Though he was just a toddler in the early 70s, Christopher Lynch swears he can still remember sitting in the backseat of his grandmother’s Cadillac as she cruised the tarmac at Midway Airport. “She had automatic windows, and I remember playing with those windows and hearing the scream of the jets as we drove around,” he says. “Midway was dead then, but still there was an occasional flight. I remember how cool it was to hear the whine of jet engines and smell the fuel.”
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In 1931 Lynch’s grandfather, a sightseeing pilot named Pierce “Scotty” O’Carroll, founded Monarch Air Service at the five-year-old field–then called Municipal Airport and serving primarily as an airmail hub. Lynch’s mother spent much of her youth at the airfield, and as a teenager Lynch worked at the Monarch hangar, where he drank in the stories of the pilots who flew the corporate jets stored there. He took his first flying lesson at 15–the same year he decided to sit down and interview a couple of old-timers, including longtime Monarch employee Fred Farbin.
He found the former pilots back at the hangar’s lounge, where they still hung out to gab and drink free coffee. Their stories and photographs make up the bulk of Lynch’s new book, Chicago’s Midway Airport: The First Seventy-Five Years, which follows the rise of Midway from a former onion field to the world’s busiest commercial air hub. At the height of the airport’s importance, in the 40s and 50s, spectators gathered to watch planes take off and land and celebrities dined at Marshall Field’s elegant Cloud Room in the control tower. “It was like the center of a wheel,” says Lynch. “In the early days planes were slow and only went a couple of hundred miles, so you hopped around the country.”
