99% Invisible - 304- Gander International Airport

Episode Date: April 25, 2018

The Gander Airport in Newfoundland was once the easternmost airfield in North America, so when transatlantic air travel was new and difficult through the mid-20th century, Gander played a critical role in getting people back and forth from Europe to America. This made the tiny town of Gander an unlikely international hub, hosting the likes of Fidel Castro, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, and the Queen of England in the beautiful, mid-century modern lounge. The lounge and bar at the airport also served as the town’s major hotspot, so the locals just hung out there, always with the possibility they’d rub elbows with a huge international celebrity. Once airplanes could easily make it across the Atlantic without refueling in Gander, the airport got really quiet, but the town that hosted the most famous people in the world found a new purpose on 9/11 when they welcomed 7000 stranded passengers unable to enter US airspace. Gander International Airport

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Off the east coast of mainland Canada is the island of Newfoundland. The island is as far east as you can go and still be in Canada, so far east in fact that it has its own time zone, a half an hour later than anywhere else in North America. If you've seen a photograph of the island, it's probably the one that went viral last year of a small village on the eastern coast, and the foreground are rolling hills in a couple of houses. In the background, a gigantic iceberg floats by on the choppy blue sea.

Yeah, icebergs float by occasionally, but that one was actually scary big. And nice pronunciation of Newfoundland, by the way. A lot of people say Newfoundland, and it's a bit of a sore spot with us locals. That is Newfoundland native Luke Quinton. And I want to take us to a different part of the island, to a little town on the north eastern side called Gander. Now, looking back, I was all of 20 years old at the time, though I thought I was ancient. It's Christmas Eve, 1972, and Ian Blackmore is working.

My name is Ian Blackmore, and I was a photographer with the Gander Beacon after I finished high school before I went to college in Toronto. Ian's coworker Gerald Vokey was an editor on the same local paper. He's going to help tell this story. It was Christmas Eve and her mother was, you know, getting things ready for Santa Claus. Gerald was home that day in 1972. His family was getting ready for Christmas and he wanted to get his daughter out of the house.

So they decided to go hang out at the local airport as you do. As you do when you live in a tiny town in Canada And the airport is the best thing around also. This is not a normal airport, but we'll get to that soon You never knew with the airport being up there who might Come through at any given time Regardless of the hour of the day or at night or whatever And when Gerald got to the gander airport, he started asking around. I asked the security there, you know, what was going on.

And they said, Fidel Castro is here. And I said, what? Fidel Castro was there in the airport, and he was more or less just hanging out. I had dinner with him. Yeah, in the dining room, naturally. He had his traditional fatigues and his combat boots. Green fatigues, no medals or nothing, just playing uniform.

Turned out Castro had a pretty long layover in Gander, so at some point, he basically says, give me a tour of your town. He wanted to see the town. So Ian and Gerald and Fidel Castro all pylons and cars and go driving around the little town until they come across a kid sledding. There's a young fella with his dog and probably another friend there and they were taking turns going down on their toboggan. Of course Mr. Castro decided that looked interesting and figured he might see what thing wasn't how it worked, not being that familiar to snow.

Castro gets on this sled and starts down the hill, and Ian Blackmore snaps a picture. I got ahead of him before he started on the slide down, so I was in position for the catch him on his way down, and well, photograph him I didn't catch him. Ian Blackmore's photograph of Fidel Castro's sledding would end up in Time magazine. And the amazing thing about this anecdote isn't how unique it was for Gander, but how totally normal. The Gander Airport was used to hosting really famous people from all over the world.

It wasn't just some tiny airport in some tiny town. It was a very large, very important airport in some tiny town. But before we hear how this place came to be, I want to take you inside the airport because it's an incredible building. Okay, here on the Gander Airport. The Gander Airport is such a mid-century modern time capsule that I actually think I have to bring up some lounge music right now. This place is straight out of an episode of Mad Men, you know, Mad Men with Newfoundlander

accents. If you follow me across here, over on the apron. Jerry Cram is a commission there at the Gander Airport. The job is part fixer, part security guard. Jerry will probably be the one to give you a tour if you ask. The terrestrial floring is all from Italy. Right here is what we call the birds of welcome. Jerry is pointing at a bronze sculpture of seven birds that greets you when you walk into the lounge. The blue and the grey furniture is all from the late 50s, early 60s.

The International Lounge of the Gander Airport is this big, airy space, super high ceilings, and when you walk in, you're immediately awash in the orangey glow of the 1950s. The vinyl chairs and couches are arranged in U-shaped seating areas. They were designed by famous mid-century designers like Charles and Ray Eams and Robin Bush. The Gander International Lounge has been called the single most important modernist room in Canada. Even the bathrooms are their own amazing time capsule. The women's restroom especially.

