History Lesson 
Airport!
The new Dallas-Fort Worth Airport—World's Largest!—opened this fall amid pomp and circumstances appropriate to the Great Pyramid. And only Dallas-Fort Worth could have brought it off.
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The small crowd gathered to greet the Concorde on press day is filled with a certain privileged excitement. There are blacks in orange Braniff coveralls and fast-talking Frenchmen in sky-blue Concorde coveralls; there are chic Parisian women, one with her blouse unbuttoned a couple of notches too far for Dallas; there are chauffeurs—older, deferential black men in standard uniforms and younger black dudes in wide-lapel chauffeur's outfits and platform shoes; there are Braniff stewardesses muttering about how out-of-date the Concorde's stewardess' beige dress looks; and there are airport police, hundreds of journalists and cameramen fighting for the best camera angle, publicity flacks, hangers-on, and dignitaries.
Along the top of the Braniff terminal are the hard hats who have built the place. I stand next to a couple of workmen, young, long-haired, hip. "Looks kind of like a Don Garlits dragster, doesn't it?" I venture again. They look at me with tolerant distaste. Perhaps they, too, think it looks like "a sea-monster resurrected from prehistoric times…."
Meanwhile, the ground crew has been unable to adjust the exit stairs to fit the Concorde's door, so the Concorde just sits there, mute and mysterious, like a strange beached white whale surrounded by curious vacationers. After flying at twice the speed of sound, the passengers must wait half an hour to get out of the plane. The thought crosses my mind, as I behold the eager, swarming crowd surrounding the plane, that maybe the people inside don't want to come out. But come out they do, to applause and general well-wishing.
AND SO IT CAME TO pass that Dallas and Fort Worth got together and built themselves an airport. Two cities, one airport. As one might expect, the marriage of Dallas for culture, Fort Worth for fun, of Cowtown and Manhattan's last westward outpost was not without its stormy courtship. Just across the road from the new airport is the most poignant monument to that rivalry: Greater Southwest International Airport, formerly Amon Carter Field, sprung full-blown like a concrete god from the megalomaniac mind of Amon Carter, the tough, crazy rich ruler of Fort Worth who hated Dallas so much only an Aggie who has had to go through life putting up with the smug superiority of U.T. grads could understand.
Old Amon was the best evidence for The Territorial Imperative walking around on two legs. Forced to go to Dallas on business, he'd take a full tank of gas and carry his lunch in a brown paper bag to avoid dropping his hard-earned Fort Worth coin in Dallas coffers. Amon loved Fort Worth as a father loves an only son: he boosted it like crazy, dressed up in cowboy gear and sat horseback for photos, figuring the best defense against being branded as Cowtown was a good offense.
So, damn 'em with their Neiman-Marcus and their Frank Lloyd Wright and their plastic state fair! Amon trumpeted the Fort Worth gospel from his paper, The Star Telegram, and played up the high points by endowing the best museum of Western art in the country. (Now that gets Dallas where it hurts, right in the clinking coffee cups of culture.)
What galled Amon most was Love Field: Dallas always seemed to get the inside track on mail runs, on route assignments, on everything. First, however, he decided to bury the hatchet and cooperate, in a rare moment of civic good sense. A mutual airport was planned, but it went down the drain back in 1941. It would have been closer to Fort Worth than to Dallas, and Dallas, of course, would never stand for Amon having that kind of ammunition. Old man Thornton, the ruler of Dallas, could have just heard Amon crowing about the airport being pracically right in the middle of the stockyards and so far from Neiman's! Amon probably told him any time Thornton had to take a flight he could come over and stay with him in Fort Worth the night before so he wouldn't have to drive so far to get to the airport. No, that wouldn't do.
Amon then built his own airport northeast of Fort Worth, and when it opened it was the most modern, most forward-looking airport of its time. Its only drawback was that Dallas set about systematically to destroy it. With the cooperation of the airlines and the Civil Aeronautics Board, Dallas corralled the lion's share of the area's flights into Love Field, which they expanded and rigorously defended against all criticism that it was too small, too close to residential areas, too much a noise and safety hazard. (All of which it was.)
The coming of jet airplanes, however, meant that two airports 17 miles apart were an anachronism. In 1964, the Civil Aeronautics Board strongly urged Dallas and Fort Worth to have only one airport. The CAB gave a not-too-subtle shove by setting a cutoff date after which they would plan the joint airport if the two cities would not. Led by then-mayor Erik Jonsson, Dallas finagled its cooperation with Fort Worth past changes in the state constitution, past defeat at the polls by the voters of Dallas County, past financial setbacks and near disaster. Tarrant County, with old man Carter dead, fell right in line, and the new airport was located exactly between the two cities.
