November 17-20, 1974: My Only Trip to Thorp, Wisconsin | |
November 3-7, 1974: My First Trip to Miami | |
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During the week of November 11, I made my first trip to Fort Worth, Texas, to do a class for Fort Worth National Bank. It was a very successful week, and the folks at the bank were very pleased.
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My installations/classes are usually three days, and organizations usually want to hold them on Monday-Wednesday, so my most frequent practice is to get a flight on Sunday evening from O'Hare that will get me to whatever airport I am flying to in enough time to get to my hotel by eleven-thirty or midnight. This gives me as much of a weekend as possible in Chicago.
Occasionally, the classes are Tuesday-Thursday, in which case I just push the travel back until Monday evening. On the days I am not actually traveling, Cullinane is fine with me just working on some new EDP-Auditor routines, answering client questions, and stuff like that. There's no Cullinane office in Chicago, so I don't have to be anywhere save my apartment when I'm not actually traveling.
Also, the advantage of staying in Chicago rather than moving to either Boston or San Francisco (where we have offices) is already becoming apparent. O'Hare is a busy airport, and there are multiple non-stop flights to just about anywhere every day, so I have flexibility when I travel. Living on either coast would have restricted me a great deal more. For this reason, Cullinane has me do most everything between Denver and Philadelphia, while the folks in San Francisco handle the West Coast and the staff in Boston takes care of the majority of our clients that are in New England. We are getting lots more new clients in the Midwest and Far West, so there is plenty of work for Ted Hollander and I to do. San Francisco is also calling on us to help them on occasion, although I have not been to the West Coast since the User Group meeting earlier this year.
For this trip, I took a flight from O'Hare to the new airport that has been built midway between the cities of Fort Worth and Dallas. Both those cities used to have their own airports; Dallas used Love Field and Fort Worth used Meacham Field. (You may remember that on the day of his assassination, John F. Kennedy traveled from Fort Worth to Dallas (only a 40 mile trip) by flying from Meacham Field to Love Field.
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I've read about this new airport; Dallas and Fort Worth expect to attract the airlines that currently use either Chicago, Denver, or St. Louis as their mid-continent stops. Why? All three of those other airports are susceptible to delays and disruptions- particularly in the winter. But it rarely snows in DFW (the new code for this airport, and also the short-hand name locals use to refer to the entire metropolitan area that encompasses Dallas, Fort Worth, and all the cities between them), so these delays will rarely occur. True, DFW is a bit more susceptible to summer thunderstorms, but these usually don't close an airport for hours or days. All in all, it is expected that in five or ten years, DFW will become one of the busiest airports in the nation.
At DFW, I arrived at one of the new, semicircular terminals. Rather than have long concourses extending from a main building, as in Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, DFW has built terminas that are essentiall one gate thick. That is, you arrive at the terminal (or park there) in what would be the center of the circle, then walk into the terminal (usually less than 200 feet from where you parked), check in at the counter nearest your gate, and then just walk past the check-in counter and your gate is right there. If you plan ahead, your actual departure gate will be within 500 feet of where your car is parked! And, usually, the airlines arrange their flights so that flights to and from the same city use the same gate, or one very close, at DFW, so when you return, you again don't have to walk far to your car.
I like this system; in Chicago I have to allocate at least 45 minutes from the time I park in the garage until the time I arrive at the gate. When I got to DFW Sunday evening, I was at baggage claim just two or three minutes after getting off my plane, and on the rental car bus two or three minutes after claiming my bag. And plane to bus was less than 300 feet!. It's a great concept, and for people who travel frequently- like me- a godsend. If I ever leave Chicago, Dallas or Fort Worth would certainly be convenient places to live.
I picked up my rental car and drove into Fort Worth to the hotel the bank folks had recommended- a Hilton Hotel downtown. The class would be only a few blocks away, although installation would be at the bank's data center- and I'd need to drive to that.
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I thought I would add an aerial view of the part of downtown seen in my photograph, and it is above. Of course, my photograph is from this year and the aerial view is from 2015 or so. I was curious about the CNB (Continental National Bank of Fort Worth) Building in my photo, as I could not locate it on the aerial view (where I marked the location where I was standing and the direction I was looking with the yellow arrow on the aerial view). I discovered that the building became Landmark Tower in the 1980s but was actually abandoned in 1990. It was demolished in 2006. You will also note that the convention center has been expanded in the intervening years, and the street that was previously straight now curves around the new building.
NOTE:
I want to add here the narrative that I wrote in 1992 as I was having prints made from my slides and I was putting them into albums:
"From the vantage point of the winter of 1992, I can perhaps trace my desire to live further South from this first trip to Texas. Although I had driven through Texas in the Summer of 1968, then it was too hot for me. But, by 1974, having endured the winters in Korea and Chicago, perhaps I was beginning to look much more favorably on the South and Southwest. Of course, I moved from Chicago to Dallas in January, 1985." |
You can use the links below to continue to another photo album page.
November 17-20, 1974: My Only Trip to Thorp, Wisconsin | |
November 3-7, 1974: My First Trip to Miami | |
Return to Index for 1974 |