We were not much of a traveling family, aside from vacations at the Eastern Shore or a family reunion in western Pennsylvania. I was 17 before I got on my first airplane, a flight on People’s Express from Florida to Washington, D.C. I almost got lost during the transfer in Newark.

It made sense that we weren’t always piling on a plane for some distant destination. We were, after all, a family of six, and while air travel had long since lost its exotica in the 1960s and ‘70s, one did not shepherd four kids through international airports and call it a vacation. Plus mom was probably afraid she’d lose one of us in an airport bathroom and not discover it until baggage claim.