1940 Air Terminal Museum

Our breakfast at The Original Kolache Shoppe is a delicious memory as we make our way down Telephone Road for a bare three miles, veering left on a road appropriately named Travelair. Suddenly, we are here! Standing before me is a large white art deco building that looks like something out of a movie, the 1940 Air Terminal Museum. Standing in front of it is an airplane so colorful it looks like it is something out of a movie too—a very different movie.

While Michael checks in, I ask for the lady’s room and am directed down a long hallway. Pushing open the door, I know I’m in a movie set, a 1940s movie set. I stand in the middle of a cozy lounge area—lounge areas in ladies’ rooms don’t exist in my world—with a couch and a burled wood Art Deco dresser. 

Returning to where Michael is being given a guided tour on paper, I stand and listen too. The principal artifact of the museum is the building itself—an Art Deco air terminal with administrative offices and the airport control tower. Opened in the fall of 1940, it operated for fifteen years, with 100,000 passengers walking through its doors the first year of operation and almost 1,000,000 fourteen years later.

The increase in passenger activity called for a bigger, better air terminal. The new structure was christened Hughes Airport (after Howard) until the powers that be discovered if you name an airport after a living individual, Federal funds dry up. Today it is known as Hobby.

In 1978 the old terminal was abandoned. Twenty years later, the Houston Aeronautical Heritage Society took over and began restoring the past, turning the former airport terminal into a museum.

A Short Journey Into the Past

Michael and I begin to wander down the years–to a time before we were both born; the museum is full of memorabilia and flights of fancy.

The mannequins dressed in stewardess uniforms through the decades, tell the story well. When I see the photo of a stewardess in Hot Pants I really feel like I have fallen into a time warp. First of all I forgot that Hot Pants existed, and then I try to recall which airline thought it was a good idea to dress their stewardess employees in such scanty attire. Was it Southwest?

In 1973, Southwest Airlines threw caution to the wind with their stewardess uniforms. ‘The girls must be able to wear kinky leather boots & hot pants or they don’t get the job’, said the airline’s male bosses. According to a spokesman at the time, when women interviewed for the job, he started with their legs & worked up to their faces. Can you imagine a company saying that on the record nowadays? LOL! OMG, how times have changed…

Yatzer.com Airline Style at 30,000 Feet

We are invited to go outside and step inside a 1940s era airplane, being warned not to sit in the seats, they are falling apart.