American Airlines Travel Bag

Sandburg flew to the West coast in January of 1959 as an honored guest on American Airlines, the first cross-continental jet flight. He found it every bit as marvelous as the train which first took him out of Galesburg when he was a boy. Sandburg was enthralled with the "beginning" and "promise" of jet flight, remembering that it took relays of ponies and seven days and seventeen hours to rush Lincoln's first inaugural address from Missourri to California, and he hoped that "this narrowing of the distance between states and rivers, between countries and the people in them, will cement still further the common country that Lincoln saw as the destiny of America."� (page 679, 682-3 Niven).