Tale of Three Cities

The Midwest, once the seat of U.S. isolationism, is now actively scheming to bring the world to its doorstep. Chambers of Commerce talk less these days of tariffs than of air transport. The beginnings of debate over "freedom of the air," the realization that all the world's air is navigable, brought the Midwest a discovery of great local import: its inland cities are, geographically, the logical U.S. "ports" for the world's sky traffic. This month three great Midwestern cities were hard at work on plans for these world ports of the future.

>In Detroit bug-eyed businessmen heard a Lafayette Escadrille veteran, Gill Robb Wilson, now National Aeronautic Association president, say that their city would "have a pretty good chance" to become a great international air-transport center after the war. Already, said Captain Wilson, the bulk of U.S. planes taking off for

Europe by-pass New York for Midwestern airports--such as the Ferry Command's field just outside Detroit. Captain Wilson's words, and his presence at the Book-Cadillac Hotel, were part of a concerted campaign by Detroit aviation men to dramatize the city's postwar aviation possibilities,

>Chicago still hates to remember the stature it lost to the East and West Coast when the Panama Canal opened. This week Chicago's Association of Commerce will bring forth a map-sprinkled plan to make Chicago as strategic to air transport as it is to the railroads. Chicago's genial Mayor Ed Kelly is preparing chest-thumping speeches to that effect; United Air Lines President William Patterson has already mounted the stump. But Chicago's plans are already beyond speechmaking; surveys have been made of 72 possible airport sites in the area, twelve of them suitable for huge bases. The biggest: a $35,000,000 dream port on the lakefront.

>St. Louis is most air-minded of all Midwestern cities. With a local election in the offing, candidates are hedgehopping over each other to promote St. Louis as the "No. i air capital of the nation." Last week Mayor William Dee Becker announced that famed Lambert Field is being expanded to twice its present size, that a second huge air terminal is now on the drawing boards. St. Louis' aviation boom was touched off late last year when the U.S. economic mission to Brazil (TIME, Dec. 7) recommended it as the terminal for a straight-line air route from Rio de Janeiro via Miami and Birmingham.

All this heady Midwestern talk was heard uneasily by Atlantic and Pacific Coast ports. Detroit and Chicago looked north to Europe and Asia, St. Louis looked south to Latin America, New York and San Francisco looked gloomily at their great sea harbors, which might become cheap freight bases when much of the rich, glamorous passenger traffic goes by air.

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