Iowa

If you know me, you’ve heard my story of being everywhere but home when I was growing up. Military Schools, full time sleep-away kid-sitters, summer camps. It was a weird blend of disadvantaged and privileged running side by side. The one thing I don’t speak much about is my summer in Iowa. Maybe because I was so young and it was so long ago. It was the summer of 1965 and I turned 8.

You would think growing up in NYC would provide plenty of stimulation for a young kid. The parks, the zoos, the museums, the beaches, Radio City…I could go on and on. But still that summer in Iowa turned out to be a summer of firsts.

I remember it vividly.

Sometimes, while we are experiencing things, their significance doesn’t register. It’s only years later that we understand that we may have been standing at a cross-roads. And in many ways, 1965 was a cross-roads for everything.

There were kids that were going to live in the neighborhood in Hollis all their lives, and kids that were going to get on airplanes and go places. It doesn’t mean your life isn’t going to be a total wreck…whatever it turned out to be, it was going to turn out somewhere else. There was something about Hollis though. I think a lot of my contemporaries wound up going places. We were a cohort taught to believe in ourselves. We went to the Lutheran or Catholic churces or to the synagogue and joined the Cub Scouts and somehow our parents swung summer camps. A very short time later, a new cohort in the neighborhood and school produced some of the most successful Rap and Hip Hop acts on the planet. I might have been a troublemaker, but I came from a strong place.

I was seven years old when I took my first commercial air flights. My introduction to air travel started at the iconic, TWA terminal at JFK in Queens. Designed by Eero Saarinen it was a structure designed in the spirit of unbridled optimism about the future of air travel and the world in general. It was still a time when you dressed to travel by air, and not too far past the days when air safety was still maturing.¹ It was an event, and an adventure; Saarinen (and TWA) wanted a flagship terminal that suited that vibe.

Today’s modern airports, like IND carve out their space with soaring glass and steel atriums. Big space is the norm, and it works. But the TWA terminal was filled with architecture. It was like walking through a soaring concrete sculpture.

One of the most striking features were the twin concrete tubes, layered with red carpet that led out to the departure pods. Watch enough movies or TV and you will eventually see them show up in a scene. I am convinced some writers/directors chose TWA just so they could shoot a departure out of that terminal, having their characters take that long walk through the concrete tubes.

After the long walk, we boarded the sleek TWA “Starstream’ Boeing 707. Starstream was the trade name TWA used for it’s jet service at that time.

In 1965, and especially to a young boy, the stewardesses² would have been damn near the same level as movie stars. They were Audrey Hepburn and Kim Novak working for a living. I do remember ringing my call button just to see if one would actually appear. Like magic, she did. I was given a sweet smile and handed a pair of wings.

We sat in coach of course, the three of us, my Great Aunt and another cuz who was along. I don’t remember much about him. He was either so obnoxiously well-behaved or boring that he didn’t leave a lasting impression. We were headed to my great-aunt’s daughter’s house. She had moved from Brooklyn to marry an Iowa guy named Ike. Ike and Dottie. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if Ike and Dottie didn’t remember this other cousin either. My guess is he was pretty low maintenance. I guarantee they remembered me for a long time.

The situation we were headed for was not all that uncommon. Just like a few of the other women in my family, Dottie must have married this guy she met during the war while he was on port-call in Brooklyn. Boom. Twenty years after the war, they have a couple of teenagers, and she is working at a bank during the day and helping run the farm on nights and weekends. They were the all American post war family. They were the reason our fathers and grandfathers ran into enemy fire and sacrificed themselves. Dottie and Ike and their kids were a frigging movie.

I remember having a very nice meal on the TWA flight to Chicago. In those days, even in economy you were served a meal on china with real silverware. Imagine making someone travel for nearly two hours in the middle of the day without feeding them lunch. If I remember correctly there was some turbulence and we had to stow our food trays temporarily. We put them under the seat in front of us, which was open because no one was forced to jam extra stuff under there. People checked luggage back then. Overhead space was for purses, briefcases, hats and jackets.

I remember the terminal at Chicago O’Hare as a long straight line of gates, all on one side of of the terminal, facing the runways. Memories are sketchy but if you are familiar with ORD, the long stretch between B and F concourses, right where the sushi bar is, has always looked very familar. There is at least one gate there today and if you look out the windows, you can see remnants of other retired gates. Let’s go with that, and say it was here that I boarded a very different airplane, taking a very different route.