PRESIDENT NIXON CHOSE NOT TO attend the airport opening and share the platform with John Connally, Spiro Agnew being in such difficulty at the time. President Hammer DeRoburt of Nauru was the only head of state to attend. Therefore, he was number one in precedence—ahead, among others, of the ambassadors of Britain and France at the diplomatic reception Friday afternoon. With all due respect, the president looks like a Polynesian Rock Hudson surrounded by three aides in ducktail haircuts, pegged trousers, thin ties, and engineer boots.
I shrewdly get the inside track with President DeRoburt while all the other journalists are swarming around John Connally, who has just arrived—who is he, anyway, when I've got a real president right here? It turns out that Nauru really exists. It's a small island off the northwest coast of Australia which became independent in 1968. It has 5000 people and one tiny airport. The island makes its living by exporting a high grade of phosphate. Another diplomat tells me that the country is composed entirely of guano, which the Naurans are shipping out from under themselves as fast as they can.
"Mr. President," I begin with what seems to me the obvious question, "Why are you here?"
"Well, we were invited and since this is going to be the world's largest airport, I wanted to see it. It is indeed very impressive."
"It certainly is impressive. In fact, it's bigger than Manhattan Island. How big is your country , Mr. President?" I ask, tactlessly.
"Well, it's actually (the president takes a long drag on his cigarette) smaller than Manhattan Island. Ten square miles, in fact. I suppose that means it's smaller than this airport."
That information confronted me with a dilemma. They have a vote in the U.N., right? And there's no telling when we'll be putting phosphates back in Tide, right? Still, against all caution, I pose my final question.
"Well, Mr. President, if your country is only ten square miles and it's made entirely of guano, uh, phosphate, and you're exporting the phosphate, then aren't you shipping your country away?"
"Well yes, in a way." The President examined his fingernails. "We haveapproached the Australian government about letting us relocate on one of their uninhabited islands, but we've had no success so far. We may have to rehabilitate our island as we go along."
Since President DeRoburt is the first chief of state I have ever talked to, I did not take the experience lightly. I liked him, really, and I ended up convinced that if I lived on an island made of guano then I would want him for my president. Over the next couple of days the presence of this entourage of Polynesians from a tiny speck in the South Pacific as the top foreign representatives, the highest of dignitaries, at an airport in North Central Texas came to symbolize for me a point of constancy amid the activity and the pomp, the public relations and the potential problems, the massiveness and the fragility of the incredible facility which surrounded us, bigger in size than an entire country.
The President of Nauru, after all, is only doing for (or to) his country what Erik Jonsson and the visionary leadership of Dallas-Fort Worth are doing for (or to) North Texas: applying a highly pragmatic ingenuity to their environment for the purpose of enriching their communities, and, it hardly needs to be added, in the process enriching themselves. That kind of resourcefulness transcends race and culture. Of course, the process of using their environment as a natural resource is eventually going to destroy Nauru. No one is really quite sure what the airport is going to do to Dallas-Fort Worth, beyond (hopefully) making it grow and prosper.
Most of the leading Dallas environmentalists, ironically enough, ended up supporting the airport, which, through a stroke of good fortune, was entering its final stage when the environmental battle of the century was being waged in Dallas. The issue was a vote on bonds to finance the Trinity River Canal ("The Unholy Trinity Incident," TM, June, 1973), a multi-billion dollar project aimed at transforming the Trinity into a seaworthy stream, "bringing barges from every country in the world," as Mayor Wes Wise put it, 250 miles from the Gulf right into downtown Dallas.
The Dallas Establishment got its machinery together, pushed the right buttons, pulled all the old switches, but the engine just didn't run. The canal project was defeated soundly, opposed by environmentalists and maverick Dallas boosters who claimed as part of their anti-canal campaign that the airport—THE airport—was the hope and symbol of Dallas' future: no belching heavy industries to feed those international barges, no stinking, gurgling ship channel for Dallas; No, indeed!
Instead (the hand of the PR man rests on the voter's shoulder as the other arm gestures down the bright vista of the future) we'll have sleek airplanes with cool stewardesses and soft-handed executives, with sky freighters coming into a big cargo area tucked away around the corner from the comings and goings of national and international business and insurance men, Dallas' kind of men, non-polluting, bio-degradable executives shuffling papers and pumping up the local GNP. We don't have to be like Houston to be better—right?
So, while environmentalists in London, Toronto, Miami, and Tokyo have bitterly opposed new super airports, in Dallas they raised hardly a peep. It was so much less objectionable than the canal that they could support it and in the bargain seem to endorse the growth of Dallas. Also, they had the romance of technology on their side. Imagine taking dignitaries on a barge, when they can fly on the Concorde. Consequently, the airport has yet to receive any sort of comprehensive outside environmental evaluation, which apparently suits its backers just fine.
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