March 27, 2007

Commuting for Love

Stephen Egts

My wife and I commuted between Upstate New York and North Carolina in an era when airlines gave discount rates for advanced airline booking. The restrictions were brutal: payment six weeks prior to the flight, no changes in the reservations, and a requirement to stay in one location for at least two weeks. The final restriction created the biggest obstacle for our bi-weekly weekend visits that never lasted more than four days.

The solution was to book all flights in one name and for both of us to fly on one portion of a roundtrip ticket but return on another portion of a round trip ticket that was paired with a flight several weeks away.

We could never get away with this in post 9/11; but security was looser. This cost savings procedure resulted in an endless chain of roundtrip tickets in which we alternated flying on one end of each other’s round-trip ticket, but always using the same name.

The process worked fine until one day when my wife’s flight was delayed due to engine trouble, causing an emergency landing at an airport that obviously was not part of the scheduled itinerary. In classic airline
procedures at the time, only partial information about the aircraft and its location was sent to the destination airport (cell phones didn’t exist — at least not for people in our income bracket). When I discovered that the flight was delayed because of an emergency landing, I became frantic and insisted on more information.

“What is the passenger’s name,” I was asked; and of course I replied with my own name. “I will see what I can find out,” came the answer. “And what is YOUR name?”

I froze, then replied, “I’m sorry; I can’t remember.”

C. Anthony Broh is director for research policy for the Consortium on Financing Higher Education. At the time recounted here, he worked at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and his wife worked at Duke University. His wife is Jennifer L. Hochschild, the Henry LaBarre Jayne Professor of Government and professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. Since 1981, they have had permanent positions that have allowed them to live in the same household.

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