Now Arriving: Traveling To And From Chicago By Air, 90 Years of Flight by Neal Samors & Christopher Lynch

Neal Samors & Christopher Lynch will be at Aviation Universe!  

Saturday, May 16th, 2015 at 3pm they will be giving a presentation and signing books.  Be sure to stop by!

In the 18th Century, Chicago was just a village along the banks of Lake Michigan and the Chicago River that had been inhabited by numerous Native American tribes for thousands of years. When Americans began moving westward across the country in the early 1800s, many of them traveled to and settled in what would become the city of Chicago. They came by boat across the Erie Canal and then the Great Lakes, and by wagon and horses, and began settling in the new town and city of Chicago. 

As Chicago grew into a metropolitan area during the 1800s and 1900s, and as air travel developed along with rail travel, the city's main airport, Municipal Airport, located on the city's South Side along Cicero Avenue, eventually became known as Midway Airport. With the advent of jet travel by 1960, Chicago expanded a piece of land called Orchard Field into what became O'Hare Airport, named for Edward "Butch" O'Hare, a naval aviator. First dedicated in 1949, this airport had long enough runways to handle jet airplane traffic. 

This new hard cover, coffee table book of 220 pages, which includes more than 200 black and white photographs, along with a variety of interviews with those who had key memories of air travel into and out of Chicago, tells the story about air travel into and out of Chicago over the past ninety years, and is the first publication to provide many rare photos. A major part of the book's photo collection was provided to the authors by the family of a famous Chicago photographer, Mike Rotunno, who spent much time from the 1930s to the 1960s photographing famous people arriving in the city. 

In addition, the book includes a collection of rare autographed photos of famous people traveling through Midway Airport, from Amelia Earhart, to J. Edgar Hoover, Will Rogers, Cary Grant, and the Three Stooges. These signatures were collected by a teenager named Johnny Latoza, who sold newspapers at the airport in the 1930s, and whose charm and persistence always got the stars to sign his book. 

Also, Now Arriving includes stunning photographs provided to the authors by United Airlines which document the construction of O'Hare, the early years of the airport, as well as the opening of the modern terminal which United built in 1987. 

Overall, there has never been a book quite like Now Arriving ever done about air travel into and out of the metropolis of Chicago. From trails to rails, sails to wings, this book documents how Chicago developed into the crossroads and transportation hub of America and the world.

Hardcover.  220 pages with 200+ photographs.