When Logan was the place to be - and not just to get someplace else

Going through her mother's stuff, Jessamyn West found the some clippings from the early to mid 1960s, when her mother won a contest to name the swanky new restaurant going into the Logan Airport control tower.

This wasn't the tower with the two giant candlepins we know today - that went up between 1971 and 1973 - but an earlier, shorter building built in 1957 to replace an even older and still shorter wooden tower that had to be evacuated in hurricanes.

The Logan Tower Restaurant first opened on Dec. 16, 1966, with a gala for the Seminary Guild of New England. On the Globe Women's Page, Globe Society Editor Marjorie Sherman reported:

The glittering planes coming and going, beside you waiters hovering with Escoffier dishes - and it was all in the preview opening last night of the Logan Tower restaurant at the airport. A triumph.

Up from Washington and the Symphony Ball, which Sen. Ted Kennedy and his Joan co-chairmanned, Peter Duchin, like his father before him, drew people like a magnet. The piano was surrounded constantly as they watched his hands and talked about Eddie and if he played all night it wouldn't be enough.

Lingering together over their beef and lobster under the expert ministrations of maitre d'hotel Pieter van De Rybt and manager Berne Hoaglan were monsignors and judges, company presidents, heads of banks and businesses and scores of pretty wives in dresses as long and lovely as any Paris opening.

The new, current control tower was built with a cocktail lounge on the 17th floor - and an observation deck on the 16th. Both were shut in 1989 for security reasons. Patrick Smith recalls the days when he and other local urchins would regularly spend time up on the deck - when not casually walking down jetways into parked airplanes to sit in the cockpits.

Once bored with the flight deck, we’d head back to the cabin, loading up our backpacks with barf bags, magazines, briefing cards, and cans of soda from the galley. We’d guzzle down that soda and were careful to save the cans. After amassing a six-pack or two, it was back to the 16th floor. There, in the bathroom sink, we’d fill the cans with water before sneaking into the fire escape. Within the tower’s north pylon, directly between the elevators, is a top-to-bottom spiral staircase. We’d learned to jimmy the door without triggering the alarm. Once inside, we’d lean over the railing and drop our water-filled cans the entire, 200-plus foot height of the shaft.

The cans would wobble, twist, and twirl, depending on the angle at which we released them. Like a pitcher feeling out the seams of a baseball for a slider or a curve, we had the different trajectories down to a science: hold it this way for a flat spin; tilt slightly for an end-over-end rotation. Off they’d go, and you’d hear the cans hissing as they accelerated toward terminal velocity, disappearing into a barely visible speck before impacting the concrete floor.