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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Tickets cost $50 a person. They were in the form of a passport, which included a place for the bearer's photograph (optional) and a map showing which particular country's hors d'oeuvres or buffet could be found in which particular departure area, baggage claim area, or lounge. Three hundred car parkers were hired to provide individual valet parking to each guest. The combined Junior Leagues of Dallas and Fort Worth had organized the gala, and it promised to be a distinguished affair.
WE ENTER THE AIRPORT PROPER at 8:25, sitting carefully rigid in our car to avoid bending, stretching, crumpling, or wilting our formal clothes. By 9 p.m. we have traveled less than a mile, as far as the underpass leading into the terminal. Mercedes-Benzes to the right of us; Eldorados to the left of us; Continentals behind us; and a huge charter bus belching black exhaust fumes in front of us. The sea of cars creeps forward, barely moving. Cars and people begin to overheat. Scores of Halstons, St. Laurents, and Balenciagas begin to wilt. Large Cadillacs flying diplomatic flags begin to pull over, steam pouring from their radiators. Diplomats join women walking to the terminal while chauffeurs and husbands remain in the cars. I can feel male teeth gritting around me. The scene is like Napoleon's retreat from Moscow.
Our only hope, our only choice, is to reach the terminal building, glittering like a mirage just out of our grasp. We begin to be overcome by carbon monoxide and heat. The bus is no longer in front of us, but beside us; it is filled, perversely, with about 40 close-cropped celebrants who all look like they had gotten lost on the way to homecoming at Bob Jones University. For minutes at a time not a car would move from in front of the terminal. Once the car parkers had parked a car, they had to return to the terminal on foot, since the traffic jam was too thick to return them by car. As more cars were parked, more distant lots had to be used, and the distance the parkers had to cover on foot increased. We could see them jogging back. They looked exhausted. I remember thinking I wished I were John Connally and could have come by helicopter or however he arrived.
At 9:20 we were coming up over the overpass leading into the terminal. There was a line of buses in front of us. Each bus ran over the curb making the turn up the overpass. Apparently the computers had been too busy filling the skies with planes and working out runways to remember to allow buses enough room to get in the place. At 9:35, one hour and ten minutes after entering the airport that is pioneering the no-wait, easy-access parking system with individual gates, we arrived-hot, nauseated, exhausted. It was not a good beginning.
Shelly Katz, who was photographing the opening for Newsweek and 16 European newspapers, was standing by the terminal door, dressed in a tuxedo with six cameras slung around his neck.
"Connally is out there in all that mess," Shelly said, with the conspiratorial glee and excitement of someone saying General Eisenhower had locked himself by mistake in the ship's head the morning of D-Day. "He's out there, and there's no telling when he'll get here."
The ubiquitous Julian Read was pacing up and down behind Shelly, muttering, "I should have brought him in the back way…I should have brought him in by helicopter…."
Suddenly the gaggle of reporters and cameramen waiting at the terminal raced past Dallas Times Herald executive editor Tom Johnson, who was walking up the sidewalk. Could it be? Yes. JOHN CONNALLY. "Found him wandering around down at the other end of the terminal," Tom says. "He'd been let off at the wrong place."
The press surrounds the Connallys, and begin throwing questions at him. It's all so easy for Connally; he doesn't even have to take his warm-up suit off. They ask him about his ambitions: "Well, I want to be a better lawyer than I have time to be; I want to travel more than I have; I want to become better read; I want to learn to play the piano…." And all the reporters trying to get a hard fix on the vice-presidency or anything—Jesus, this is John Connally I'm interviewing here!—the reporters find themselves writing down "wants to play the piano." Connally is so smooth and magnetic they think they should be trying to impress him. With an exaggerated "Not on your life!" Nellie Connally comes in right on cue and drags him away when he's asked if he wants to be president. A female TV reporter turns to Julian Read who is (of course) standing by and asks, "Was I O.K.? How did I do?" I allow myself a few brief, if fearful, thoughts on the future of the press and follow Connally inside.
As soon as Connally enters the terminal, there is a moment, frozen in my mind as in amber, when no one moves, everyone simply stares. Then it happens. People are everywhere. The British Ambassador is trampled by the Junior League co-chairwoman who in turn is shoved out of the way by a TV cameraman just as she's about to meet Connally. The scene around Connally becomes a milling mob of microphones, cameras, designer originals, and tuxedoes. The last time I had seen anything like it was with Robert Kennedy in 1968, only then the crowd were farm-workers.
