South Dallas Forty

Airline flight crews rarely have time to go to football games during a layover. Many years ago, when I was a flight engineer on the DC-8, we had way too many very long Detroit layovers, which meant we were laying over in Ann Arbor at the venerated Ann Arbor Inn.

We could sometimes score tickets to a football game they held in their half-buried stadium on the east side of campus. Going to a football game on an Ann Arbor layover was more fun than visiting the Michigan Museum of Natural History or trying to get sweet tea with your lunch at the Lamplighter Inn.

Today’s layover with my first officer Tony was in Fort Worth, and we had a total of twenty-eight fun-filled hours to enjoy. Normally, layovers don’t last longer than a good nap, a healthy poop, and a quick shower, but during the end of the month, changeover trips tend to get a little long and squirrelly.

Who knew that Tony would come up with two football tickets from his alma mater, Goat Rope State? Tony’s home team was coming in from the far reaches of West Texas to play those low-life, sister-marrying, communications majors from South Central Texas Agricultural University.

Yep, the Fighting Goat Ropers were going toe-to-toe with those puppy abusing Horned Cows from SCTAU, and the game was going to be more exciting than a coach meal with an ice cream sundae, according to Tony.

The van from the Arlington Hilton gladly took us away from their lobby bar and deposited Tony and me directly in front of the hallowed stadium of the fighting Horned Cows. “Dan Jenkins Field” is a beautiful place if you can ignore the fact that it is built with taxpayer money on biggest the sand-spur infested meadow in the DFW area.

The stadium is about two miles south of the departure end of the DFW runways, so we were not surprised the fact that the noise of departing overbooked airliners drowned out the playing of the national anthem by the Fighting Horned Cows marching band.

Tony and I got some beers and settled into our seats in Section 13a, Row 68. We sat in a sort of “reverse seniority,” with me on the right and Tony on the left, and were situated just above a group of skanky SCTAU females whose only saving grace was that their tattoos appeared to be spelled correctly.

Sitting on either side of us were two guys. Joe, on my right, sported a SCTAU wife-beater shirt and a baseball cap with a picture of a cartoon Rebel on it saying, “Forget? Hell!” On Tony’s left was a fellow with wire-rimmed glasses, a leather-elbowed tweed sports coat, and a hat that said, “Our Athletics Team is far Superior to Your Athletics Team.”

My new friend started the conversation by apologizing for spilling beer on my leg and then telling me how many games of the SCTAU Horned Cows he had attended in his lifetime, which was all of them.

“You fly for the airlines, don’t you?” Joe began, lighting up his third cigarette. How did you figure that out? I asked. “Because you are still wearing your airline ID on your jacket.” Oh, crap. I forgot to take my secondary ID off of my commuting jacket. A secondary ID, for you non-airline, law-abiding airline people, is the ID you get from the company when you lie to them and tell them you lost the first one so you have a spare. I carry one on my uniform coat and one on my commuting jacket.

I forgot to remove it and was about to pay for it for at least three more quarters. “My uncle Joe was an airline pilot just after the big war,” continued Joe with no encouragement from me. “Yep, after getting a bullet in his butt flying Hueys in Vet-Nam, he got a job flying for Braniff. He got furloughed after Braniff went belly-up and got on with Southwest.”

Where is he now?

“Dead.” Said Joe. “He was what you people call ‘laying-over’ in Little Rock and died from a heart attack while he was watching ‘Dancing With The Stars’ on TV. They found him the next morning still in his uniform, sitting up, TV remote in hand, dead as disco.”

Those layovers can be treacherous, I said, trying to be helpful yet respectful of a departed captain and a war hero. “Yeah,” said Joe. “This stadium seat was left to me by my uncle Joe. He was a big Horned Cow fan and once told me that airline flying was an awful lot like a football game.”

I had to ask: How so?

“Hours and hours of uncomfortable boredom interspersed with quick moments of embarrassment and pain.”

By now, the game was not only underway, it was out of control. Amidst the howling madness of a hundred climbing turbojets, we saw and heard the dismantling of the Fighting Goat Roper’s entire football program. By half-time the score was: Horned Cows 46 — Goat Ropers 3.

Tony and I retired to the concession stand during the latter part of half-time for beer refills and nachos. I asked him if he was OK staying to watch his alma mater get their noses stomped into the mud like a new-hire at a chief pilot’s conference, or if he wanted to head back to the Hilton.

“Hell no! This is the best my team has done here in 20 years,” said Tony, who by now had imbibed at least as much brew as my new best friend, Joe. Rather than try to get Tony back up those 80 flights of stairs to our seats, I made a pre-emptive phone call and summoned the Hilton van back to pick us up early.

Most of the Goat Roper’s fans were heading out the exits as we left. They were moving for the doors faster than a “special needs” passenger at the gate after arrival in Fort Lauderdale.

Tony said didn’t mind leaving a little early. His seatmate turned out to be an English Lit professor that he had taken a class from when he was a junior at GRS.

“Old Professor Snape didn’t remember me, but I sure remembered him,” said Tony. “He was the one who convinced me that my worst day flying an airplane was going to be way better than my best day reading Proust and talking about dangling modifiers. The day after I dropped out of his class and quit being an English major was the day I enrolled in Air Force ROTC, started majoring in engineering and began my Air Force career.”

I’m sure it was a great loss to the literary community but a prodigious gain for the defense of our nation, I said. As our noisy, air-conditioned, hotel-courtesy bus hit the interstate on our ride back to layover bliss, our conversation drifted away from losing football teams, and we got back to more comfortable subjects.

Before we knew it, we had shaken off the dust of a cool-weather Texas football afternoon. Tony and I had forgotten all about Snape and my new-best-friend Joe and had begun to look forward to tomorrow night’s layover in Shreveport, MS—the cultural center of the airline world.–

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