When he left in the morning to go on his business appointments, he said to me: Stay at the pool, charge your lunch to the room, and I’ll see you at dinnertime. “When I was 9,” Dad tells me, “we went to Denver. His father, Josh, was a navigator in the Army Air Corps during World War II, and ran a company that manufactured paper and artificial flowers, traveling worldwide and telling stories about the places he went. Legend goes, upon bringing me to O’Hare Airport as a baby, my father said, “This is daddy’s playground.”ĭad has loved to travel for his entire life. And I think - as does my whole family, including my dad - that at the very least, it doesn’t quite land. In the coverage, whether he’s mentioned by name or in off-handed attributions to ostentatious wealth, it’s always this: sensational. The obvious story is that my father was a decadent jet-setter who either screwed or got screwed by American depends on your take. It’s even a perennially popular conversation topic on Reddit. My father was one of several lifetime, unlimited AAirpass holders American claimed had breached their contracts.Ī few months later, my father sued American for breaking their deal, and more importantly, taking away something integral to who he was. After 20 years it seems, they’d decided the pass wasn’t such a good idea. Then, on December 13, 2008, American took the AAirpass away.įor several years, the revenues department at American had been monitoring my father and other AAirpass holders to see how much their golden tickets were costing the airline in lost revenue. For 20 years, he was one of American’s top fliers, accumulating more than 30 million miles, which he acquired every time he flew, even with the AAirpass. He (and our whole family) was featured on NBC’s Today Show in 2003, and then on MSNBC in 2006. Other times, I remember calling his office to find out what country he was in. Often he’d leave in the morning for a business trip, fly back, and I hadn’t even known he’d left. A quarter of a million dollars gave him access to fly first class anywhere in the world on American for the rest of his life. In 1987, amidst a lucrative year as a Bear Stearns stockbroker, my father became one of only a few dozen people on earth to purchase an unlimited, lifetime AAirpass. One of the many designs that American used for AAirpass. Then, a few years later, American introduced something straight out of an avid traveler’s fantasy: an unlimited ticket. My 30-something-year-old father, having been a frequent flyer for his entire life, purchased one. In the early 1980s, American rolled out AAirpass, a prepaid membership program that let very frequent flyers purchase discounted tickets by locking in a certain number of annual miles they presumed they might fly in advance. For my father, it was a last-ditch effort to save his life. With $23 billion in annual revenue, American Airlines had nothing to lose. starred my father, Plaintiff Steven Rothstein, and the Defendant, then the world’s third-largest airline. Circuit Court for the Northern District of Illinois, where I grew up. On March 10, 2009, a case was filed in the U.S.
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