Description:
Jim Connaughton talks about his life and career in the aviation industry.
Transcript:
Interviewee: Jim Connaughton
Interviewer: J.R. Connaughton (Jim’s son)
Interview Date: 12/8/2007
Interview Location: Unknown
J.R. Connaughton: Hi. I’m J.R. Connaughton and I’m going to interview my father, Jim Connaughton.
Jim Connaughton: Hi. How are you doing? [laughs]
JRC: I want to start off with where you were born and where you’re from. Tell me about that.
JC: I was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas in November 1946, so I’m about 102 years old, I guess. [laughs]
JRC: Were you born on the third or the fifth? I always get them confused.
JC: The fifth. I plead the fifth.
JRC: That’s awesome. Okay. Do you have any brothers or sisters?
JC: I’ve got two brothers and three sisters. Larry and Paul are my brothers. Carol, Theresa, and Diane are my sisters. They’re all still alive and kicking. Well, kicking, if not alive. Larry is in Sulphur Springs, Texas. He works for a canning company down there, plant manager, er not plant manager but manager of maintenance. My brother Paul, who works at a printing company down there, makes and prints all sorts of – whatever it is that needs to be printed, I guess, anywhere from phone books to flyers to business cards. Two of my sisters are in Fort Smith. Diane and Theresa both work for Sparks Medical Center. Diane works in a doctor’s office there, and Theresa works in the reception office. My other sister Carol is in Middleburg, Ohio. Her and her husband – she works for K-Mart and her husband works for an armored car company. The name of it escapes me right now.
JRC: What’s the differences in ages like?
JC: I’m the oldest. Right now, I’m 61. Larry is next and he would be 59. The rest of them are kind of spread out. I think the youngest one, Diane, I think she’s 40. I wouldn’t swear to anything else.
JRC: You were born in Arkansas. Did you guys stay there and live there?
JC: I stayed there until I went in the Navy when I was 18, 19. The Army recruiter came around and said I was going to be drafted in the next draft, so I said, “I’ll show you. I’ll join the Navy.”
JRC: The draft was going on. What were they drafting for?
JC: It was the start of Vietnam. I didn’t have any wishes to be out on the jungle, so I figured the Navy is in water and water doesn’t get close to the jungle [JRC laughs] so I’ll do that.
JRC: Where did you go in the Navy?
JC: I went to basic training, boot camp, in Great Lakes, which was a culture shock because Fort Smith, we might get four or five inches of snow all winter long. The day after we got to boot camp, it started snowing and it didn’t quit snowing until I got out in May. I went in in February and got out in May.
JRC: What was boot camp like?
JC: It’s kind of – well, you get out of it what you put into it. It can be intimidating.
JRC: Did you have like the Full Metal Jacket drill instructor guy?
JC: My NCO wasn’t that bad. One of our sister companies had a first class E6 that was nicknamed “Little Hitler.” He was barely tall enough to be in the Navy. I think you’ve got to be 5-foot and he was 5-foot-1 or something like that. Knowing what I do now versus what I didn’t know then, those guys, if they don’t really run roughshod over the company, if they don’t get the maximum amount of work out of them, they get hollered at and disciplinary action. Little Hitler went over and above and beyond.
JRC: To catch you guys working?
JC: He got his point across very well. We’d be out in formation waiting for something to happen and not quite standing at attention or parade rest or whatever it was supposed to be, and he’d grab a flag and swing it at the biggest offender and a lot of times he didn’t miss.
JRC: Oh man. What’d you do in the Navy? You weren’t fighting.
JC: I spent two years down in Pensacola, Florida, where I started out in a first lieutenant’s office, which is kind of like the backbone of each outfit. They supplied all the lightbulbs and paper and ink pens and take people from here to there. Two of them were like a mailman, like a delivery service. I did that. I was attached to a photo school. They called it B School, the secondary phase. A School, they teach you the basics of taking pictures. B School, they specialize in taking more in-depth, teach you how to take specialized pictures. Part of my command was teaching guys how to take aerial photographs. After about 8 months in the first lieutenant’s office, I talked them into letting me go out to the flight line. We had six twin-engine Beechcraft. They called them a D-18 Tail-Dragger. It was a twin-engine job that holds about 10 people. They took two of the seats out right behind the cockpit and put belly cameras in, so whoever was flying co-pilot, or the right seat, had a viewfinder. Basically, the pilot would set things up and he would fly over a specific target they wanted to shoot pictures of. Right behind the cockpit was the cameras, and they had one guy for each camera. Their job was to keep film in it.
