
There was no trip consolidator website, easy travel arrangements on the Internet, or printing out your boarding gate at home. It was all very personal and paper-driven.
Travel Meant Dressing Up
Travel decorum was a big thing too. People got dressed up to fly. It didn’t matter if the trip was a 20-hour flight across the planet. People put on their formal business ware or church clothes and traveled spiffed up, even the kids. I hated that. Fortunately, I at least didn’t have to wear a tie at that age.
Security wasn’t as an aggressive as it is today, but there were still travel precautions. I remember I had an orange toy gun taken away by the plane staff when they saw me playing with it. My mother was so embarrassed she just told them to throw it away to solve the issue. It was obvious a kid’s toy but, nonetheless, in the plane bin it went.
A Rare Occurrence Versus Now
All of the above said, plane travel was still an amazing thing at the time. People rarely did it. I remember being the only kid in my class who had been on three continents by the time I was 10. Unless you were a military brat, most traveled by car and far more local in those days. My father was a civil engineer, so we ended up living in some far off places in my early years. It afforded me the chance to see a lot of the world I probably would never see again, and would probably be unsafe to do so these days anyways.
Today, we take care of everything digitally, wave our phones and line up in a cattle line to board and debark. No one gives a hoot about what to wear, and it’s quite common to see people travel in their pajamas. I don’t think I even want to imagine what plane travel might be like in another 40 years. It could get a bit risqué the way things are going.
Notes:
Pan Am Airlines photograph under free license with attribution. Eduard Marmet - http://www.airliners.net/photo/Pan-Am/Boeing-747-121/1372694/L/ . permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.