Jerry calls out a warning so that we can go in. Male bird, I don't work good to go. This is not a gross airport bathroom. It's beautiful mid century luxury. There's a row of swivel chairs in front of a counter and a wall size mirror. It has two showers because yes, people used to shower at the airport. Well, there is two showers in this room as well as the end of the men's. But now you can say you were in the washroom that the Queen Poverty knows in June the 1959. When this international lounge of the Gander Airport opened in 1959, the Queen of England herself came for the opening. And yeah, the townspeople

popped knob with her too. A lot has happened in this airport, and the story of how it came to be and what it's become is really also a story about the history of air travel. By Newfoundland, because the shortest way. Clear, let me show you. You've got to look at it on a globe. If you trace a direct course from New York to Paris, you'll see that it takesander existed, Newfoundland's grassy fields were the jumping off points for transatlantic daredevil pilots.

Amelia Earhart, Alcock and Brown, Lindbergh, all of them. Because it was so far east, it made sense to start there if you were worried about getting across the Atlantic with enough fuel. Eventually, the British government, which controlled Newfoundland at the time, started to take note. Maybe there was something to this whole air travel thing. In 1936, the British chose what was then basically a patch of woods on the eastern side of Newfoundland as the site for over a million square yards of runways.

By the spring of 1938, the Gander Airport was fully operational, but the massive runways were mostly unused. There just weren't enough planes in operation that could actually survive the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. It was a very, very risky journey. In the two decades before the war, only 100 planes had crossed the Atlantic. 50 others had tried and failed. 40 people had died.

Then in 1939, World War II began in Europe, and Allied forces wanted as many fighter planes as they could get their hands on. Americans and Canadians had been shipping planes over by boat, but that wasn't working out so well. They were being torpedoed by the German submarine and whatnot, so they were losing more airplanes than they were actually making it over to the UK. That's a story in Informer Air Dispatcher, Dean Call, and he says to get planes to the UK, the British had to come up with a new idea. They would have to put up what we call a bladder inside. It was a spare fuel tank, basically, to give new idea. The process of flying the planes from Gander to Scotland began in 1940 and was called the ferry command.

The first crossing was seven planes and it took place on a freezing night in November. The pilots had to fly in the dark because lights could alert the Germans. Miraculously, all seven made it. But that was just the first day. Over the course of the war, 20,000 planes were brought to Gander to be flown across the Atlantic for the war. Some days there would be 100 airplanes that would go over. The Churchill was even quoted at one point. He referred to Gander as the largest aircraft carrier in the North Atlantic.

I guess it was the turning point of the war really for Britain. Gander was making history, even though at the time there was no actual town of Gander. There was no town, so there were people living between intersections and runways. And that's where the Americans and the Canadians and the British had built wartime buildings. Frank DeBoe was a former air traffic controller at Gander and his story into the airport. And he says the early town of Gander was basically just a few living quarters right next to the runways. I would say, you know, a hundred yards or even closer than that.

And they made a hell of a lot of noise. Those aircraft. Because the Gander airport started as a military operation, it wasn't until the war was over and civilian air travel began that they decided to build a separate town away from the runways. And then in the late 1950s, the Canadian government built that fancy international lounge at the airport. In 1958, just a year before the new lounge opened, jets like the De Havelin Comet and the DC-8

were introduced. These planes could make the long track across the Atlantic without having to stop and refuel in Gander. But they took a while to go mainstream, and for years, Gander served as a stopping place for international travel. These were the glory days of Gander. When celebrities from all over the world would wind up stopping through on their way to or from the states, the Beatles first step in North America wasn't in New York, it was in Gander, Newfoundland. The Gander Airport became by far the hottest place to be in Gander. Oh yeah, used to go up and hang around up there and watch the people coming in on the

planes and, you know, who's there and right on the escalator. It was a hotspot for fun. John Beard grew up in Gander. You know, everything revolved around the airport. I mean, that was one industry town. It was a lot quieter place now than it was then. In the 1960s, air travel was still pretty exclusive. A lot of North American tourists still traveled to Europe by ship.

But celebrities and heads of state from all over the world were paying big bucks to fly, and many of them were stopping in Gander in that beautiful mid-century modern lounge. A lot of famous people who came through the Gander Airport tried to go unnoticed, but some really wanted a cocktail from the bar, and if they were in the airport bar, they probably were interacting with the people of Gander. Security was pretty loose back then, to say the least. I met Marilyn Roll. Was that like, like, a bad dude again.

Bob Hope and Kings and Queens of various countries, King of Jordan, King of Saudi Arabia, Mikhail Gorvatrov. My Choman Randy Savage. I met President Bush. That's the former mayor of Gander, Claude Elliott. I met the Queen of England, I flew with Prince Philip on his chopper. The locals also love to tell a story about Frank Sinatra trying to cut in line at the airport bar.

