Issue of Airline Seats Put To Rest

It's one of those stories that won't change the world, but you follow it anyway. It's like watching a minor traffic accident in slow-motion. You want to stay until the bitter end.

We've been following the story of the Arizona Historical Society and its airline seats. It's a story about some well-intentioned volunteers, some missed communications and a very curious FBI agent. Oh, yeah... and it's about terrorism.

The Arizona Daily Star reports it all began when 75-year old Muriel Keegan, a docent at the Historical Society in Tucson, starting putting together items for the annual White Elephant Sale. As is her custom, Ms. Keegan distributed flyers to several storage facilities around town, hoping to snag long-abandoned property for cheap and make a profit at the White Elephant Sale.

Ms. Keegan came across 57 airliner seats, three-to-a-row. She bought them from the storage facility and then... stored them.

That didn't sit well with her fellow docent, Andy Rutter. 57 airliner seats do tend to take up a bit of room. So Ms. Keegan and Mr. Rutter decided to start the White Elephant Sale a little early. They put a classified ad in the paper, offering the seats at $40/row. The turnout was prettygood.

One woman, Susan, decided she wanted more than one row of the seats, so she had her son call the day after she made her first purchase. He asked if any more seats were available, but apparently forgot to leave a phone number. As good as the turnout was, there were, incredibly, eight rows left. Now, the question was, how to get the seats to Susan.

So, Ms. Keegan placed a second classified ad in the paper: "Attention Susan: jetliner seats, bank of three, eight sets left."

Here's where the alarm bells started ringing at the local FBI office.

Ms. Keegan got a call two days later from an FBI agent. He told her a citizen had called the Bureau in Phoenix and suggested the ad was a coded attempt to reach "agent Susan."

It took 15 minutes, but Ms. Keegan was finally able to convince the FBI agent that the seats were real, the ad wasn't a cryptic terror message and the 75-year old woman herself wasn't a terrorist.

Ms. Keegan is fine with all that. Better safe than sorry, right? But Andy, who's a septuagenarian himself, isn't.

"I've had to take my shoes off in De Gaulle airport this summer, in Juneau, Alaska, and in San Diego," he told the Daily Star. "But this is the epitome of absurdity."

FMI: http://community.tempe.gov/ahs/, www.fbi.gov