We were magnificent.
We were a small but determined band of iconoclasts, holding tight to our principles, cherishing our independence. We were the Tecumsehs of transport, the Che Guevaras of conveyance.
Let the rest of the world go soft, we said. Let them walk around with their wheeled luggage — which included, we noted with bitterly amused disdain, wheeled briefcases and back-packs and duffel bags — like freckled tykes with their Radio Flyers.
Wimps, we thought to ourselves. Weaklings.
We continued to lift and hoist and haul and curse. While everybody we knew was buying wheeled luggage, we remained steadfast: pure of heart, crooked of spine.
But now this reporter must confess:
I have given in. I recently purchased a piece of wheeled luggage. Seduced by ease, comfort, convenience and the possibility of healing a beleaguered back crinkled by years of dragging super heavy suitcases and chronically over-stuffed briefcases, I have capitulated.
Now I am just one of the crowd. It is, in fact, a very large crowd, because virtually the entire world uses wheeled luggage.
Approximately 98 percent of all products sold these days in the nation’s $3.5 billion luggage market has wheels — a remarkable number, when you consider that the idea of sticking wheels and a plastic handle on suitcases didn’t really take hold until the mid-1990s, said Marcy Schackne, marketing director for Travelpro, the company whose founder dreamed up the idea for wheeled luggage.
Sure, you could buy rolling suitcases before that. Beginning in the mid-1970s, according to a spokesman for the Travel Goods Association, you could get a bag with four itty-bitty wheels and a thin little leash, enabling you to jerk the suitcase along like a stubborn terrier.
“Jerk,” though, was the operative word, because that’s what you looked like each time the top-heavy bag tipped over, which occurred after about every yard and half of ground you covered, and your progress was systematically impeded by having to stop every few seconds to set it upright again.
But in 1988 Robert Plath, a pilot with Northwest Airlines, had an epiphany. Tired of schlepping his bags through airports, he fiddled around in his garage and came up with the notion of attaching sturdy inline skate wheels and a retractable handle to the suitcase. The next year, he took his invention — he called it the Rollaboard — to the Travel Goods Show, the industry’s annual gathering, and things have never been the same since. As founder of Travelpro, he was able to leave the cockpit and now cruises the Florida coastline on his yacht.
“It’s everywhere,” Kim Ballis said of wheeled luggage. Yet Ballis, chief executive officer of the Boca Raton-based Travelpro, said he understood why some people might be reluctant to go with wheels.
“There is that little macho thing. People say, `I’m young and I’m strong and I can carry that thing.’ But once you wheel it… “
His sentence trailed off. He didn’t have to finish. I knew exactly what he meant.
Just research?
Once I tasted the forbidden fruit of wheeled luggage, I couldn’t help myself. It was bliss.
At first, I just sampled it for the sake of my research. I wheeled it around the department store, a big blue suitcase with a nice handle and wheels. I was experimenting. Really. I could stop anytime I wanted to and go back to slinging bags across my shoulder, until the strap dug into the flesh so deeply that rainwater could collect in the notch.
But prodded by the friends with whom I was shopping — I think it’s called peer pressure, and I think it results in a lot of social problems among today’s youth — I bought the luggage. Took it home. Let it stand in the corner, perky and upright and inviting: Use me, it cooed. Fill me up and roll me wherever you want to go. C’mon. You know you want to.
And I did. God help me, I did.
And it was great.
I must now beg forgiveness of my former comrades, those who nobly eschew wheeled luggage as the latest example of how simpering and effete we’ve become. Wheeled luggage can seem so — so French.
Yet instead of a return to the character-building drudgery of prewheeled luggage days, we’re moving in the opposite direction: toward more comfort. Samsonite, the nation’s largest luggage company, recently introduced something it calls the Spinner: a four-wheeled suitcase that can be pushed or pulled from any direction.
Cultural implications
Isn’t this how Rome fell?
And what about the cultural implications?
If wheeled luggage continues its relentless march, then Tim O’Brien’s classic book “The Things They Carried” will have to be renamed “The Things They Wheeled.” And the beautiful lyrics to “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”? Odiously, they must be sung, “Comin’ for to wheel me home.” Similarly, the song “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” will be transformed into “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s Riding Atop My Wheeled Suitcase.”
But few people seem especially troubled by the obvious consequences of a nation of wheeled-luggage fanatics. At airports, along urban streets, in hotel lobbies, the battle is lost: Wheeled luggage is everywhere. Small children happily drag their pint-size wheeled luggage, emblazoned with Scooby-Doo or SpongeBob SquarePants logos.
Older folks pull their sleek suitcases behind them with a sassy swagger. Schoolkids casually scoot along, trailing wheeled backpacks that bulge with books and jackets and lunches and beeping electronica.
But doesn’t anybody hesitate, for even the slightest moment, and think about what we’ve lost? About a nation of slackers that can’t even trouble itself to pick up a dadburned suitcase anymore?
Somebody might hesitate, but it won’t be Keith Brown. The retired cop from Columbus, Ohio, spotted a while back at Midway Airport with a natty-looking piece of wheeled luggage, said his bag “seems a lot smarter” than the traditional, non-wheeled variety. “I’ve got a ton of stuff in it. If it doesn’t have wheels these days, nobody’s going to buy it.”
The muscular Brown seemed the very essence of the masculine ideal: He used to work in law enforcement; he now works as a representative of a gun manufacturer; he was reading a Tom Clancy novel. Asked if he ever worried that wheeled luggage made him look a bit — um, wimpy — Brown laughed. “It wouldn’t be the worst thing I’ve been called.”
Jim Harris and Kristen Young, a couple traveling from Philadelphia to Los Angeles — with their wheeled luggage right behind them, of course — said wheeled luggage is so ubiquitous that they hardly notice it anymore.
“Even at work,” said Young, a nurse. “People are getting smart. Saving their backs.”
Joining the fleet
Fine. So nobody cares. But I continue to feel a twinge of regret at having fallen into the fleet of people gliding through airports, proudly towing wheeled bags. I’m a bit conflicted about counting myself among the phalanx of folks ferrying heavy briefcases across the downtown streets without breaking a sweat.
I remain a trifle embarrassed. A certain vague guilt nips at my heels. Oh, so you couldn’t handle that eensy-weensy bag, could you? That nasty old suitcase was a little too much for you, honey?
I am regretful. Chagrined. But I am also walking upright without stabbing pain for the first time in decades.
Weak kitten, c’est moi.
