Over 2023-2024 we intend to roughly double the size of our volunteer Board to fifteen members, as we dig into the work of business planning and making our case to government agencies, potential donors and partners, and the community at large to help us site and construct an exciting new facility in the middle part of this decade. Airline work experience is not necessary! And in fact, we are seeking a broad range of backgrounds, as we aim to serve an even broader range of visitors and students.
This copy of the 1969 brochure introducing North Central’s new headquarters and primary maintenance base (today’s Building D at Delta’s Minneapolis/St. Paul complex) comes from Hal Carr’s personal collection. The complex was a beautifully realized Mid-Century Modern design that has held up quite well in the five decades since it was completed, as the many photos inside this brochure will demonstrate.
Its positioning alongside busy Interstate 494 then and now was a master stroke of marketing that Republic, Northwest, and Delta continued to take advantage of – both to burnish name recognition, as well as to show off their fleets. North Central’s management could never have anticipated that their investment would be the visual focal point of essentially the Twin Cities’ third “downtown”.
From the donated papers of Hal Carr, we find a copy of the full-color brochure sent to all Southern and North Central employees to introduce Republic Airlines:
Click to open a PDF of the full document.
Staff photos taken for the piece are the main attraction for today’s readers. Perhaps you or someone you know appears here?
Another fun brochure encouraging us to get out and enjoy nature has just arrived, featuring ski pro Jake Hoeschler with 25 pages of tips for hitting the slopes and trails. Hoeschler was a collegiate and national star who made a lifelong career of his passion, even forming his own company, International Sports Management. He served on North Central’s advisory board in the 1970s and was the airline’s contact person to the ski resort industry – often promoting the MSP – Denver service in print and broadcast media.
“Relax in unspoiled wilderness areas. No telephones to annoy you. Crystal clear waters are everywhere… surrounded by towering trees reminiscent of days long past. You snake a lure out over the quiet water. Start to retrieve. Then bam! And your fun begins.”
Following on to our 1951 Northwest fishing brochure, here’s a North Central gem from 1978, listing packages in Western Ontario and Manitoba. Nearly all of the options included some bush flying out of International Falls, MN / Fort Frances, ON to remote lodges or even floating houseboat accommodations.
From the 1960s into the early 1980s, fishing trips into the remote Canadian wilderness were an affordable middle-class adventure, especially for folks in the Upper Midwest who would usually vacation in Minnesota, Wisconsin, or northern Michigan in the summer.
As higher-paying union jobs (with well-defined vacation benefits) declined in the 1980s, so too did multi-week family vacations to the Northland. Rising costs of fuel, interest, and insurance also made it more expensive to fly small aircraft in Canada, and these trends combined to make fly-in sport fishing a hobby only for the wealthy by the late 1980s.
North Central and Republic had been able to fly DC-9s into Hibbing/Chisholm as well as International Falls with decent loads of passengers destined for fishing trips into the wilderness, but as that type of tourism faded, those stations could only support Republic Express Saabs and Jetstreams by the mid-80s.
