Boeing 747 retirement: what will happen to all of the travelers and "putnici"
Katherine Sredl, 1 Feb 2023
Every time I step onto a 747 or another long-haul aircraft - and that's at least a few times a year - I am 4 years old again, traveling with my Dad from Kentucky to Buenos Aires to visit my Baka Katica, my namesake, my Dad's Mom.
My first memory is that flight, having my Dad all to myself - Mom, my older sister and brother would leave for Buenos Aires after school let out. Dad offered me his Juicy Fruit gum in the yellow package. Was the gum to help me with the change in air pressure during takeoff? Or because my Dad smoked a pipe and that was his substitute on the flight? I think I had on my favorite mustard yellow sweater, a hand-me-down from my sister or her best friend. I remember the stewardess in the blue dress - I guess we were flying Pan Am - coming to our seats to invite us on a tour of the plane, taking us up the spiral stairs to the bar, moving us to what I now recognize as first class. I think the plane was mostly empty, because in my memories, there are no other people. Now that I am telling my memory as a story, I realize I don't remember what Dad wore. Which is too bad because I would like to describe that to you, so you can know that my Dad was quietly charming and well-dressed. I wonder if that played a role in creating my first memory?
It has now been 12 years since my Dad died, in 2010. Grief hit me in the form of tears when I heard on my streaming news app that Boeing rolled its last 747 off the assembly line yesterday, the end of a 50 year run. The 747 is a symbol of living with the dislocations caused by World War Two - like the ones that took my Mom from Istanbul and my Dad from Zagreb to Buenos Aires, where they met. Dad told me about the King Neptune ceremony when he crossed the euqator aboard ship on that long trip. That's the only story he shared from the trip and that's all I remember about the story: he was 14, he liked it, and he remembered it at age 79.
They call it the plane that shrunk the world. The 747 engineers gave travelers an easy long-haul travel experience for the first time; it was design thinking and user experience thinking before those terms became trendy. The ease of travel allowed my Dad to travel with his (lo key favorite) daughter to visit his mother and siblings. The 747 sewed together many post World War II dislocations - and in doing so allowed those dislocations to continue. It allowed us and many other members of many other diasporas to live very far away from family, to pursue work very far away, so that our visits "home" would only be periodic.
The 747 is a symbol of the post World War Two technological and economic boom as technologies transferred from war to industry. It is a symbol of the US commitment to win the Cold War technological race in industry and economy that brought my Dad and Mom to the US from Buenos Aires. My Dad was an engineer - mechanical and electrical - a technical, transportable profession that brought him to Kentucky to work for a textile manufacturer, designing and selling machines globally. He and my Mom had an easy path to Visas and citizenship, facilitated by engineering degrees, acts of congress to bring in engineers, and an employer eager to compete globally. They arrived in the US on a jet in the 1960s.
My cousin Vlado grew up in Buenos Aires; we share our memories of that trip to remind ourselves of the miracle that we have known each other for a long time, across long distances. Last summer in Zagreb, where he lives now, Vlado told me that when he and his Dad came to Ezeiza (the airport) to pick us up in Buenos Aires, I was waiting on the curb with the luggage, alone. Dad had told me to stay with the luggage, and don't let anyone take it or take me. As a father of three, Vlado now thinks it incredible that a four-year-old child would be told that and assume, "If my Dad thinks I can do that, I can do that and I will do that." How did fifty years of the 747 go by so fast?
As the last 747 rolls off the assembly line, I wonder if my memories of my Dad will fade. I miss him even as I write this, and the longing physically hurts. Will there be fewer triggers of memory as the technology and the material culture of the US change? Will I forget him? Am I alone in this memory? Can anyone help me?
I think now of the poem "Putnik" (Traveler) by the Croatian nineteenth century romantic poet Petar Preradovic. The theme of the poem is people (men) leaving home, their Mothers, and the emotions of the traveler and those left behind, especially longing. Reader, the traveler is not going on a gap year but is forced to leave his rural home in a small imperial colony as it offers no future that fits the political and economic circumstances of a rapidly changing world. Some say the poem defines us Croats.
When my Dad was dying in 2010 of pancreatic cancer, and he was in bed on morphine, I read "Putnik" out loud to him to comfort him. A memory from his childhood in Slavonia (a region of Croatia that looks like, well, Western Kentucky); he would have had to have memorized it in elementary school. His parents were teachers, and if my Dad's parenting was modeled after theirs, then he had to memorize it perfectly. The lines of the poem rhyme and I said one word wrong. He sat up in bed and corrected me in his morphine induced end of life palliative care haze. He really got on my nerves until the end.
My Dad was an engineer; he was curious about how machines work. In my imagination, my Dad's experience of that flight brought him close to heaven. I wonder now also about the stress he must have been under: I bet five plane tickets were expensive? Why were we flying at that time: I think my Baka Katica had been sick? What was it like for him to leave his business in Paducah for that period of time, and be so far away? What was it like to go to Buenos Aires, knowing he would leave again? What was it like for him to be alone with his daughter for the trip? Does he miss me?
#747 #Boeing #globalization #diaspora #grief #putnici #traveler #Kentucky #Paducah #Western Kentucky #Croatia #BuenosAires #Zagreb
