Whenever I think about Midwest Airways I’m reminded of Bob Newhart’s skit “The Grace L. Ferguson Airline and Storm Door Co.” But I think too of the title of a Pete Seeger and The Weavers album, “Wasn’t That a Time!”
From the late ’50s into the ’60s, Ebby Lunken operated a seasonal, weekend air service for Carriage Trade clientele — wealthy people with summer homes in northern Michigan — who were devastated when longtime scheduled train service from Cincinnati ended. While the enterprise wasn’t exactly profitable, it gave Ebby a reason to fly the Lockheed without losing much money. Then, after the summer flights of 1963, when he’d hired me as a stewardess and proposed, Ebby expanded the operation (the airline, not the marriage proposal) to a year-round commuter airline with weekday service between Cincinnati’s Lunken Field and downtown airports in Detroit and Cleveland. The “valve works” (The Lunkenheimer Co.) had been sold, and a partner bought out his share in Queen City Flying Service. My husband, or E.P. as I called him, wanted to build an airline; he idolized C.R. Smith, Eddie Rickenbacker, Bob Six, Juan Trippe, Pat Patterson and Bud Maytag, head honchos of airlines in their glory days. And he looked enough like the handsome but eccentric TWA mogul that he was known as “the ‘Poor’ Man’s Howard Hughes.”
