CHICAGO—The holidays are stressful, but it could be worse.
You could work in an airport. In one of the busiest airports in the world. For free. You could work in an airport for free and sit for five hours a day wearing a blue vest and invite strangers—bring me your tired, your hungry, your flight-delayed, your missed connections, your abusive, your entitled, your perpetually turned-around, your extremely frustrated, your actual refugees seeking asylum—to complain to you, to ask countless questions, to ensure their trajectory. For no money. You could do this because you are a good person who wishes to experience the satisfaction of being helpful in an unhelpful environment.
You could work at an information desk at O’Hare International Airport.
More than 2 million passengers passed through O’Hare Thanksgiving week alone, a confusing place even if you visit regularly. Not McCormick Place confusing. (Nowhere else in Chicago is that confusing.) Finding help is not quite finding-an-employee-at-Home-Depot difficult. But it often seems easier to find a Nuts on Clark at O’Hare than a person with answers.
This is where the saints of the information desk come in.
They are the 125 volunteers of Travelers Aid Chicago, they have been at O’Hare since it first opened to commercial traffic in 1955, and from what I could tell by spending time with them, you’ve never given them a second thought. You take them for granted. You barely notice them. But they can tell you the number of Nuts on Clark at O’Hare (four) and what to do if you’ve been stranded at O’Hare without a passport. They’ll tell you where to take a service dog that needs to poop and can offer decent directions to the Blue Line. They bill themselves as “the oldest nonsectarian social welfare movement in America,” but their constituents are swaggering tech bros and people who have never been to an airport, business owners and military vets, travelers with special needs, people in the visible grasp of trauma, children scared of flying for the first time, wide-eyed exchange students, grandparents without boarding passes, runaways, newlyweds, migrants; until recently, they carried adopted babies through O’Hare to new parents outside of security.
Take, for example, Jon Ziomek, who stands behind a podium on a Thursday morning, listening to a very nervous woman explain, and explain, she doesn’t know where to walk. With a pause of calm, he points her down the right hallway, then turns to me and says quietly, “Going to Zurich through London then transferring. I didn’t ask why not book direct from Chicago? Why make someone feel bad about their flight choices?” After all, working an information desk at O’Hare—at a time when understaffed airlines leave gates looking like ghost towns of customer service—can mean absorbing anger. “We are often the first official-looking person a frustrated traveler sees—so we get it.”
They are insulted, cursed at, told they move slow.
When I met Kim Heiferman—her Travelers Aid vest pinned with almost 37 pieces of flair after a decade with the group—she had been on her shift for about an hour and already handled 76 people. After each interaction, they press a clicker to keep track. She said: “Today, I’ve gotten ‘Where can I smoke?’ ‘Where is baggage claim?’ ‘Where is my gate?’ ‘Where is Garrett Popcorn?’” As she talked, a tired man stopped before her:
“Curious. What’s the best place to eat? I got two hours. I mean, I don’t need to eat, you know? I’m overweight, as you can see, of course. But look, can you just tell me where?”
She patiently offered suggestions, then turned to me:
“Some will swear at you. Some are very, very angry. I love talking to people, and yet I had this one guy walking down the hall just screaming at me, which is a dagger in your heart, because you are not paid, you’re here to help. Usually, people aren’t harsh. Still ...”
Travelers Aid says it has about 900,000 passenger interactions a year in O’Hare. And even if you don’t consider the people who approach them experiencing medical issues, the people who approach them fleeing domestic abuse, the people who approach them so stoned they’re not sure what city they landed in, the people who approach them with nothing but a strip of paper with the faded number of a distant relative, there is just the stress of being in a big airport: the lost luggage, the expenses, the crowds, the missed flights, the indifference.
John Ishu is the director of Travelers Aid Chicago and has been with it for 25 years. He thinks of O’Hare as a midsize metropolis. “One with a population of more than 200,000. They speak 40 languages. And every 24 hours, seven days a week, the population changes. It’s a place of transition and people in crisis, and there’s no stopgap for that. So we’re there.”
The next time you see someone at O’Hare behind a blue desk with a button reading “Ask Me,” remind yourself, they’ve been doing this for 172 years. Before airports. Travelers Aid Chicago even predates its own agency, the Heartland Alliance. (Indeed, when Jane Addams created Heartland in 1888, it was among the first services offered.) Travelers Aid and its many sister organizations—in 20 states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Canada and Australia—dates to 1851, when philanthropic former St. Louis Mayor Bryan Mullanphy gave his city $500,000 in his will to help pioneers going West in covered wagons. They helped with sick horses, broken axles, families running out of food.
By the 1940s, when Travelers Aid became one of the agencies that helped form the USO, the group could be found nationwide in railroad and bus stations, often assisting returning war veterans. But fundamentally, it served migrants, domestically and internationally. In the early 20th century, that often meant immigration from Europe. These days, it can mean asylum-seekers from everywhere, as well as the migrants who are put on planes in San Antonio, Texas, several times a day, bound for O’Hare. Most of the time, a Travelers Aid volunteer will meet them at their gates, provide them with fresh diapers, socks and toys for children, then guide them to resettlement agencies.
Ziomek stepped around his podium to greet a large group of migrants being resettled—elderly, millennial, children—representing a half-dozen countries in Europe and South America. They gathered behind a staff member with the International Organization for Migration. They looked around the chaos of the airport and smiled at Ziomek who beamed back.
“So where’s everyone going?” Ziomek asked.
“U.S.A.,” the leader said.
