I keep seeing all these connections to my birthplace. Yesterday morning I was sitting in a terminal in Baltimore, where I had spent Tuesday running around like crazy from one client to another, wrapping up with a panel at the University of Maryland (someday, Craig, I will be in town longer than one day, and then I’ll call), waiting for a 6:45 am flight, and I looked to my right, and there it was: AirTran flying to Newport News.
Then I picked up the in-flight magazine on the plane, sitting in business class (which for a $35 fee has to be the cheapest business class ticket in the industry), and flipped through. And what did I find in the middle? Newport News. Complete with mentions of the Monitor at the Mariner’s Museum; Lee Hall; the Shipyard (of course); and even the Virginia Living Museum (née the Peninsula Nature and Science Center).
And that’s not even to mention the prominent coverage that the Mariner’s Museum gets in recent issues of National Geographic, with the upcoming restoration of the Monitor.
It appears that someone in the city’s Chamber of Commerce is riding the Monitor train into a smart wave of publicity for the city. Good plan. Maybe someone in the City Council will take the cue and turn the city into someplace that I’ll want to visit again, rather than the treeless collection of strip malls it was rapidly becoming when I left 16 years ago.