After 44 years, BIA employee has seen it all

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BANGOR – Presidents, movie stars, criminals and heroes. Jetliners, puddle-jumpers, Blackhawks and the Concorde. Connie Strout has greeted them all in her 33 years at Bangor International Airport.

A city employee for 441/2 years, Strout has worked as an administrative assistant at BIA since Bangor bought the facility from the U.S. Air Force for $1 on July 1, 1968. Now 67, she could retire “any time now” but stays on the job because “no two days are ever alike.”

“This is the most exciting place to work,” Strout said in a recent interview. “There’s something different happening every day. Someday, I’ll just decide, ‘Hey, that’s it’ and retire. It’s not today, but it could be tomorrow.”

Around the airport, Strout is known as the unofficial historian because she has filled a half-dozen large scrapbooks with newspaper and magazine articles about the facility. Whether it was triumph or tragedy, criticism or praise, if it was on paper, Strout pasted it on one of the pages of the large, black books.

A 1970 Life magazine cover showed the first emergency evacuation of a 747 on the BIA runway after a bomb scare. Several pregnant women slid down the emergency chutes along with the other passengers. No one was hurt and there was no bomb, but skepticism about the safety of the large aircraft evaporated after the incident, explained Strout.

A native of Milbridge, Strout had planned to move to Boston to work after graduating from Westbrook Junior College, but decided against the big city and returned home.

In 1957, she went to work for the city of Bangor and moved to the airport 11 years later as the assistant to William Depuy, BIA’s first director. He soon was replaced by Peter D’Errico, who stayed until 1990. Bob Ziegelaar was Strout’s boss for the next decade. This fall, Rebecca Hupp was named the new airport manager.

“I don’t why, but I have worked for all these people with unusually spelled names,” Strout said. “I spent a lot of time spelling the names of the first three. Now I have one that’s not too hard to spell, but almost everyone gets it wrong and pronounces it Huff.”

When Strout talks about events at BIA, she divides them into decades. The ’70s were years of growth and sorrow; the ’80s brought profitability and snowstorms; the ’90s were marked by a decline in the number of flights but put the airport in the national spotlight again. Strout is making no predictions about events in the new century.

In the early years, Northeast Airlines was the only passenger service in and out of Bangor. Before Bangor took over Dow Air Force Base, the terminal was a small, white building where Fleet Bank now sits at the corner of Union Street and Griffin Road. The base fire station was converted into a terminal that included a snack bar, car rental office and bank.

Operations soon moved to the former General Aviation Building on Maine Avenue until the current domestic terminal could be completed in 1972. Three years later, the hotel, now the Sheraton Four Points, which included a covered walkway to the terminal, and the international terminal opened.

About that time, Strout recalled, Delta bought Northeast and there were eight of their flights going out a day, plus one Pan Am flight and the smaller regional jets. Today, only one Pan Am jet flies out of BIA daily, but regional carriers continue to operate. Corporate jets flying to and from Europe frequently refuel in Bangor.

The ’70s brought tremendous growth, but also turmoil. On Oct. 31, 1969, BIA became part of the longest “skyjacking” on record when a plane hijacked at Kennedy International Airport in New York stopped in Bangor to refuel. It then went on to Ireland and eventually, Cairo, before the passengers were released.

Several years later, 7,000 anti-war protesters and supporters of former President Richard M. Nixon jammed the airport when he and his family came to Maine to visit friends. In August 1972, the same month Nixon resigned, the crash of a Maine Air National Guard Voodoo aircraft claimed the lives of two young men.

Strout could see the black smoke from her office after the crew aborted takeoff, and the plane rolled off the end of the runway, and burst into flames after its landing gear collapsed.

In 1978, Strout lost close friends, including the owner of Bar Harbor Airlines, when a plane crashed in Trenton. The four killed in the crash had been in her office the day before they died.

The ’80s turned out to be “the most profitable years,” said D’Errico, who now works as a part-time consultant at BIA. “We were well-established as a refueling stop for trans-Atlantic flights. That was our niche because we were equipped to handle aircraft of any size, even the Concorde. Back then, we had humongous snowstorms on the East Coast and a lot of planes were diverted here. We had 13 jets sitting out on the ramp at one time.”

He said that the relationship BIA and the city have maintained with the Maine Air National Guard meant the airport had de-icing and snow removal equipment it could not have afforded as a private facility. That allowed BIA to replace its “ice and snow image” with a reputation for “safety and reliability.”

The continuing defense presence also brings in money for runway repairs, provides firefighting coverage for the airport and ensures that the FAA tower operates 24 hours a day.

D’Errico left Maine in 1990 for a job in California. He watched in awe as BIA became a touchstone for national pride and patriotism when troops returned to the United States after the Gulf War.

Members of the Pine Tree Chapter of the American Red Cross were joined by representatives of the Bangor Region Chamber of Commerce, volunteers and veterans in welcoming the groups home, and high school bands played as soldiers returned to American soil.

Everything was manageable, according to Strout, until Sgt. Kevin Tillman borrowed a saxophone from a John Bapst Memorial High School student and blasted out a blues version of the national anthem.

The image was broadcast worldwide and within 24 hours, the switchboard at BIA lit up with 2,000 calls a day, according to Strout. People came from all over the state and the nation to greet the soldiers, and the number of people on the terminal’s second floor had to be restricted so it wouldn’t collapse under the weight of the thousands of people who wanted to give the troops a hero’s welcome.

A few years later, Stephen King arranged to have a television adaptation of his novella “The Langoliers” filmed at BIA. Several scenes were shot in the International Terminal, with local residents starring as extras. Many of the $40,000 worth of plants purchased to turn BIA into Los Angeles International Airport for the film continue to thrive in the Domestic Terminal, said Strout.

“It was exciting,” she said of the filming. “Everyday the movie people came up to my office wanting something. We did everything they could for them and they gave us those beautiful plants which make the terminal so much nicer.”

Over the years, Strout has done her best to accommodate people passing though Bangor. She once borrowed a china cup from the airport gift shop so that Joan Mondale, wife of former Vice President Walter Mondale, wouldn’t have to drink her tea from a foam cup. She opened the conference room for former President Jimmy Carter when he found himself in the airport the morning the space shuttle Challenger exploded over Cape Canaveral.

Her job has allowed Strout to travel extensively with her husband. And while she is far too modest to admit it, Strout is one of the city employees who has helped Bangor earn praise from the U.S. Department of Defense for its successful conversion of a former military installation into an international airport that continues to redefine itself as the decades roll by.

No doubt, this story, like all the others, will be pasted into one of BIA’s big scrapbooks – unless, of course, the day comes when Strout decides that her job’s just not fun and exciting anymore.