On July 1, 1960, a member of the ground crew at Lindbergh Field (now San Diego International Airport) alerted the tower to suspicious activity on the runway, causing a twin-engine Douglas DC-3 to be held for takeoff. György Takács, a baggage handler for Pacific Southwest Airlines, reported two engineers on the tarmac who were not wearing the airline’s official orange jumpsuits. While this seemed a small detail, these were paranoid times — an American U-2 spy plane had just been shot down by the Soviets, The Twilight Zone had just been renewed for a second season — and protocol demanded an intervention. While the matter was investigated, a ground hold would be issued for the psa flight to Santa Fe.

Takács easily spotted the men at a distance, both of whom were found to be well-known employees in good standing. Though Takács felt foolish, he defended his decision to intervene, and demanded to know why neither man was in uniform. But plainly, both men were indeed wearing their standard psa jumpsuits, in safety orange, badged with the psa logo above the breast pocket. An increasingly agitated Takács insisted that they were not, and when a supervisor asked what color he thought the jumpsuits were, Takács paused, contemplated, and confessed that he did not remember ever having learned the name of this color, neither in English, nor in his native Hungarian. ‘Orange — Not orange!’ he insisted, a phrase that would be quietly repeated that hour, on a call to a number pencilled on the back of a business card, that had been given to the airport superintendent by a visitor from Washington. Within an hour, Takács would be visited by five representatives of the fbi San Diego Field Office: two agents, a young man in fatigues, and two unnamed advisors, one of whom carried a machine like the one seen here.

To be continued.

Published February 20, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.