I was, at the time, Secretary-Treasurer of the Tunnelworkers Local Union 88 out of Quincy, MA and as such was elected as a delegate to the Laborers' International Union of North America Convention in Las Vegas. The Convention is a once every five year event where the Constitution of the Union is amended by vote of the 2,500 or so delegates. It is a big deal. The Convention was to open with a welcoming dinner on Saturday night September 15th. I had already secured airline tickets for my wife and I to arrive on the 14th but in light of everything that happened I expected the Convention to be cancelled. I called the Regional office to check and to my surprise was told that the Convention would go ahead as planned. Of course all the airports in the country were closed so how was one to get his ass to Las Vegas from Quincy? How about drive?
With no flights and thousands of people stranded you know rental cars were scarce but after a few calls I managed to get the last car available in eastern Mass. It was a Pontiac Grand-Am and it would have to do. So about 11:00AM Thursday the 13th we picked the car up in Dedham and took the next exit to I-90 heading west to begin a cross country odyssey. I told the wife if she got us past Buffalo (400 miles) I would take us the rest of the way. She did better than that and got us past Buffalo and down I-90 almost to Cleveland. The drive was surreal. Every state's troopers were out in force and every other car you passed had a rent-a-car sticker on its back bumper. Speed limits were not enforced by the police and zipping by the mounties at 80 MPH soon became the norm. I thought for sure there would be roadblocks at some point as the whole country was on alert but so far that was not the case. We were all in this together. Since this post is going to be kind of long I'll finish the story in a second post.
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