I'm getting told to go to the back. But as time went on, the lounge wasn't just a scene of people drinking cocktails on their way to London. By the late 1960s, most commercial jets could make it across the Atlantic without needing to refuel, but Gander was still serving an important role in international travel, especially to communist countries who couldn't fly to the US or use its airspace. Gander was the major stopping point between Moscow and Havana, but this occasionally invited defectors seeking asylum in Canada.

And in particular, there was a fair number from Cuba. That's Gary Voki, Gerald Voki's son, and he says sometimes people would get off their plane coming from Cuba or Bulgaria or some other communist country in Seekas Island. Not that this was easy. Vokey remembers witnessing one incident in particular in which a woman from a Cuban flight attempted to escape down the lounge escalator to Canadian authorities while the Cuban flight crew tried to stop her. They had the lady hold by her feet.

The Canadians had her hold by her head and her arms. So she was upside down, going up the escalator. And she had a dress on her dress was back over her head. It nearly turned violent. And it was for me, even as a kid, it was one of the most iconic things I've ever seen. For residents of Gander, life was also about living alongside people from all over the

world who worked for the airlines. Arrow Flot, the Russian airliner, had over 150 crew and flight planners in Gander alone. Gander, in its day, was a lot more multicultural than probably some of the bigger cities in Canada. The Brits had people, the Germans had people, there it was Canadian military. So Cubans and the Russians. Everybody mingled. In particular, Cubans were famous for buying bicycles and shipping them back to Cuba.

The airport turned Gander into an amazingly diverse place, and beyond that, it was a portal from the town to the rest of the world. There are stories about local people with the right connections, hopping on last minute flights to Cuba and Europe and New York City just by clearing it with the captain. And maybe it was all those trips to New York that prepared the people of Gander for September 11th, 2001. As Matt just mentioned, we have a breaking new story to tell you about.

Apparently, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center here in New York City. It happened just a few moments ago, apparently. We have very little stuff in my wife said to her. She had the news on in the morning and she said, it looks like an airplane crashed in the... one of the buildings in New York. On the morning of September 11th,

an unprecedented decision was made to close all American airspace. Hundreds of flights were diverted to land at airports in Canada. I was only on about 10 minutes when the time manager called me and said, you better come in, we may be getting some planes. The Inter Air India 113,

will we go to Toronto? There, any 113 center, a negative, you must now land at Gander, at turn right heading 3-2-0. As the planes came in one by one, the people of Gander gathered outside the airport to watch. Well, it was quite remarkable actually, because you would see airplanes, aircraft lights, you know, miles and miles and miles in the distance.

It all lined up to land, right? So it was quite a remarkable scene. 38 planes and nearly 7,000 passengers ended up in Gander. They called the stranded visitors the plane people. But the plane people weren't there just for a few hours. They were there for three days and they had nothing. The passengers weren't allowed to take their luggage so they had arrived in Gander with nothing but the clothes on their backs. After each passenger was registered with the Red Cross, a loose network of

volunteers from Gander and nearby communities, provided thousands of hot meals, toilet trees, and prescriptions to the plain people. Bus drivers who run strike came back to work to drive them around town. It was a job Gander was born to do. And our job here, our people came true and said, we're here, we're here to help you until you're ready to leave. and said, we're here. We're here to help you until you're ready to leave." Gander had 500 hotel rooms in 7,000 new guests.

The population of the little town had nearly doubled overnight, and so the residents stepped up and took people in. And yes, there was people took people into their homes. Even though we were told not to do that because at that time, they didn't know how widespread that this terrorist attack would be. So this is the coolest question.

Did they have enough food? Oh God, you had nobody run to the food in Newfoundland. Some of the stranded passengers ended up forming strong bonds with their hosts. At least one marriage is reported to have come out of all this, and a bunch of friendships. One group of plain people who stayed at a high school started a scholarship for it that's now worth over a million dollars. The passengers organized all this on their flight home

after they finally got cleared to leave Gander. Even today, we still have people come back to visit people in people's homes, that's stayed here, we have people in Gander, that goes to the US. This 9-11 story is sort of famous because the Broadway musical Come From Away, in which the Gander that go to the US. This 9-11 story is sort of famous because the Broadway musical come from away in which the Gander Mayor Claude Elliott

is a central character. And there's just five or six of us from the community that's portrayed in that play, but we represent this whole community. Is it a good likeness or well, he's not like me. I mean, I'm beautiful, Loken, but he's not like me, but I have four on the American. He's done a pretty good job trying to imitate a new flander. They see no men's at island but an island makes a man. Especially when one comes from one like this and that. Welcome to Lurac.

Hello. These days the Gander Airport is pretty quiet. Do people, it's never quite as packed I guess as it once was. No. That's Luke and Jerry Cram inside the airport. We still get international traffic today, but nowhere near the extent before they had to stop somewhere to refuel. But now you got the planes that can go on without having to stop. St. John's, the capital of Newfoundland, has the island's major international airport now.