Instead of futuristic boarding tubes, we walked across tarmac in the bright midwestern sun to board an Ozark airlines Fairchild-Hiller FH-227. Now we’re talking. This was a much different beast. A twin engine wing-over turboprop, the FH-227 was a workhorse of the prairie. Hopscotching long distances across sparsely populated country, it connected smaller cities and towns to the wider world, quickly and efficiently. But this was not a hub and spoke arrangement like we have today. These were more like local trains with lots of stops that eventually got you to the big city, where you could connect. This was the dying remnants of the old days of the airmail routes, the realm of adventurous pilots. If you had told us our captain had flown B17s over Germany or had put a few rounds into a German Messerschimdt, I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised.

The food on the Ozark flight was a bit more prosaic, but still good. I remember little half sandwiches that seemed about right for the type of flight we were on. It was a beaautiful clear day, and I doubt we ever got above five or six thousand feet as we skipped across Illinois, Iowa and into South Dakota. I don’t remember how many stops we made but six seems about right. Since the seats were only two on each side of the aisle, both of us boys had a window seat. I remember flying over the unending expanse of farmland; every now and then seeing a cloud of dust as a car scooted along a dusty gravel road. As we approached each stop we would lose altitude and I could see the landing gear come down right next to me. There was that little screech and a touch of smoke from the tires and then we would taxi up to the smallest terminal imaginable. There was always a line of people standing behind a fence, waiting to board or to greet people disembarking. After a few minutes on the ground we were back up in the air, the landing gear retracted and then onto the next stop. I don’t remember much about our arrival in Souix Falls, South Dakota. Only that it was the closest airport to Doon, Iowa. Ike and Dottie’s farm was just outside of Doon, population in 2025: 619, not much different than in 1965. I checked out the town in Google street view and if filled in some memories for me.

“Bonnie” Doon.

Doon sat at the hub of a farming community. In 1965 it had all the services and shops to service the surrounding farmers and their families. Banking, groceries, church, druggists and etc. To say this was different than Queens or Brooklyn is an understatement on par with saying a firecracker is different than a Thermonuclear bomb. However, I remember being comfortable there. I often went into town with someone doing errands and remember the nose in angle parking along the main streer. It is still like that today. One vivid memory was of the park. It was my first experience of a midwestern park. Huge oak and maple trees that constrasted with the surrounding flat and barren farm land. It was the contrast that made the cool shade of those huge trees seem special. I remember going to baseball games there, or it could have been softball. Ike must have played in a league.

I know some farmers here in Indiana, their farms tend to be in the thousands of acres, their equipment worth millions of dollars. Ike and Dottie owned 44 acres and they made it work with an old Farmall Tractor, a couple of trucks and a few attachments. Farmers in the area would share things like combines and semi-trucks when needed. Dottie working at the bank while Ike farmed was not unusual. I think the farm was profitable, and it certainly fed them. They grew mostly corn (cause Iowa!) and owned every farm animal imaginable. Their cows were milkers though, not for beef. I would only drink the milk after the cream was separated and it was cooled off.

I did not go hungry.

Something that surprised me about the farm: the barn, the tractor shed, the chicken coop and all the other farm structures were white. I was brought up in a world where I had never seen a farm. What I saw mostly as a kid were pictures in books meant for children, and in those books, barns were red. Red barns with cool weathervanes on top of cupolas, all trimmed in white. In the strange kid-mind world this was a disappointment but I got over it quickly.

I got put to work, but I remember having fun more. The two obligations we had each day were a few chores and a nap on the living room floor. Other than that, I remember it was mostly fun and new adventures.

Dottie and Ike’s youngest, a boy, was two years older than myself. In my seven year old kid brain this was an intolerable gap so I promoted myself a year, and when my birthday came up in July we all celebrated my 9th birthday. I was a scrawny kid anyway, but next to the real nine year old, I was really small. This was attributed to my living in the city and eating a city diet. I carried on the age subterfuge for the entire summer. It was harmless I guess, but looking back I probably could have had a career as an undercover spy because I never wavered, and no one ever suspected. Or at least if they did, they went along good-naturedly with the ruse.

