a new world airport and its baggage

Aviation came to Denver mainly in the form of mail. Like much of the inland West, the first airfields served a smattering of passenger flights (both expensive and uncomfortable in the 1930s) and a regular schedule of contract mail carriers. Postal Service air mail contracts built many of the nation's major airlines—and its major airports. One of Denver's simple airstrips, Denver Municipal Airport, transformed from a mail stop to a busy airport when Continental Airlines moved its headquarters to Denver 1937, and then again when a modern passenger terminal was completed in 1946. Along the way, it had been renamed for the mayor who oversaw much of its development: Stapleton. The Second World War, and then the post-war return, brought both a boom in aviation generally and in Denver specifically. The city's population grew by almost 10,000 a year from 1940 to 1960. During the '60s, Stapleton gained an additional runway and a new terminal as the schedule grew from under forty departures a…