And aside from a few daily flights, Gander's traffic is mostly military planes and emergency landings. But between the military base, the Air Traffic Control Center and the airport, Gander has found ways to stay afloat. A few years ago, the airport authority was thinking of tearing down the international lounge, and building something smaller and much much uglier. But there was a huge outcry from architecture enthusiasts around the world. Full disclosure, I was one of them. In the end, thanks to organizing by people like Luke, the mid-century time capsule that is the international lounge was saved.

And Jerry Kram promises it will stay that way. Mark your words. Mark my words, but I'm not always going to be around either. And so as long as Jerry Kram is around, the international lounge stands as a kind of monument to a bygone era when flying was luxurious, when you didn't have to take your shoes off to go through security. When actually there was no such thing as security. When the bar in your airport terminal was open to anyone, ticket or not. And if Sinatra cut in front of you in line, you just tell them, please. Wait your turn. What do those big numbers painted on airport runways really mean?

Kurt Colstead will decode them for you, Right after this. So a few years back, the Oakland International Airport changed two of its runway numbers. 27 became 28 and 29 became 30. 99 PI's own Colessted lives in beautiful downtown, Oakland, California, and he is here to explain why it was really important that they make that change. First though, you have to understand how runway numbering works. Airports around the world use this universal system and it's based off Earth's magnetic north. So basically you figure out the magnetic compass direction of the runway up to 360 degrees, and then you round that off to the nearest 10,

and then drop the zero at the end, and then you have your number. Okay, so you end up with a set of numbers, 1 to 36 instead of 10 to 360. Right, that's it. And each runway has a complementary number, 2 that goes in the other direction, and that's, of course, 180 degrees different.

So runway number 18 is the flip side of runway number 36 and so on and so forth. And if you see letters, that actually means there are multiple runways running parallel to each other. So L is for the left, R for the right. And if there's one in the middle, they use letter C for center. So by necessity, if it was 18 L, the other side would read 36R. Yeah. Okay. Okay. And that doesn't make sense.

Though it's not obvious to me why they'd use compass directions rather than just numbering them one, two, and three. Well, even with all the high tech stuff that guides flights these days, magnetic directions serve as a kind of backup system to help planes land in case that they go wrong. And they also make it easy for pilots at the ground to double check that they're runway and compass aligned before they take off. So they know they're in the right place doing the right thing. Right.

So if all else fails, you can use a compass. But then if it's the question, why do the numbers ever change? Now, that's the really crazy part. I knew that the planet's magnetic poles reversed every few hundred thousand years or so, but there are also these smaller but significant shifts going on constantly, and we tend to think of North in terms of true North, that, you know, stable point at the top of a globe or a map, but a compass reading of magnetic North differs from one place to the next, and it moves around all the time too,

driven by the flows of the Earth's molten metal outer core. And when those cumulative changes are big enough, then the airports have to repaint their runways or the numbers don't make sense anymore. Right, and it can be a small amount of change, right? It could just be, it goes from point four to point six and that tips it in the other direction. Right, because it rounds, right.

And these shifts happen even faster, closer to the poles. So airports that are really far to the north or really far to the south actually have to make these changes more often. So scientists have to keep an eye on this for their own sake, because if they're traveling on a plane,

they want to make sure these things are right. Right, they do. And it turns out it's a huge project. There are magnetic monitoring stations all around the world and satellites that also help keep track. And I was actually just talking to my dad about this. He's a geophysicist. And apparently the polls may also reverse entirely again soon,

but it's hard to say. And when that happens, it could actually cause problems for the world's electrical grids among other things, not to mention causing an entire repainting of airport codes. That's the least of their problems. When you say soon, what do you mean by soon? Like, should I be prepping right now?

Well, if you look at the historical record, we're actually overdue already, but it could still be thousands of years out soon in, you know, geological time can be pretty long in terms of human time. Okay, so buy your cans of soup is what you're saying. Yeah, just a couple of cans. Well, it's good to know. Meanwhile, if you want to geek out with more about Runway Fonds and other flight related design details, you can find Kurt's article on our website, it's 99pi.org.

99% invisible was produced this week by Luke Quinton and senior producer Katie Mangle. Mixing tech production by Sriviusive Music by Sean Rial. Delaney Hall is the senior editor. Kurt Colstead is the digital director. Thrust the team is Emmett Fitzgerald Avery, Trophiman, Taren, Mazza, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, in beautiful, downtown,

Oakland, California. 99% of visible is part of radio topia from PRX, a collective of the best, most innovative shows in all of podcasting. We are supported by our listeners, just like you. You can find 99% of visible and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI Orc, run Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But you're always welcome over at our place at 9ipi.org. Radio Tapio.

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