The article (A Cookie Calling Card for Travelers) came out three days after my son was born, but the events in the story happened months earlier.
It was one of those stories that gets written and then sits around waiting for a slow news day. Michael Stipe of R.E.M. once said he hoped to die on a slow news day.
The article I was quoted in made it into the print edition. Yes, there was a time when the news came in paper form. You couldn’t pinch to zoom, and you’d get ink on your fingers.
The backstory to the story:
It was when the regional airline I flew for at the time started flying for Midwest Airlines. Regional airlines often bounce around, repainting planes and changing napkins to fly for different brands. The bonus for the crew? New drink and snack selections.
Midwest Airlines was known for spacious seating and free warm cookies. When we started service for them, we offered the cookies. They also served cheese curds because it was a Wisconsin-based airline. Oh, and chips and salsa.
Some flight attendants would put the chips on the cookie pan after the cookies were served, cover them in cheese curds, heat them in the cookie oven, and then douse them with salsa.
Nachos! Add a couple of warm cookies and we would consume enough calories for the whole plane.
If only the article had been about crews cooking at cruise altitude.
(Bullet point: Must write an article about the time this hungry pilot was served a warm hamburger patty brought back to life in tinfoil under the galley coffee pot. Turns out, I just happened to have a loaf of fresh Cuban bread from the night before’s Tampa overnight, compliments of my mother. Delivering the hot burger, the flight attendant said, “Do you always travel with fresh bread?”)
Ok, back to the story.
After landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport and deplaning the passengers, my flight crew and I headed up the jetway toward the hotel. As we were making our way up, the gate agent was coming down with a man carrying a notebook.
Normally that’s a sign of a random drug test, but this fellow had a fedora with a press pass sticking out of it and a flip binder rather than a clipboard and a piss jug.
(This is not true. Artistic liberty. But he did have Jimmy Olsen in tow. Also not true.)
The gate agent asked if I minded if he showed the guy around the airplane.
They had control of the airplane once I left it at the gate, and he didn’t need my permission, but I appreciated the courtesy and said, “Sure.”
Then, as I was walking away, I looked back and asked, “And who is he?”
“A writer for The Times.”
That piqued my interest, although I was very ready to get to the hotel.
He said he was writing a story about customer relations and specifically how Midwest Airlines and DoubleTree Hotels use free cookies to win over the hearts and stomachs of customers.
I said something, probably in a smart-ass tone and without much thought, as I tend to do, and then said goodbye.
(I had a sixth-grade teacher tell me that I needed to think before I spoke after I said something that could be -was- insulting to her. I’ve never forgotten that moment, though the lesson hasn’t fully taken hold yet. Years ago, I actually found her on Facebook to apologize, but so far the message has gone unanswered.)
As I turned to leave, the writer said, “Wait, Captain. What’s your name?”
“Why?”
“So I can quote you.”
He was jotting down my very poignant words into his binder.
“What the hell did I say?”
He told me.
“Okay. I’ll sign off on that.”
When the article came out, the CEO of the airline I worked for wrote to me and said, “Great quote! You were the punchline at the end of the article.”
It was something about how, when the writer went down to sample a cookie, Captain Stork said (and I’m paraphrasing my own quote) “It won’t taste as good here on Earth. The magic of the free cookie happens at cruise altitude.”
As an aside to the story:
That CEO, now the head of the FAA, was Catholic and well known, often joked about by us because he had something like a dozen kids.
When he emailed me about the article, I replied that I was knocking things off my bucket list.
I told him that I had received an email from my boss that wasn’t about doing something stupid in an airplane.
I had been quoted in The New York Times.
And my first son had just been born.
He wrote back and said, “Be careful. Kids are like cookies. You won’t be able to stop at just one.”
As often as we joked about him and the size of his family, I found it charming that he could joke about it, too.
I wonder if he thought about it before he typed it and hit send?