First Flight

 “First Flight” by Norman Rockwell on the cover of “The Saturday Evening Post,” June 4, 1938.

The old woman is fully engaged with the experience of flying as she tracks her progress on a flight map. Famed reporter Richard Harding Davis best described the transformation he underwent after experiencing his first flight. “A wonderful thing happened,” he wrote. “I began to understand why young men with apparently everything to make them happy on earth persist in leaving it by means of airplanes.... What lures them is the call of a new world waiting to be conquered, the sense of power, of detachment from everything humdrum, or even human, the thrill that makes all the other sensations stale and vapid, the exhilaration that for the moment makes each one of them a king.”

How times have changed. Commercial flight is now routine and mostly uncomfortable and annoying.

This picture reminds me of my mom and a story she told.  She and my dad were going to fly to Hawaii on vacation.  Her mom told her that she'd better take a lunch.  It would be a long flight.  So she made beef tongue sandwiches, of all things, to take with them.  But while on the flight, they were served a lovely hot meal.  She laughed about that.  My mom was a geography buff and loved to look at maps.  She always wanted to know where we were on a map.  I often think how she would enjoy GPS now.