JRC: What does the Navy need to take pictures of?
JC: Whatever is out there. We took pictures of the battleships over in Mobile Bay. We’d make photo runs over that. We helped a few of the fishing captains find fish. That was just a side. Over in Vietnam, they took pictures of the bad guys. This was basically teaching them how to do that.
JRC: So, you never went to Vietnam. Did you get to see anywhere cool traveling with the Navy?
JC: After I left Pensacola, I spent two years up in Keflavik, Iceland, nicknamed “The Devil’s Icebox.” There’s a girl behind every tree. All you had to do was find the trees. [both laugh]
JRC: What was Iceland like? Cold?
JC: Really it wasn’t that bad. Greenland is a lot more desolate than Iceland, which surprised me because on my flight up we stopped in (unintelligible) for a fuel stop. We got off the airplane to stretch our legs for about 20 minutes while they put gas on it. I have never seen a more desolate place. It was nothing but rocks, and more rocks, and more rocks. It’s like Alcatraz. The only thing that broke the skyline was a couple of buildings. I mean, there was nothing there. I went in the terminal and there was a couple of soda machines and that was about it. I’m very thankful we never had to stay there very long. Then we went up to Iceland and it’s basically a big lava field. Reykjavik is the capitol, and Reykjavik is Icelandic for “smoky bay.” About 90 percent of the heat up there is done by steam heat. They do a lot of geothermal plumbing off the geysers and steam pots. They capture the heat and pipe it through the buildings.
JRC: That’s pretty cool.
JC: Yeah. They’re one of the first green countries.
JRC: What year were you over there? [coughs]
JC: [thinking] I was in Pensacola from ’64-’66 and Iceland from ’66-’69. It was just about half my tour, I guess. We’d rent a car or something like that and drive around the island. I got to watch them drag a whale in and cut it up. They used the blubber for food processing. The Icelandics, one of the main businesses is dried fish. They fished for everything. Once they’d make a big catch, they’d bring it back in and filet them and make like beef jerky. They would dry them and make fish jerky.
JRC: [laughing] That’s awesome.
JC: It’s not bad. It’s really good. They raise a lot of sheep. There’s very little cattle because the wind is not conducive to raising cattle, but for the sheep there’s a lot of shrubbery. There’s sheep and mountain goats and stuff like that. They’re built more for running around on rocks since it’s basically a lava field. Cattle need a lot of grassland and there’s not much grassland up there. There is some, but it’s not like here in the States where you’ve got a big pasture. That’s just not the case up there. Up until the 1900s, most of the houses were built underground like in the Kansas plains, like the sod homes. They’d cut a big hole in the ground and build a frame around it. It’s easier to heat. It’s a neat place. We saw the world’s largest waterfall. They wanted to harness it and sell the electricity, but at the time, it cost too much for the power lines. They were going to sell the electricity to England. Laying power lines under the ocean was, at that time, cost prohibitive.
JRC: Wow. That’s crazy. How long were you in the Navy?
JC: Four years.
JRC: When you got out, what’d you do?
JC: I went to work for Whirlpool building air conditioners. When I got out of the Navy, I wanted to work on airplanes and couldn’t figure out how to get there. My brother Larry had sent in an application to Atlantic Airlines School, which is in Kansas City. By the time they got back to him, he wound up going into the Army. The school called the house one day, and I answered the phone. They were looking for Larry, and I said, “He’s not here. Can I help you with something?” He said, “Well, we’re Atlantic Airlines School.” I said, “Oh. He’s not here but I’d be interested in talking to you about it.” He said okay, so we arranged a meeting place and I went over and talked to him. I signed up and went to Kansas City to go to school for about – oh, four months, I guess. They basically taught you how to become a ticket agent and how to read the tariffs and how to use the computers and stuff. From there, I went to National Airlines in Washington, D.C. and stayed up there for I guess about six or seven years.
JRC: What year did you go up to D.C?
