Travelers Aid has been assisting people on the go since the early days of mobility, when mid-19th-century pioneers heading west with dreams of riches and adventure were often stalled by such realities as cholera and stagecoach snags. The country's oldest nonsectarian nonprofit organization was formed in St. Louis by Bryan Mullanphy, a bighearted mayor who couldn't stand to see a traveler in need of food, drink, shelter or a friend. (After his death in 1851, he left half a million dollars to the cause.)
The group now has outposts in 24 states, the District, Puerto Rico, Canada and Australia. In the Washington area, TA kiosks appear in Dulles, Reagan National and Union Station. Dulles boasts the largest presence, with five desks and about 230 volunteers. (Reagan National has 150 helpers; Union Station about 50.) Between January and July, the Dulles volunteers assisted 477,994 of the nearly 13.5 million passengers who used the airport. Last Thanksgiving eve, the craziest day of the travel calendar, they helped 3,016 holiday-bound. . . .
About 80 percent of the volunteers are retired, and the majority share the wanderlust gene. “Most of us here like travel and airports,” said Holly Harrison, a former guidance counselor in Virginia and my co-volunteer during the 2-6 p.m. shift. “And I like the problems of travel.”
A fair number of queries could easily be resolved if the questioners would simply look up at the signs or ask their arriving friends or family members for a flight number. As Dave Ginsburgh, a 10-year volunteer, summed it up, “They want to know if the plane has gotten here yet or has Joe Smith arrived.” (For the former, the volunteers check the flight data on their screens; for the latter, they don’t have access to passenger manifests and therefore answer as if they had been asked the first question.) Many of the vignettes, however, have dramatic arcs: parents meeting their adopted child for the first time; political refugees seeking asylum; a mother flying to Saudi Arabia to retrieve her teenage son, who had been abducted by his father as a 10-year-old and was in a coma after a devastating car accident.
The story tells some of these stories. The reporter mans a booth with the Travelers Aid people and tells about some of the people they helped. In a single four-hour shift, they logged “61 airline assists, one page, 49 airport information queries, 28 transportation questions, two about museums and 10 phone calls.” May God bless these people for giving their time just to help others in big ways and in small!
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