By Shaun Tumpane
Laguna Woods Globe
Can you remember when air travel was an enjoyable experience? When travelers got dressed up to fly to Grandma’s house for the holidays?
Granted, it seems like that was decades ago, because, well, it was decades ago.
In the ’60s and ’70s, men wore suits and women elegant frocks with decolletage demurely hidden by the softest of fur from some dead animal. Sleek four-engine jets came with a shelf over the ample-width seats for a salesman’s sample case or the ladies train case.
In those days, there wasn’t a quad-wheeled steamer trunk masquerading as a small valise to be seen. No one boarded the plane wearing competition orange sweatpants and a T-shirt that read “Screw Mr. Zero,” with an oil-stained paper bag housing a greasy Big Mac in one hand, a Big Gulp in the other, and a duffel bag slung over a shoulder that bounced off seatbacks or other passengers’ heads as “Two Ton Terry from Tennessee” waddled to the middle seat in aisle 31.
Children were a rarity on flights and were treated quite specially, invited to go up to the cockpit and chat with the captain sporting a shiny new Pan Am wings pin.
No one thought to eat before traveling as a meal was waiting for every passenger regardless of seat assignment. First class often had a menu with two or three choices of entree and virtually bottomless non-screwtop bottles of wine.
Flying was a refined experience, a respite from the hustle and bustle of life 35,000 feet below.
Airline ticket prices were all-inclusive: a ride to Idlewild Airport (renamed JFK in 1963), food and drink, a pillow, a blanket (both hermetically sealed in plastic), and any and all baggage fees.
All these amenities didn’t seem like amenities, but rather more like necessities.
If one is going to spend five-plus hours in an aluminum tube going 450 mph 5 miles above the earth, getting something to eat and maybe catching a nap seems a reasonable expectation. Airlines were in the business of getting customers from place to place in reasonable comfort.
Fast forward 40 years. Pan Am has given way to Greyhound. Gone is the rarified fragrance of sandalwood that Pan Am would have wafting through the cabin upon boarding.
Gone are the seats designed for 100% of the ticketholders, including legs, and gone are the pillows and blankets, the edible meals, the suits, the furs, but sometimes unfortunately not the decolletage, now barely covered by a “I’m with Stupid” wife-beater T-shirt offset with yoga pants that cut off circulation, accompanied by a tattoo parlor’s favorite client wearing the companion “I’m Stupid” T-shirt, sharing a bag of garlic fries sitting in 29A and C, and my boarding pass reads 29B.
Ahh, the friendly skies.
Shaun Tumpane is a Laguna Woods resident.