Your contest is about 25 years too late for me. I tossed out all my timetables a long time ago. Every time I was at an airport I would hit all the check in counters begging for a timetable. I was in Paris for a few days as a 14 year old. What was my big thing? The Eiffel Tower? The Louvre? Hell no. It was getting out to Charles De Gaulle for a day and roaming around the terminals and seeing what I could wrangle away from the check in desks. Everyone was very nice except for the dorks at KLM who had somehow convinced themselves that I was after a boarding pass even though I kept using the words “time table” and “baggage stickers”.

Oh yeah, baggage stickers. I stuck my bedroom door with those and any other airline related sticker I could find. National, Air California, PSA, Western, Pan Am, TWA, Eastern, Ozark, Hughes Air West, Braniff (which had different color stickers since they had different color planes), all long gone but preserved on that door. Until I sanded it down and repainted it.

I might even have a picture of that door around somewhere though I have no idea where.

I was a dork in my day but no more…

…well not that obviously anyways…

But, memories of my efforts to get these wonderful documents will live on forever. Once a year, a June trek to Philly International, roughly a 140-mile round trip, in Dad’s old Chevy pickup, ticket counter to ticket counter, for those marvelous documents. Then outside, on the observation deck, seeing a real live airliner departing on the hour and minute, just as the timetable said it was supposed to. Ecstacy!

Later, visits to K Street and Connecticut Avenue in downtown DC to pick up a Qantas, a Swissair, a Singapore timetable on some obscure floor of some office building. Who knew they had ticket offices there, and then for the ticketing people to learn I was there for nothing more than the latest system timetable. OK!

Yes, a liittle sad, but thank goodness I never quite outgrew all this!

CF – I’ve seen that picture of you before, but yikes, how much heat did you catch for that one??

Might as well embrace it instead of trying to run from it!