JC: I got out of the Navy in ’69. It was probably [pause] late ’69. Yeah, because I worked for Whirlpool most of the summer.
JRC: What was going on in D.C. when you got up there?
JC: That was right before the race riots. You had to watch the news to find out what was going on. Mom and I were going to a nightclub one night and we took a wrong turn, and it was like we were driving into a different world. Cars were on fire and the cops were out in riot gear. It was just chaos. We decided we didn’t want to be there so we turned around and took a different path, shall we say.
JRC: Speaking of Mom, where did you meet?
JC: She was working for National Airlines as well, but she was working in the reservations office and I was working out at the airport.
JRC: Did you guys meet in D.C.?
JC: Yeah. We got a bowling league started, the guys at the airport and the girls in reservations. Her dad bowls a little bit so she knew how to do it. We got in the league and we both ended up on the same team. We bowled for three or four years. It was a midnight league. Just about everybody worked 2:00-10:30 or 3:00-midnight. We made it over to the bowling alley about (unintelligible). We’d bowl until about two or three or four o’clock in the morning. We did pretty good. We had lots of fun.
JRC: So you met in D.C. and she’s not from D.C. She’s –
Together: From Delaware.
JRC: How did she wind up in D.C.?
JC: She went to Weaver Airline School in Kansas City. We were there almost at the same time but never knew it. She was on one street and I was on the other. That was about five miles apart. She did her thing and flew back home and I drove.
JRC: That’s pretty crazy. How did you wind up in Oklahoma?
JC: Mom was working for National, and I had quit and went to work for Braniff because I couldn’t get off the ramp. They would promote you by seniority and every time I would get up to one or two to go and I’d get approved to get off the ramp, they’d have a cutback and so back down the ladder I would go. A friend of mine jumped ship and went to work for Braniff and told me, “Hey, we’ve got a couple of slots open if you want one.” I said okay and went over and put an application in and did an interview and was hired. It got us out of both working for the same company. That was safer because National would go on strike quite a bit, and when you’re on strike, you’re not making any money. She was unhappy with reservations because the work rules were kind of stringent and the work wasn’t that bad, but the supervisors they had made it kind of difficult, so she wanted to get out of there. The cost of living in that area was such that we really couldn’t afford to live where we were living. There were a couple of vacancies that came up for grabs, one in Tulsa and one in Oklahoma City. I put in for Oklahoma City and got awarded Wichita, Kansas. [both laugh] After a few phone calls, we realized there was a clerical error on their part, and I was awarded Oklahoma City. That was – what, ’72? I want to say ’74, probably. Yeah, so we came. We went west and set up shop, and we’ve been here ever since. I started out on the ticket counter, and after about a year, they were looking a supervisor. It’s extra money and we were getting ready to buy a house, so I volunteered for that and got it. I was a ticket counter supervisor for a couple of years until they decided they spent too much money and went bankrupt.
JRC: So you don’t work for Braniff now.
JC: I don’t work for Braniff now. I’ve been away from them [clears throat] for 23 years. When they went bankrupt, I went to work for Continental and Southwest and United. No, let me see. Continental, PanAm, and United, all at the same time.
JRC: You worked for three different airlines?
JC: Yup.
JRC: What was that like?
JC: That was a logistical feat. I would go to work for Continental at 5:00 in the morning until about 10:00, and then change ties and work for PanAm from 10:00 until about 2:00 in the afternoon, go home for lunch, and come back from 4:00 to 10:00 for United.
JRC: Good Lord.
JC: I’d take a suitcase to work with me every day, just to change uniforms. Every three or four weeks I’d get a couple of days off. I’d get off with United a couple of days, and then I’d get a couple of other days off with PanAm, and then a couple of other days I’d be off with Continental.
JRC: That was a lot of work.
JC: It was interesting. It was all temporary because I couldn’t be a full-time employee for more than one carrier at a time. The way I got around it was I was temporary with everybody. That lasted about six or eight months.
JRC: When did you go to work for where you work now?
JC: September of ’84.
JRC: ’84. Southwest Airlines.
JC: Yeah, Southwest Airlines. I started off on the ramp and went to operations. I guess it’s been about ten or twelve years ago that I transferred over to air freight.
JRC: What do you do there now?