“Specifically?” Ziomek laughed.
The man waved his hand airily—they’re headed all over.
“Ah,” Ziomek said, instinctively grabbing a stack of free coloring books for the kids.
Ziomek has been doing this for eight years, several times a week. Though most Travelers Aid volunteers stick with a single desk, Ziomek floats about, working at all nine information desks scattered around O’Hare. (Midway Airport does not have a Travelers Aid office, but a spokesperson with the Chicago Department of Aviation said it’s being discussed.) Ziomek has a trim gray beard and a serene demeanor. He has calmed so many hysterical people he could qualify as a hostage negotiator. It’s the rare shift he doesn’t meet someone openly weeping, he says. He keeps boxes of tissues on hand.
“Quick, memorize this binder,” he jokes, handing me the group’s thick laminated folder containing information on everything from cabs to the location of Chicago hot dogs. He’s handled only 19 people in the past 20 minutes, which he says is a little slow. He doesn’t know if he always helps. “In a way, a job like this is a reminder of just how much the human eye can take in. There are signs all over this place that probably answer a lot of the questions that people have, but there is also a limit of how much we can absorb.”
He notes that there’s a terminal where one sign for the baggage-claim area points straight up, but 20 feet beyond that sign, a different sign for the same baggage area points straight down. He notes that there is a Terminal 5 but no Terminal 4 (which has become the bus and shuttle center). American Airlines’ airport code is AA yet Spirit Airlines is NK. JetBlue’s ticket counters are in Terminal 2, yet its gates are in Terminal 3. (To make this even more confusing, the blue information desks near several baggage areas are staffed by parking-lot businesses and have nothing to do with Travelers Aid.)
Now imagine all that but you don’t speak much English, and you don’t know anyone, and maybe you don’t even know where you’re headed—you just hope someone might help when you get there.
Ziomek recalls a woman “who came up to me at the desk and just said ‘Sri Lanka.’ I said that there were no direct flights, and I went on and on explaining and when I was done, she just repeated, ‘Sri Lanka.’” Among the 125 volunteers, they speak 26 languages. There is also a language-translation phone service, so Ziomek called and as they tried to understand what language the woman was speaking, her daughter called her cellphone. She explained that her mother was flying to Doha in Qatar and then transferring to Sri Lanka. The daughter hung up. Ziomek told the woman that she could wait there for the flight. Then she handed him a small note. It read: “I have dementia.”
About eight years ago, a 14-year-old girl from the Netherlands arrived at a Travelers Aid desk, unsure how to get to Rockford. “She lived with her grandparents who agreed to let her come here to meet someone she knew online,” said Tony Medina, volunteer manager. “She was waiting awhile for her pickup.” All she had was a Rockford address, but when Travelers Aid did an online search, they got an image of a vacant lot.
“The person she was meeting wouldn’t return phone calls from us.” The girl received a return plane ticket. “Most likely,” Medina said, “we avoided a human trafficking situation.”
Ziomek and Lorenzo Vasquez stood behind an information desk in Terminal 3 and spoke quietly and casually. It was Vasquez’s first day with Travelers Aid. He wore a porkpie hat and listened to Ziomek explain the job and occasionally looked up to scan the clamor from another rush of passengers: fathers with visible sweat stains carrying children, couples bickering softly, armies of matching teenagers in volleyball sweatsuits.
It takes a special personality to do this, Medina told me—with a public-service gene, to be specific. Vasquez, a former Chicago firefighter who also volunteers with the USO, has it.
“You scan for distress,” Vasquez said. “You read faces. It’s a skill you pick up.”
Occasionally, Ziomek would call into the ether: “Help? Anyone?”
Like many Travelers Aid volunteers, they’re retired. Ziomek taught and was assistant dean at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, as well as its director of editorial master’s programs. (Disclosure: I took a class with Ziomek myself at Northwestern, about 30 years ago.) There are two 17-year-old volunteers (the minimum age to join) but most are retired professionals, at least 60. They include Chicago police, firefighters, dentists, plumbers and teachers; many were airport employees, airline workers and even pilots who miss airport life. If they do six months of this, Ishu said, they stay years, even decades.
Heiferman was a nurse who volunteered eight hours a day, five days a week, for nine years. But she’s cut back a little after the pandemic. “I can’t pinpoint exactly what changed for me, but people in this place are on edge all the time now. And I still love it.”
People, to generalize, expect to get screwed over at an airport. They will be mistreated, inevitably. Volunteers report passengers who zone out in the middle of gate directions, passengers who wander off in midsentence, passengers who shake their heads furiously when told to call airline customer service, as if they’d been sentenced to death.
Elisabeth Adams, a former Pan Am employee and 10-year Travelers Aid vet, gets it.
She’s not paid to get it, but she does.
She stands at a desk in Terminal 5 on a Friday morning. She has the short graying hair, thin eyeglass frames and the Glinda-the-Good-Witch smile of a preschool teacher. She doesn’t witness many tears, she says, but she knows to anticipate something she can’t anticipate. She has the image of a passenger seared into her brain who, trapped in O’Hare airport limbo, began shouting that he’s been wearing the same underwear for two days, then reached into his pants and gave himself a massive wedgie, to illustrate his despair.
Adams looks up.
A woman stands before her and explains very quickly that she’s been trying to get home to Texas for days and she has a sick child there waiting for her and she may start to cry.
“Please don’t,” Adams whispers to me, “then I’ll be a liar.”
She turns back to the passenger: “OK, how can I help?”
