ii. O'HARE CONNECTION: IT'S BUSY

Every thirty seconds a plane landed or took off at sprawling O'Hare International Airport. At the time, it was the USA's busiest air traffic hub.  O'Hare, owned by Chicago, sprawls across 7, 000 acres, 17 miles northwest of the downtown Loop. Once cornfields, the site was used in the 1940's to build cargo planes at the airfield called ORD.  In 1949, the field was renamed in honor of World War II hero Navy Lt. Comdr. Edward (Butch) O'Hare. A new airport, built in 1959,  had been the world busiest since 1961.

118,000 people worked at the airport or related businesses. O'Hare's heating and refrigeration plant could warm and cool a city of 500,000. Twenty hotels encircled O'Hare, offering 7,500 rooms.  In 1984, 45.7 million flew into O'Hare. Forty-eight percent were en route to another place.

Susie Nicolas and her boyfriend were there to welcome us as soon as we got off the plane. A nurse who is a native of Jones, Isabela, was requested by her sister Cely who was then working with the PRODED to meet us at the airport.  Getting out of the airport building, we were greeted by the bone-penetrating chill of Chicago winter. " It snowed a couple days ago," Susie informed us. It would have been much unbearably colder, so I thought.

Although we had our initial encounter with the wintry Midwest weather, the warm welcome that Susie and Carlo gave us was unmistakably Filipino hospitality.  We had a very hearty dinner after a brief rest and seemingly endless conversation.  We spent the night in her apartment at 7232 West Randolph at Forest Park, which is south of Chicago.

The next morning, Susie drove us around. One of the women fellows, Belinda Valaquio,  left ahead of us to the Greyhound bus depot in downtown Chicago. She was to take the bus to Urbana-Champaign  before noontime that day.  At one in the afternoon, Evelyn de Juan, Marina Espiritu, and I were on the bus to Iowa City. I thought the bus went rather slowly. It was drizzling throughout the trip. Along the vast open spaces and on the leafless tree branches were traces of snow.  At last, I was seeing snow!  As the Greyhound traversed Interstate 80 highway, the wide open spaces appeared to be uninhabited. I took a nap. When I awakened we had arrived at our destination: Iowa City.