Companies don’t do this anymore, but a Tennessee newspaper flew me up from Texas for a job interview in 1970. The job only paid $135 a week. At the time I was making $125 a week at the Paris News. This was the first time I ever flew on an airliner.
A buddy in college had taken me up in a Piper Cub one time. We flew around the campus and to the next town. At one point he handed the steering column over to me. It was kinda neat and not too scary. As long as I could see the cows in the fields below me I knew I wasn’t really that high up.
I had to work until midnight Saturday, had Sunday off and then worked Monday morning then had the afternoon off. I asked to switch it to Monday afternoon without explanation, and my boss was nice enough not to ask any questions.
Sunday morning I drove out to tiny Paris airfield, climbed the steps to a commuter plane that didn’t look much bigger than the Piper Cub and took off, following the highways, to Dallas Love Field. I got a slightly larger plane and connected to Nashville then to Tri-Cities Airport located in the middle of Kingsport, Bristol and Johnson City, Tennessee.
The managing editor picked me up and drove me to the newspaper office. It was a second story rat hole, but he said a new, ultramodern building was under construction.
Then he mentioned my letter to him in which I mentioned I had never flown commercially so I didn’t know if the plane ticket was in the right price range. Instead of being impressed with my concern to save the newspaper money, he lectured me on being too honest about my naiveté. Never let anyone know how inexperienced I was in the ways of the world, he said. If anyone asks you if you’ve traveled much, lie, he continued, and say you’ve been around the globe.
It should have been a warning sign that the man who was about to hire me to report the facts was urging me to lie. But what did I know? I was just a country kid from Texas.
He impressed me with a dinner at the Holiday Inn and then sent me back to my motel. Like I said I was just a country kid from Texas and easily impressed.
I flew out Monday morning. At one of the airports going back one of the two flight attendants stopped me at the front door to the plane, saying I had not gotten the proper boarding pass. The engines were revving up and I didn’t have time to return to the terminal. I wasn’t going to make it back to the Paris News by one o’clock so I’d lose my job. The Kingsport paper would decide not to hire me because I was too naïve, and I would be unemployed.
The other flight attendant said, “What difference does it make? Let him on the plane.”
So I took my seat on the plane, arrived back at the newspaper on time and in a couple of weeks received a call that I was hired in Tennessee.
First time to do things is fun. You get an adrenaline rush. You get challenged over the way you think about the world. You get scared to death. You sigh with relief and tell yourself, “Well, I lived through that.”
I still look forward to doing things for the first time. I need the excitement to keep my hearting pumping.