I think my mom had a mug with Ozark Airlines’ logo on it from when she was a travel agent. Flying out of St. Louis used to be nice it looks like. Now every trip out of St. Louis requires a connection except Chicago and Atlanta and Houston.

late update: I found a map of TWA’s routes from 1992. Except for a direct route to London, St. Louis still had practically no international flights, but on TWA you could fly to the West Coast.

TWA was founded by the merger of Transcontinental Air Transport and Western Air Transport. In 1929, T-A-T was the first company to offer cross-continental transport that included air. From Wikipedia:

On July 7, 1929, it began the first transcontinental trips. It initially offered a 48-hour train/plane trip with the first leg being on the Pennsylvania Railroad overnight from New York City to Columbus, Ohio, where passengers boarded a plane at Port Columbus International Airport that included stops in Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Wichita, and finally Waynoka, Oklahoma. There, passengers caught the Santa Fe Railroad for an overnight trip to Clovis, New Mexico, where they would take a flight to Albuquerque, Winslow, Az., Los Angeles, or San Francisco. Its slogan was “Harnessing the Plane and the Iron Horse.”