JC: It’s basically moving boxes and packages, doing paperwork and making sure they’re labeled for the right flight and that everybody has the right documentation.
JRC: Do you like it out there?
JC: Yeah. It’s interesting. You get to see and meet a wide variety of people, from desk clerks to company presidents.
JRC: How do you think the airport has changed since you started out there? How do you think the airline industry has changed?
JC: It kind of ran along. Not much happened until 9/11, and with all the kooks running around, security has almost quadrupled. They had a fence around the perimeter of the airport to keep people from going out and getting on the runways and getting really close to planes when they were landing. Now it’s keeping the maniacs out.
I was working the departure gate one day and had a helicopter land on the ramp about a block away from where were at from the building. We had just pushed an airplane off the gate, and a guy who was one of the people seeing somebody off saw it land, and he ran out there. We hadn’t closed the jet bridge door yet. He ran out there to the jet bridge and jumped off and was going to run out and see the helicopter because he had never seen one close before. I had to chase him down. I grabbed a baggage tug and one of the cargo handlers, and we went out and I almost had to tackle him to stop him. If he had gone much farther, he would have been out in the middle of everywhere and while those planes are taxiing, they’re doing 40 to 60 miles an hour. They’re in a hurry to either get to the gate or to get from the gate to the runway. While they can stop pretty quick, somebody out there with the engines running that fast can get sucked up in one of the intakes from quite aways away.
JRC: Who was this guy?
JC: Just somebody who was fascinated with helicopters.
JRC: [laughs] Apparently they had a strong draw to them.
JC: Yeah. A friend of mine who was about two blocks away from an airplane that was taxiing out one day was sweeping the pod for foreign object damage, which is stuff that falls off the suitcases and out of baggage carts and off tugs and airplanes, so just junk. Clutter. He had a sweeping machine and he was cleaning the ramp up, and he should have realized where he was at and what was going on. The jet blast blew him about 50 feet, just like you take a piece of paper and throw it up in the breeze. He was head over heels. It didn’t break anything, but it skinned him up pretty good. He had black and blue spots for a couple of months. This guy had been around airplanes for quite a while. He just wasn’t paying attention. His gray matter must have sprung a leak or something.
JRC: It sounds dangerous to be working around airplanes.
JC: It can be dangerous. When I was in D.C., a friend of mine was taking some freight to the freight house, and he had a couple of pieces of mail that needed to transfer to Eastern. This is back when we were working for National. Eastern’s transfer point was inside the terminal. Well, he’s got like a big Kubota tractor and he’s pulling, for description purposes, three medium-sized hay wagons. He went in the terminal and he was coming out headed for the print house, and Eastern had a turboprop. It was leaving. The plane turned, and my buddy had on the first cart a bunch of canaries. When the plane turned, it sucked about two-thirds of them off and there was feathers and crates all over the place. They’d put them in an oversized cardboard box with a screen for air, and the cardboard won’t hold up to 80 mile an hour winds. It was a mess.
JRC: Working in the airports in the country, did you ever meet any famous people? Rock stars? Presidents? Actors?
JC: I met Lawrence Welk twice. The guy – I can’t think of his name. I met Bob Hope. Jim Gunner once. (unintelligible) Sutton in Mustang. I can’t think of his name right now. He used to do old Westerns. He’s since retired. But yeah, I’ve met quite a few. I met Henry Kissinger’s wife.
JRC: Really? That’s cool.
JC: I talked to a few people.
JRC: You told me one time you met our current President.
JC: Oh, yeah. Mr. Bush. Back when his father was running for office, they were coming in on a Southwest flight. He was in the meet and greet party waiting on his dad to come in, and he came down in our operations office and sat down and talked to us for, oh, 45 minutes to an hour.
JRC: What was he like?
JC: Just like you and me. Just a normal, everyday, fun-loving guy.
JRC: Is this when he was Texas governor?
JC: I’m not sure if he was governor yet or not. I don’t think so because if he would have been governor then, he would have probably had a bigger entourage.
JRC: Did he have anybody with him?
JC: There was four or five Secret Service guys. They’d play with their ears and talk into their coat sleeve. I met Lady Bird Johnson.
JRC: What was she like?
