Chicago Midway Airport

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A few hurried Blackberry photos from Chicago Midway Airport, taken on my way to Cleveland back in March. I'll be the first to say these aren't quality photos, but I should point out that the greasy fingerprint over the lens was caused by a genuine Chicago Italian beef sandwich. So, you know, local flavor. I'm going to argue that, thanks to the aforementioned fingerprint, the photos count as a "found object" piece, or possibly a collage, and are therefore an expression of Art with a capital A, and anyone who says they suck in a traditional photographic sense is an ignorant philistine. That's my argument, and I'm sticking to it.

I get bored quickly in airports, and I have this ongoing idea that I really ought to go seek out whatever local color there happens to exist within the airport's confines. In the case of the Midway airport, that involved the sandwich I mentioned earlier, plus tracking down a historical exhibit about the Battle of Midway, for which the airport was renamed in 1949. So in case you were wondering, the name doesn't refer to the airport being the midway point in your trip, despite what flying Southwest might lead you to believe. Although that does happen to be the reason Midway Island (at the far northern end of the Hawaiian Islands) is named what it is.

On a more obscure historical note, the airport also has a small plaque commemorating a 1933 trans-Atlantic flight. Chicago pilots Steponas Darius and Stasys Girenas, in their plane named the "Lituanica" attempted to fly nonstop from New York to Kaunas, Lithuania, only to crash in Germany, just short of their destination. Both pilots were killed in the accident. I had never heard of this flight before, possibly for that reason, but apparently the men are considered national heroes in Lithuania, and the main soccer stadium in Kaunas was renamed in their honor after the USSR broke up.