Besides the plane rides and escape from New York, it was a summer of fond memories that have stayed with me all these years.

It was the first time I had ridden a horse, and the first time I was tossed off a horse and subsequently stepped on. However, despite a limp, I did, as they say, “get right back on the horse.” There was plenty of horse riding after that, including a trail ride where we put the horses in a trailer and travelled to a special park. I did not master horses by any means but I had the experience of riding them.

I learned to ride a two wheeler bike, something that has become a lifelong passion for me. While there are many ways to learn to ride a bike, I can tell you from experience that an older boy, a male relative in this case, pushing you down a steep grassy hill and telling you not to fall works just as well as any other method. It only took one time.

Once a week we drove up to Rock Rapids, where there was a large outdoor municipal swimming pool. There we took lessons and I started down the path of a childhood filled with Red Cross and YMCA swimming lessons. I am a confident swimmer and can swim a mile non-stop when in good shape. This started me down a path of being smart but also confident around water.

I have a crystal clear memory of their being a homemade gas powered go-cart that we put to good use. I can picture that go-cart as clearly as if it were yesterday, but I am a little foggy on the “where”. Given all my memories of summer camps and visits to out of town friends, it makes the most sense that our breakneck adventures with the go-cart were on that farm. It just fits too well.

Mostly, I had never been in a place where you could just go outside and keep going. Oh, at seven years old I was already feral in NYC, and I could wander anywhere, but you had to be careful. Here is was different. It seemed like we could wander the earth with no fear as long as we were back in time for lunch or dinner or chores. We could get lost in the high corn or run down to the creek and jump in. Even at that age, I was greatly aware of the privilege. Or should I say luck. Most poor kids don’t get to do things like this. I had a good extended family, and they had a long history of watching out for each other…this was something that was never talked about…it only became evident through the practice. The full force of that has only recently occurred to me.

For some reason, one of the memories that remains most vivid is a road trip to Minnesota where we visited some friends or relatives of Ike and Dottie. There was the usual outdoor large picnic and I remember an old steam powered tractor. The tractor was enormous, black and hulking… nearly the size of a steam locomotive. My memory wants to say it was running but ChatGPT tells me that these beasts were long obsolete by 1965. It is possible, given that we were guests, that it was a restored hobby piece and might indeed have been fired up for our benefit. I like to think that version. That evening, before we headed back to Iowa, I remember sitting outdoors, looking across endless fields and seeing more fireflies than you could possibly imagine.

I have done some basic searching for information about Ike and Dottie but have turned up nothing. In 1965 we were much closer to the end of World War II than we were to the age of the internet and electronic record keeping. Records are held in small county archives where no one has likely taken the time to digitize old records. Even our family tree on FamilySearch.org, which is very well documented on my mothers side of the family turns up little information on my great aunt, or her children.

Ike and Dottie’s children would be a little older than me and may not even still be living. I will uncover the trail, but for now, Aunt Vange, Dottie and Ike are lost to history. They were ordinary people with good hearts. I will never forget them.

¹ Though air travel was becoming safer every year crashes occurred at a rate it would be difficult for us to accept in 2026. In 1965, a typical year, there were 23 commercial air disasters of full size passenger planes with 8 of them occurring on US soil. An additional 2 were US carriers on foreign soli.

Right around the time we were on the return trip to O’hare, another Chicago bound plane crashed into Lake Michigan. It was the same plane type (727) with the same poorly designed altimeter that we took on the return flight to NY. The dates were so similar, maybe even the same day, that worried relatives were calling to see what flight we were on.

² Yes, I am going with “stewardess” to make a point. While a lot of contemporary observers wring their hands over the undoubtedly sexist requirements of the job, I think it really sucks to reduce those women to objects. These were very difficult jobs to get and keep. You had to be quite intelligent. Having a college degree was required on many airlines and for international assignments, speaking a second language was critical. As far as the physical constraints, while you can call it injustice, it took hard work and discipline to maintain the grooming and conditioning standards required. Recommend reading “Come Fly The World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am” by Julia Cooke. Ms. Cooke makes the case that PanAm Stewardesses were perhaps the most liberated women in the world.

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