JC: She was just a fun-loving little lady. This is back after her husband was out of office. They used to fly – as a matter of fact, when I was working for Braniff, they used to fly to Austin quite a bit. She’d come up and she’d do a dinner or something for somebody.
JRC: Have you ever been struck by lightning?
JC: Why do you ask that?
[both laugh]
JRC: Random question.
JC: Well, I do have curly hair. I have been hit. Well, it wasn’t a direct hit. It was more like static discharge. Back when I was working for National, they had a thunderstorm on the field. I had a flight getting ready to push the gate, and the nose of the airplane was pretty close to the building. Under the passenger boarding area, they had like a basement-type deal. It was unfinished and we used to park our equipment in there. Well, there was this 12-foot wooden ladder and they brought the weight computations out, where you tell the pilot how much the plane weighs and how to set his trim settings. They put it on a long aluminum pole and had a radiator hose stuck on top of it. You rolled your papers up and stuck it in there, and then took that and handed it to the captain. It was thundering and lightning, so to keep from being grounded, I went up about four rungs on this ladder and reached out and gave the captain his papers. The last thing I remember was this big crash, and about, I don’t know, two or three or four minutes later, I was laying on the ground and about seven or eight guys were leaning over me. One of them says, “Hey, man. You okay? Do you feel okay? You doing alright? Are you alive?” I said, “Yeah. What happened?” They said, “You got hit by lightning.” Naw. Well, about a block or a block and a half away, the lightning hit the ramp and there was a chunk of asphalt that was about three feet around and about a foot to a foot and a half deep where the lightning hit. It looked like you shot it with a grenade. Asphalt was all over the place and nice and toasty melted. When I got over to see it, it was still warm. I have no recollection of hitting the ground at all. They said I just folded up like a wet sack of potatoes. Zap and splat.
I got chased by a lightning bolt a couple times. That’s back when I was a kid. We were playing baseball and a thunderstorm came up. I was playing right field, and one of the guys said, “It’s starting to lightning. Let’s get out of here.” Everybody ran for a grove of pine trees. Of course, I was the farthest one away, so it took me the longest to get there. Well, I was probably about to second base, and one of the guys hollered, “Run, Jimmy! Run!” I looked over my shoulder and this big, old, humongous ball of fire was on the ground coming at me. I put it in second gear and started hauling, moving just as fast as my two little stubby legs would take me. I’d look back over my shoulder once in a while, and just about the time I got to the trees, it went from about the size of a Volkswagen down to the size of a basketball. It dissipated into the ground, but if I hadn’t run, it would have got me. I did the zig zag deal where I’d run to the right and a little bit to the left and wherever I went, it went. I was its target. I almost had to go home and change pants.
JRC: Are you religious?
JC: Not if I don’t think of it.
JRC: What’s your religious affiliation?
JC: I’ve been a Catholic all my life.
JRC: Any good Catholic stories?
JC: We used to nip at the sacramental wine every once in a while. I wasn’t an altar boy.
JRC: You were an altar boy?
JC: No, I wasn’t.
JRC: No strange altercations with any of the priests?
JC: No. They were all straight and narrows. Nothing funny. We had one who was a gun collector. He collected Civil War rifles and pistols. He had what they call a Peacemakers .45 with about an 18-inch barrel. It was almost a rifle. You know the TV show Gunsmoke and Marshal Dillon? He carried one on the show and its barrel was at least a foot long, if not longer. They carried those things for accuracy because you can’t do a fast draw with them, but you can get – a normal pistol’s got a six or eight inch barrel. You can get close, but those Peacemakers, they used them as billy club as well as a pistol. If you don’t want to waste a bullet and don’t want to kill a guy, you just slow him down. Get your hefty gun out and whack him upside the head.
JRC: Did the priest ever carry that around?
JC: Not as a deterrent. He brought it to class a few times and showed it to us.
JRC: So, you went to a Catholic school?
JC: Yeah. I went to Saint Boniface from first through eighth grade, and then Saint Anne’s Academy for junior high and high school. The Dean of Boys at Saint Anne’s was a semi-pro boxer. His name was Father Cane. They had what you call Cane’s Chain Gang. Anybody who got in trouble and could withstand five swats got to sign his paddle. Crazy as it seems, I wasn’t one of them. I think three guys in my class got to sign his paddle about four times apiece. I think a couple of them were on purpose, but I wouldn’t swear to it. I had some fun in school. My dad didn’t have enough money to pay my tuition, so to pay for the tuition I played janitor after school. I cleaned the classrooms and mopped floors and stuff. I got to know two of the nuns pretty good. Some were nice and some were deadly.
