Last night I dredged up a childhood memory from the dark recesses of my mind. Perhaps it was the sudden arrival of cool, dry autumn air that got me going. The memory regarded a little airport about 5 miles from where we lived, right near the factory where my father once worked. One of the most frequent entertainments of my early youth were little road trips with my parents. My father would get my brother and me (and sometimes my mother) in the car and drive us around. Being an organized kind of man, my father usually had an idea of where to go. A common destination was Teterboro Airport. We would cruise up along the industrial road on the west side of the airport and find a place to park, near the big old bare-metal aircraft hangars. I wasn’t very impressed by Teteboro, as the planes there were just little Piper Cubs and such; nothing like the fighter jets and bombers that I built plastic models of back at home. Just a little plane buzzing up or down the field now and then, pulling up to the gas pumps once in a while to refuel for a weekend recreational trip.

One thing made the time there a little less boring for my brother and me: a Good Humor ice cream truck was usually parked near-by. My parents weren’t the only ones who made use of this rather tepid but certainly affordable form of family entertainment (Disneyworld was not seen as a suburban birthright back in my day). After the snack, though, there wasn’t much to do between planes but watch the cars and trucks going by on Route 46, off in the distance. Eventually it would be time to go home and turn on the tube, or if it was a nice evening maybe get out the bike for a short ride around the block.

Teterboro later became somewhat more entertaining for kids given all the corporate jets that started using it in the late 1970s. I lived not far from the airport back in the 1980s, and I remember the powerful sound of Leer jets torquing up their engines for a fast take-off. I wasn’t the only one impressed by it; I remember seeing families in cars pulled over along Route 46 at the north end of the runways, watching the action on summer evenings. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen anymore. It became another subtle casualty of nine-eleven; today the airport is considered a vulnerable target whose perimeter needs to be defended by the authorities.

Obviously, I now sort-of miss old Teterboro, despite the dearth of action and the acrid smell in the air from garbage burning in the near-by meadowlands. Maybe it’s just childhood nostalgia, maybe it’s just that life and the world in general seemed simpler back then.

In truth, the world wasn’t all that much simpler. Every weekday, my father used high-quality tools and machines across the street to craft parts for guidance devices that would guide military aircraft and missiles, some armed with nuclear weapons, precisely to their targets if and when needed. The Cold War was going strong back then, as we were reminded every Saturday at noon when the local air raid sirens were tested. The world was not a safe and cozy place back then either.

But the world sure has changed a lot over the five decades of my life, and it threatens to keep on changing faster and faster. Given all the dizziness in the air these days, I wouldn’t mind going back to Teterboro with my parents for an hour or so late on a sunny Saturday afternoon in September, munching on an almond crunch ice-cream bar. With 20/20 hindsight, boredom wasn’t so bad after all!

Here are some recent pix of the area. The black plane is pretty cool, but there ain’t no friendly place to park and watch. Teterboro ain’t Mayberry or Hootersville no more (if you remember your 60’s TV).