August, 1962, Western Airlines, SFO-MSP (with a stop at the old Stapleton Field in Denver).

My first trip by air ever was when I was 7 years old. My father worked for a nationally known food company headquartered in a small town in west Michigan; he worked at this company's plant in Oakland, California; he was offered a promotion if he were to relocate to company headquarters. The company paid for my mother and I to travel to Michigan to see whether we liked the town.

Our trip started at OAK; we flew on the now defunct SFO Helicopter Airways over to SFO. My recollection of the trip is somewhat vague, but I remember that we could not leave at the scheduled time, due, probably to a mechanical. We left our house in Alameda probably before 7:00 a.m., but reached MSP by nightfall. We spent a week in Turtle Lake, Wisconsin at a lakeside motel while my dad did a research project at a nearby dairy that was supplying products to his company.

At the end of week one, we flew I think on United MSP-ORD; I remember us staying in the Drake Hotel. We spent the weekend in Chicago, and a company plane picked us up at Meigs Field to fly us up to 3FM. We stayed in a house owned by the company for two weeks. At the end of the two weeks, a company plane flew us from 3FM to DTW, where we boarded American Airlines for a short flight to BUF. We then spent four days in Niagara Falls, Ontario, where my dad's company operated a plant. After this, we went back to BUF, and flew to New York City (I'm not sure what airline we were on or what airport we flew into). I remember staying in the Astor Hotel; I don't remember much else about New York in August 1962. I do remember us flying non-stop home to SFO on American Airlines; I don't remember anything else about the flight. This trip was so long ago, JFK was called Idlewild.

Growing up where I did, where the closest airports were MKG and GRR, the only airline choices were the old North Central and United; Allegheny started flying out of GRR in the early 70s, and there was another airline there called Lake Central. My dad used to fly on DL quite a bit, as he had to travel to Maracay, Venezuela regularly on company business--the company plane would take him to either ORD or DTW, he would fly on Delta to MIA, and then get on either Viasa or ALM to go to South America. My dad was a 1,000,000 miler on UA, his trips on them having begun circa 1950 (he retired at the end of 1984).

My first flight on the Big D was in June, 1981, DCA-ATL-MSY, going on a trip to take depositions and have a physical inspection of television station equipment located inside a tractor trailer in Houma, Louisiana. We flew home on Eastern (we were on full-fare Y tickets on the last flight of the day, and Eastern upgraded us to F).