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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