I read a small article in today edition of the Memphis Commercial Appeal that the last six Northwest Airlines Airlines skycaps had been relieved of duty and would be placed elsewhere in the airport. It was really no surprise because the Northwest skycaps were heavily unionized while Delta skycaps had much less protection.
So I wondered about my friend Harold Morrison . . .
I got to know Harold when I arrived early for a flight and he asked me what I had in the boxes that I was checking. I told him that I made my own line of blues shirts and I took them off to sell at festivals. That must have been in the late 1990s when there were plenty of blues festivals and I was doing at least six or eight every summer.
Harold was wiry thin and he reminded me of major league baseball player Ricky Henderson. He had the same energy and he talked fast so you had to pay attention to what he was saying.
The first shirt that I gave him was Memphis blues legend Albert King and when Harold held it up for the other skycaps to see, I knew that love was in the air. I followed up with a B.B.King, a John Lee Hooker and then I gave him an Etta James shirt for his wife.
I skipped over the Janis Joplin and Mick Jagger, and I gave him a Muddy Waters instead.
I don’t want you to think that this was a one way relationship because Harold took very very good care of me. He somehow had the knack of looking up just as I was pulling alongside the Northwest curbside area.
He would point to me and yell, “Don’t you worry . . . I got you!”
So I would take out of my ticket and pull my suitcase and boxes to the curb as Harold didn’t look at me but whispered, “Where you going today? How many you checking?”
He might have 15 people waiting in line but he would turn quickly, take my itinerary, process my boarding pass and I was out of there in seconds.
When I wrote “Between Midnight and Day” in 2003, I made sure that I arrived early so I could give him a signed copy. And when I wrote B. B. King’s biography (“B. B. King: Treasures”), he held his signed copy for a long time and just shook his head.
On those occasions when I got to the airport and he wasn’t working, the other skycaps would note, “You Harold’s man” as if we shared a certain stature.
Well, airline tickets have become expensive over the past few years and the number of blues festivals has dropped significantly, and and I don’t get to see my friend very often.
The last time I spoke to him, he said that he didn’t know if he was going to survive the merger with Delta. But he wasn’t unhappy because he said that he had over 30 years in with the Union and his wife had been after him to retire.
I’m going to ask the skycaps at the Memphis airport if any of them has a phone number for Harold. I’m not going to let it end this way. The last thing he said to me was,”If you sitting on Northwest miles, you better use them up because Delta is going to downgrade whatever you’re holding.”
I’m going t0 miss Harold, I really am. Sometimes I would arrive at the Northwest sidewalk and it would be jammed with travelers inching their suitcases toward the check-in desk.
I would unload my boxes and luggage with a heavy heart and then I would hear his voice rising over the terminal sounds . . .
“Hey, there Mister Waterman, you just come on in here behind me. Don’t you worry, my friend . . . I got you!”