And on the edge of the crowd is George Bush, holding back just a little, like he's eating his heart out the way he always must when he's around Connally and Bentsen and the whole LBJ crowd who've beaten back his political ambitions so many times. Even when he was ambassador to the United Nations he never seemed quite to have made it, never quite to have entered that exclusive club of easy, relaxed, assured power—Texas Democratic power. Connally and Bentsen have it—that security of kids who've been class officers all their lives and know they'll be again next year. Connally doesn't even need Bush now that he's a Republican: he clearly has his own power base. So there's a formal kind of greeting between the two men, and private citizen John Connally is swept away in the crowd. Bush, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, former U.S. Congressman and ambassador to the U.N., twice a candidate for U.S. Senate and perhaps one day for governor of Texas, wanders off alone to get a drink.
The whole mob around Connally moves off propelled by some invisible hand, down the long corridor filled with people and stretching as far as we can see, bouncing between Peter Nero on one end and, a half mile away, Doc Severinson on the other. Connally and his entourage go right up the middle, careening off walls and groups of people like Vince Lombardi in heaven.
At midnight I walk out to get my car. Gathered around an earnest, extremely polite young man are about 20 men in tuxedoes, looking like penguins around a zookeeper at feeding time—clucking, pleading, cajoling, intimidating, doing anything to try to get their cars. There are no cars in front and none being driven up. People are bringing chairs from inside and beginning to sit along the curb. The young man takes each car claim ticket and radios the number down to some unseen, and (everyone suspects) non-existent, dispatcher.
One man with a rip in his evening clothes and a wild look in his eyes bursts through double doors and heads straight to the bar with the air of a scout who'd just brought a wagon train through Indian territory.
"Found my car," he mutters. Men around the bar look at him with undisguised respect and envy. "Now all I have to do," he says, downing another drink, "is to find my wife."
ALONG THE CURBS OUTSIDE THE terminal the cream of Dallas and the most dignified of diplomats begin to perch dejectedly, wilted designer original next to wilted designer original. Far away, in the dim lights of distant parking lots, shadowy figures are moving back and forth, stopping to check license plates against ticket number, trying to find a car to bring up. A drunk, redfaced man, obviously accustomed to power, begins to harangue the young man, who continues to collect tickets and radio numbers unperturbed. "Can you get my car or can't you? I'll tell you what. I'll give you $10. $20. I'll give you $50 to go get my car. Whaddya say? There's gonna be real trouble if I don't get my car." With truly benign patience, the young man shrugs his shoulders, smiles, takes another ticket, and says, "We're doing the best we can. It'll just take a while."
And take awhile it did. Some guests waited four hours. One consul waited from midnight till 3 a.m. The diplomats had been dumped unceremoniously into the gala without escorts, in contrast to the reception earlier in the day. Occasionally I got a glimpse of what I took to be the Nauru delegation, once while Willie Nelson was singing "Jambalaya, Crawfish Pie-ah" and once at the curb waiting for their car. The curb finally became the most popular gathering place of the gala, surpassing in consistent attendance the elaborate buffets, John Connally, and even Doc Severinson.
Taking things into my own hands, I go in search of my own car. After a surrealistic trip of half an hour around, under, and over the unfinished skeleton of a huge airport, I locate it parked behind a port-a-can underneath the terminal on a temporary construction road. It is by itself. I find it purely by luck. Heading for home, we do not pass a single other car.
The whole debacle was an embarrassment: to the Junior Leaguers who had worked together so well to plan it; to the airport boosters who saw diplomats and powerful Dallas backers go away angry; to Julian Read who saw it provoke a painfully bad press. Apparently civic cooperation, good will, technology, fine facilities, and the best interests of Dallas-Fort Worth don't always go together without a hitch. Perhaps the airport itself will be in for some of the same.
For the opening ceremonies the next day, the planners made sure VIPs and diplomats didn't get caught in the monumental traffic jam expected when 100,000 enthusiastic North Texans crowded into the airport. They flew them out from Love Field in a 747. We drove, and passed three cars on the way. By conservative count, taking away the people who had to be there, less than 5000 people attended the opening ceremonies, although the crowd did pick up for the air show in the afternoon.
At the ceremony 2600 band members from 25 high schools played one number. Dignitaries gave welcoming speeches. There was a moment of silent prayer, then balloons were released to float out over the terminals. The President of Nauru, in the first chair that diplomatic precedence gave him, slept through the ceremony.
And so, three months before it would actually open, the new Dallas-Fort Worth airport officially opened, delay or no delay, Southwest Airlines or no Southwest Airlines. On the way home we had dinner at a friend's. I met a young man who is in the process of building "the world's greatest roller rink" in Dallas, complete with a special floor that eliminates the noise of the skates, piped-in music, and just about everything you can imagine. I gave him Julian Read's phone number. Dallas-Fort Worth is on its way.
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