JRC: Did all your brothers and sisters go to Catholic school?
JC: No. Larry and I were the only ones who went all the way through. The rest of them went to Saint Boniface, but they went to public high school.
JRC: What were your parents like?
JC: They’re pretty good people. I got along pretty good with them. My dad worked for the city of Fort Smith on their traffic lights and the police radios. He installed and did maintenance on the traffic lights and radios both.
JRC: Mechanical guy.
JC: Electronics and radios. It wasn’t out of the ordinary for him to get a phone call at 10:00 at night or 1:00 in the morning with a radio going on the fritz and him needing to come fix it, especially in the spring and the fall when the thunderstorms are out. The lightning would get in there and fry a relay here and a relay there and the police department can’t be off the air. You gotta have somebody to come fix it right then. Every once in a while if it wasn’t too late, I’d go with him and help hold the flashlight. The guy was unique. He had a hunting accident when he was a teenager and got shot in the left muscle, so his left hand was basically a hood ornament. He couldn’t use it for much. He could hold a soldering iron with it, but he had to sit it in there and place it. No dexterity with the fingers at all, but he could type faster with one hand than I could with three. There for awhile on their monthly rotation, when their dispatch office was where he was at, they would put him into rotation as a dispatcher. Fort Smith back then didn’t have but one. Communication needs were small, a one-man dispatch office.
After hours the offices were closed, you only needed one guy running the show. He went in at midnight or 1:00 in the morning until five-ish or something like that answering the phones and stuff. He told me a story that a lady called him one afternoon and wanted to know how to get the water back in the power cord for a TV. He says, “I beg your pardon?” She says, “Yeah, my dog was messing around behind the TV and bit a hole in the power cord and all this water ran out.” He said it took all of his composure to keep from breaking out laughing. He explained to the lady what had happened, and she didn’t believe him. He told her to call a TV repair shop and see if they would verify what happened to the dog.
I had fun with him. He and I and Larry would go hunting every once in awhile and go fishing. Paul didn’t get to go much because he was too little. I guess I feel sorry for Paul because by the time he was big enough to do anything, Larry and I had already left. He’s made up for lost time, though, because he’s done more hunting than I ever did. We had fun. Mom was a homebody. She raised the kids and took care of the house.
JRC: That must have been a lot of work with six of you running around.
JC: Yeah. She got her exercise, that’s for sure. Weren’t none of us really bad, just kids being kids, run you ragged. I sure wouldn’t know anything about that.
JRC: Yeah, yeah, yeah. What’s it like now that you’ve got your own kid and you’ve got a grandson now?
JC: It’s really neat to get to play with him and tease him and spoil him and then send him home.
JRC: Do you plan on retiring ever?
JC: Oh, I don’t know. I have trouble sitting down and doing nothing. In that respect, I will probably change jobs, I’d say, more than retire. I’ve been playing with airplanes for 30, 40 years and it’s time to find something new. I did run a part-time lawn mowing service the last fifteen years and I’m going to give that up. I’m basically retired now. I’ve got a couple of people that physically can’t do the work and both of them are in their late 80s or early 90s, so I’ll probably keep those two around for awhile until they move on.
JRC: You got any final words of wisdom or anything?
JC: Well, do what you do best and do it well. If I want to do something, I’m going to do it right because going back and doing it for free is no good.
JRC: What would you say the meaning of life is?
JC: The meaning of life – I don’t know that everybody’s ever figured that out. I enjoy what life I’ve had and I try to look on the positive side of things because you can either do the task at hand with a smile, or you can do it with a frown on your face. The smile keeps the blood pressure down and the frown makes the blood pressure go up. Enjoy life. Nobody likes to listen to someone crying and moaning and groaning about everything. They’d much rather listen to somebody with something positive to say or with a smile on their face. Nobody likes a Gloomy Gus.
JRC: Well, thanks for letting me interview you.
JC: Sure. We’ll do it again next week.
End of interview.