St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day

Chances are, a few years down the road some­one will ask you what life was like before the Inter­net came along. I don’t know about you, but I’ll be ready with my St. Patrick’s Day story.

The story actu­ally begins two days before St. Patrick’s Day, on March 15, 1986. I’d just arrived in Los Ange­les on a KLM flight from Amsterdam.

When I hauled my suit­case over to the Fron­tier Air­lines counter to con­firm my seat for a con­nect­ing flight to Den­ver, the clerk asked me where I was headed. Grand Junc­tion, Col­orado, I told him.

“So how come you bought a ticket only to Den­ver?” the man said.

“I didn’t know Grand Junc­tion had an air­port,” I explained, never hav­ing heard of Walker Field (now Grand Junc­tion Regional Air­port). “I’m fix­ing to take a Grey­hound there from Denver.”

The man shook his head pity­ingly and wrote “GJ OK” across the ticket with a green felt marker, took my suit­case, and told me to board the plane.

When I asked him how much I had to pay to fly the extra 250 miles, he waved me off, say­ing, “St. Patrick’s Day is just around the corner.”

And so it was: two days later, I went over to the Quincy Bar & Grill in down­town Grand Junc­tion and cel­e­brated in an appro­pri­ate man­ner. Fron­tier Air­lines went out of busi­ness a few months after that (the name, how­ever, is back; when some for­mer Fron­tier exec­u­tives formed a new air­line in 1994, they named it Fron­tier Airlines).

Any­way, that’s my St. Patrick’s Day story. It reminds me of what life was like before the Inter­net. Because back then there was no way of find­ing out — short of call­ing a travel agent (remem­ber them?) or ask­ing a ticket clerk at an air­line counter — if there were flights to a par­tic­u­lar city.

As for what air­lines flew there and at what times, a travel agent or air­line rep would be happy to tell you. All you had to do was pick up the phone and call a travel agency or an air­line to get that infor­ma­tion. And if you were smart, you’d have a pen­cil and paper ready to write it all down.

Copy­right © 2009 The Gra­ham Agency. All rights reserved.

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