The Airport

(I'm not sure what has happened to my last couple of days blogs but luckily I had handwritten a portion of one so I'll retype it.)

I remember what Ryan Airport looked like when I was a child. You'd walk into a room with a concrete floor and immediately to your right was a single window where a ticket agent raised a real window to help you with your flight tickets. I remember people just milling around. There may have been one vending machine, the type with the steel knobs you pulled really hard and then your candy dropped (thud) into the tray. Possibly there was a cigarette machine, maybe not. I was too young to think of people smoking. I'm sure there was a pay telephone in there...it may have been a phone booth. The luggage tags said RYN.

I was born in 1952 but growing up I only knew it as Ryan Airport. It had changed from Harding Field in 1954. As Harding Field it was a military installation that provided flight training during World War II. It was renamed after Captain William Joseph Ryan.

In 1981 it was renamed again and a strategic long range plan began. Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport was born and today, in 2005, it is a marvelous 2 story facility. Now, don't start looking for RYN luggage tags... they are now marked BTR!

We just went to Pittsburgh through Atlanta. The Pittsburgh Airport is very nice. They have a very strict scanning code straight out of some futuristic movie. Then, Atlanta was down right spooky. The place was overcrowded and under construction while we were in it. This is a time when the Airlines are moving into corporate reorganization and bankruptcy. We used to board large planes. Now we squeeze into small seats on teeny planes for longer trips. They are having to cut corners. It shows. Delta no longer goes from Baton Rouge to Dallas! Well, in time all things will pass.