Our last day in Europe -- Thursday, August 11-- dawned with overcast skies, light drizzle, and temps in the high 50s/low 60s . . . a typical London morning. Tom had returned our Morris minivan to the rental agency the day before, so I suppose we took cabs to Heathrow. This time there was no cab driver in top-hat-and-tails to bid us farewell -- see Chapter 1 if you don't remember this character from our arrival at Heathrow -- but a bigger send-off surprise was awaiting us at the airport.
Trivia Interlude: Heathrow Airport opened as a commercial airport in 1946, and was originally named London Airport. To avoid confusion with two other airports serving London (Gatwick and Stansted), London Airport was renamed Heathrow in September, 1966 . . . one month after we departed.
In 1966, international airport security was virtually nonexistent by today's standards. Terminal buildings were completely open. Friends and family members—including non-passengers without tickets—could walk all the way through the terminal to the gate and sometimes even out on the tarmac to the plane -- there were no jetbridges from the building to the planes. See photo above.
Carry-on bags, briefcases, and checked luggage were not scanned or inspected for weapons or explosives. There were no walk-through metal detectors; no X-ray machines; no routine body or bag searches. Passengers could carry items like pocket knives, tools, or wrapped gifts onto the plane without restriction. I carried on a full-size souvenir épée with a blunt tip (Why did I buy that??) and one of the girls in the other group brought a switchblade she had bought in Italy (illegal in the U.S.) tucked into her underwear!
Besides for historical perspective, the foregoing is intended to explain (in part) what we encountered at Heathrow. As we walked into the ticketing area to check our bags and get our boarding passes (printed on paper with a little tear-off stub with your row and seat number on it), the place was swarming with teenage girls . . . hordes of them running back and forth like a murmuration of starlings. And in the boarding gate concourses, the same phenomenon . . . hundreds of girls excitedly running everywhere. It was weird.
At our gate, the doors to the tarmac were locked and guarded, and when we were escorted out to the plane, only passengers were allowed out. As I walked out, I looked back at the terminal building and the observation decks were totally jammed with people. On board the plane, we asked one of the flight attendants what was going on with all the girls swarming the airport. The answer: the Beatles were at the airport that morning to depart for their final North American tour.
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| Beatles departing for the U.S. from London Airport, August 11, 1966 |
See -- I am not making this up!! The Beatles' flight left after ours did, so we never came close to seeing them. But still . . . once again, we were there on the day!
I have faint memories of the rest of the trip. Flying west, at one point the pilot came on the address system to announce that people on the righthand side of the plane could see Greenland out the windows. This is what it looked like; kinda hard to tell . . .
Over the next 48 hours, we retraced our outbound itinerary: London to Montreal by air; Montreal to Chicago to Oklahoma City by train. The Beatles' first shows in the U.S. were August 12 in Chicago (an afternoon and an evening show). On the train out of Chicago there were people who had been to the afternoon concert; in conversation with them we nonchalantly mentioned that we had been at the London airport the previous day when the Beatles left.
In any event, it was a long, boring, restless train ride home, and it took some time to recover and adjust to U.S. Central time. Nevertheless, I had had a truly Excellent European Adventure!
As I have been posting these stories, a number of people have asked what long-term effects the trip had on my life. I'll share some reflections on that in my next post.
