Learjet

Ben Hanscom owns a Learjet, a private jet that serves as a crucial tool for managing his transcontinental career as a celebrated architect. The jet allows him to maintain an extraordinary commuting schedule, most notably during the two-year period when he was designing and overseeing the construction of the new BBC communications center in London. Each Saturday morning at 11:00 A.M., Ben would leave London on the Concorde, arriving at Kennedy Airport in New York at 10:15 A.M.—forty-five minutes before he had departed, by the clock. A limousine would then take him to Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, a trip that usually took no more than an hour on a Saturday morning. By noon, he could be in the cockpit of his Lear, and by two-thirty in the afternoon, he would be touching down at his private landing strip on his farm in Junkins, Nebraska. This schedule allowed him to take a two-hour nap, spend an hour with his foreman and half an hour with his secretary, eat supper, and then drive over to the Red Wheel bar for an hour and a half or so, arriving as if he lived no farther than the other side of town. The Learjet is thus not merely a vehicle but an extension of Ben's will to remain connected to his roots and his simple, solitary life in Hemingford Home, a place that stands in stark contrast to the high-profile architectural world he inhabits. The jet's existence underscores the theme of a successful man who, despite his wealth and fame, remains deeply lonely and tied to a past he is only beginning to remember.