Post date: Nov 16, 2013 8:47:31 PM
I have just finished a new book that chronicles a special time in airline travel as well as the travails of the sixties. My father, Gerald James Wall worked for Trans World Airlines and I guess you could say I was an airline kid. We had free travel on the routes that TWA serviced and I was exposed to world travel as well as domestic excursions.
The book opens on a trip to Ireland and other European country's when I was about twelve and with my mother and father. I highlight that trip because of the emotional warmness I felt with my family. We made several trips to the continent together before I started going on my own in the sixties. I was in high school one moment and on my lonesome in Paris the next.
My first book was Lump Sum and it was a work of fiction taking place in my home of forty plus years, Montana. The new book is called Postcard From The Abyss and is autobiographical about the first third of my life.
A lot of the tales I tell are from my youngest years when I would go to my grandmothers house in a small Nebraska town on the Missouri River. We lived in Kansas City, Missouri when I was a pre- schooler and we traveled on train to get from Missouri to Nebraska and those trips fueled my desires for travel. I often went out to where my father worked and it was there that I learned to love the dance of the airport with its pre jet age, piston engined aircraft, and I soaked up the glamour of air travel and took my first flights to different parts of the country.
As I got older I experienced much more air travel as we, as a family, took more and more excursions both foreign and domestic. By the time I was in my teens I began to fly on my own and learned how to read the arrivals/departures board and took my chances with space available travel.
We received our term passes when my father had twenty years of seniority with TWA. Having the term pass meant we didn't have to apply for specific travel vouchers and instead present our term pass, in the form of a small wallet sized plastic card with our picture on it. The term pass could be presented at the departure gate, if one didn't have baggage to check, and be boarded on coach class, or first class, if there were no seats available in coach.
It was when I received the term pass that I left school and began my travels. I could go anywhere but that didn't mean I had any money for the other expenses incurred on my travels. A lot of my story is about the various ways I used to obtain the cash I needed to support my ramblings.
Coming of age in the sixties also involved drugs and politics and both had an impact on my life as they did to so many people my age. The draft had a major impact on the choices I made and the places I went to. Whether it was by plane, train or automobile, my adventures and relationships provide the material for this book and I hope that anybody who chances upon it will enjoy it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
POSTED BY THE WALLNETTO AT 8:05 AM