The Weirdest Day of My Life at the TWA Flight Center

This story deserves its own post, because if I tried to include it in my story about our visit to the TWA Flight Center and hotel, it would be the world’s longest footnote-slash-digression.

So here it is.

March 5, 1999 was the day after my 21st birthday. Which maybe was not the best day to schedule a flight to Paris, but here we were.

I was quite hungover, despite keeping my legal birthday celebrations to only five shots at the only bar in our college town. This wasn’t because I was being mindful or forward-thinking; no, it was because I was sick and the health services people thought it might be mono (?!?), so I was on my first day of a Z-pack.

Prudent, non?

And I needed to get my driver’s license renewed before I left the country, so my wretched ass had to get up and go to the local DMV for a new one before my dad came to pick me up and drive me four hours to JFK Airport.

Yes, because you can’t get to Paris from The Middle of Nowheresville, PA, I had to get to an airport that DID fly to Paris. And it ended up being JFK because blah blah reasons.

So I’m sitting in my dorm room waiting for my ride when the phone rings. (The landline phone, of course.) And it’s my dad, asking if I can come get him in my car because his is on fire.

On. Fire.

At a gas station two exits away on I-80 — westbound, by the way, not even getting me closer to JFK — I pull up to see a blackened husk of a Ford Taurus next to a fenced-in pen for a goat. The goat seemed nonplussed.

Onward we drove in my non-exploding car, and thankfully I recall nothing else unusual happening on that leg of the journey.

Finally we made it to the TWA Flight Center. Even in my exhausted, totally loopy state, and even in the terminal’s final years with the indignities of various addendums and renovations, I remember the soaring ceilings and grandeur of the place.

We sat in a row of seats near the sunken lounge, which I do recall as still having the red upholstery, and I watched a pigeon flutter around the concrete waves and windows above me. Revisiting the space today, I estimate I would have been sitting near the Bertoia stools in this photo.

(I found a Getty Images photo of the terminal interior from May 6, 1998, which tracks accurately with my memory of my visit.)

Finally, it was time to board the plane, so I walked down the iconic flight tube (toward the Saarinen wing in the photo) and made my way to France.

I guess I didn’t have mono, because I didn’t get any sicker in Paris after finishing the Z-pack.

And even though the day was full of chaos and confusion and I really had no idea who Eero Saarinen was back then, the brief time I spent inside the TWA Flight Center made a lifelong impression. I’m quite sure that my fascination with the building started that day.

My only other souvenir from that time was the customs sticker affixed to my passport from our return to the U.S., also via TWA. However, I have zero memory of the terminal on the return visit, as I’m sure we either breezed through or bypassed it entirely.

But I do remember driving back from JFK to my college in a terrible snowstorm, so bad that cars were sliding off I-80 left and right as we chugged westward. One car, I believe, was identifiable as some Lambda Chi brothers I knew, and they were standing around outside the car waiting for assistance.

Always a story!