Travelers Aid may be just the ticket for the stranded

One of those long faces at the airport last week belonged to me. After my Continental flight from Tucson, Ariz., arrived late in Houston, I double-timed it across two terminals to make my connection.

Too late, I realized as I knocked futilely at the locked jetway door. A missed connection had stranded me and summarily canceled a meeting the next day in Toronto. A pleasant woman at the Continental President's Club gave me a voucher for a hotel and a meal, and I felt like a vagrant as night pressed on through the cold glare of George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

As I trudged downstairs looking for the hotel shuttle, a loudspeaker blared a jaunty Christmas song that was beginning to sound a lot like a cackle. I was just another poor soul stuck at an airport at the end of this, the worst year ever for air-travel delays, missed connections and general airport misery.

Alice Jena looks at those forlorn faces with sympathy. Jena was one of hundreds of volunteers planning to work Christmas Day at Travelers Aid stations in 24 airports around the country. Her post is at Kennedy International Airport in New York.

"People are so stressed-out when they miss a flight," she said. "They're like, 'Oh, I'm going to miss my meeting tomorrow,' or 'I won't get home to see my kids.'

"The things you see," Jena said. "People arrive at the wrong airport. They're supposed to be at La Guardia and here they are at JFK. We've had people come in here who are supposed to be at Newark. We do what we can."

Travelers Aid International, founded in 1851 as a nonprofit, nonsectarian social services movement, has 1,600 volunteers who staff booths at airports and train and bus terminals.

Missing a meeting in Toronto is one thing. But forlorn faces sometimes reflect more critical concerns: family emergencies, abrupt relocations, job searches, desperation, confusion, abject loneliness.

"You get people who are down and looking for a friendly face," said Roy L. Wolford, 92, who has been a Travelers Aid volunteer for two decades at Los Angeles International Airport.

While most people just need directions, others need someone to intervene. Broken relationships, dashed dreams, the missed connections of life -- they all pass by Wolford's knowing eyes. "I still get Christmas cards from people who once came this way," he said.

Typically, Travelers Aid workers are well known to employees in airport terminals, where airlines have cut customer-service staff sharply in recent years. Personal relationships often help solve a problem that seems otherwise intractable.

Wolford is retired from work as an aerial photographer and a security executive in the aerospace industry. He will arrange a voucher for a meal and escort the person to the restaurant. He knows the airport police and makes sure that people stranded overnight find a seat near the police post, "so they can at least sleep safely during the night."

At Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Terry and Terri Klein began to volunteer last January at Travelers Aid.

"It can be as mundane as, 'Where is the restroom' or 'Where can I go smoke a cigarette?'" Terri Klein said. "But it can also be: 'My mom was supposed to be on the plane from Peru and I can't find out whether she was on it.' And the airlines won't tell people. But if I go to the airline counter, they may tell me because I have on the Travelers Aid badge."

She added: "I love people. I have a ball out there."