Posted on 03/16/2024 5:24:55 PM PDT by Rummyfan
Seen on Twitter-X the other day: “How did people get airplane tickets before the internet? Did you call the airline and they mailed you the tickets physically?” The author’s bio said she was a neuroscientist. Apparently there’s a difference between knowing how the brain works and using it.
Well, miss, lemme tell you. We’d crank up the crystal radio set and see if we could raise anyone down at the aerodrome. “Hello, Hank? You got a seat on the midnight pond-jumper there? Put me down for one.” They’d mail you a key, and you used it to open the plane door. In those days, you know, you could smoke on a plane. In fact it was mandatory. Couldn’t take off unless everyone’d lit up. There were no in-flight movies, but the back of the seat had a pamphlet glued to it, and it described something funny Charlie Chaplin did. For dinner they had a pig on a spit, and they’d roll it down the aisles and carve off a piece.
Okay, I’m kidding. It went like this. You went to the travel agency, which was an office with posters of places you’d never go, and you’d ask —
Ick, seriously, like, talk to people?
Yes. You would tell them where you wished to go, and they would call you up later and give you options. You would write a check, put it in an envelope, affix a stamp — am I going too fast for you here? — and a few days later a ticket would arrive in the mail. Then you would get on the plane and be skyjacked to Cuba. Simpler times, and by gum, we liked it.
You see tweets like the neuroscientist’s all the time from the young and the baffled, the generation who grew up with the internet all around them like a benevolent god who asked nothing of them except watching five seconds of an ad before the video starts.
When you like drove from one state to another state, how did you know where to go??? Were there like signs or things?
Well, you know that word, “maps,” below the icon on your phone that calls up a strange abstraction of lines? We had actual maps. You’d unfold a map, refold it into a rectangle, and then follow a line to the end of the rectangle.
I remember the days before 9/11 when anyone could go to the gate to see someone off. I have a Polaroid of two of my kids and myself seeing friends off on one of their journeys dated September 8, 2001. That all changed on September 11th, a few days later. How sad.
I rarely used maps. I swear my dad knew every state and federal highway ever built before 2978. If I was going to drive cross country he’d tell me what route to take and I would write it down.
Nowadays I Google the route, commit it to memory and away I go. Then argue with my wife all the way there because she thinks we’re going to get lost. 17 years and she still has never been right.
Plane tickets were bought at the counter after msking a phone call to the airline and getting a reservation.
1978 duh..
I remember making trips to a travel agent to get airline tickets.
Last year I drove from the DC area to Maine, with a stop in Brooklyn to pick up my daughter. I Mapquested it to get directions, and double checked on a physical map to be sure. Mapquest is usually very good in my experience. It does not however give you traffic status as Waze does.
Just made another long drive this week - I knew the way so directions were not an issue. But I was headed southbound on I85 and there was a terrible multicar accident on the northbound side that caused at least a ten-mile backup. An app like Waze would have been very handy for a northbound driver.
Link goes to a generic page.
As I said, I linked it from Instapundit who excerpted if from NRO which is behind a paywall.
Then, you get to scroll to the middle or so to find the article.
The NR page isn't behind a paywall for me: Like Olden Times
“Plane tickets were bought at the counter after msking a phone call to the airline and getting a reservation.”
That’s how we did it.
In 1983, I picked up a flight schedule at LaGuardia with flights coming and going to most major airports. It was about 4x8 and a half inch thick with tiny print. I’d go to the airport and buy my ticket paying cash. There was always a seat. It was great knowing all the options to make plans.
Before GPS, if I let my wife navigate by compass we would have ended up at the North pole. ;)
LOL...on your preflight checklist.
In olden days a glimpse of stocking . . .
Ah...Cole Porter! :-)
Unfortunately “Anything Goes” was prophetic.
Wouldn’t you have ended up at the magnetic North Pole (which is somewhere in northern Canada, a good distance from 90 degrees north on the globe)?
I used to use travel agents sometimes but I think they usually could print up the tickets while I waited.
One of my high school jobs.
Hard to say! LOL.
Just checked and my information is out of date. A few decades ago the magnetic north pole was in the northern islands of Canada but apparently it is now 85 degrees north in the Arctic Ocean. So you would need a boat to get to it. I don’t know whose fault it is but presumably one of the Republican administrations. Or maybe the magnetic north pole was just trying to escape from Justin Trudeau.
The rose on navigation charts gives an annual adjustment of coordinates to adjust for magnetic north’s constant progression, based on the year that the chart was made.
It’s moving all the time at what must be a fairly constant rate. Of course, charts of different locations have different adjustment factors.
But, if memory serves, the magnetic poles switch from time to time. I suppose we’ll all need new charts (as if anyone uses them these days).
I don’t let her navigate the boat either. ;)
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