My neighbor’s father, in town for a visit, impressed me as a man of some authority. His bearing gently suggested a person used to being in charge.

Bob Herder, it turns out, was a pilot who flew planes for several airlines before his retirement a few years ago. Among the companies he worked for was Eastern Airlines, for three decades one of Boston’s major carriers.

Bob had flown into and out of Boston hundreds of times, he told me. Based in Philadelphia, he grew accustomed to flying the eastern seaboard routes, including the Boston to New York shuttle.

Lodged in my memory is how easily you used to be able to take the shuttle from Logan to La Guardia Airport. Boarding the plane was easy: You did not need to show any identification, but could simply walk on to the plane when it was ready for boarding.

And not only that ─ you did not even need a ticket in advance. From your seat, you could readily purchase passage to New York. And the price was low enough that you could use cash if you wished.

If you think I am making this up, and guilty of forgery, you are probably too young to imagine a time when airline travel was so simple. But, as the retired pilot reassured me, that is the way it was in those days.

To walk into the airline terminal, you were not required to submit to electronic frisking, nor did you need to load your carry-on baggage on a conveyer belt for surveillance. And, of course, you could keep your shoes on, no matter what they looked like.

In those days flying was a pleasurable activity, by and large. Hassles remained rare and you did not fear long lines or notable delays at the approaches to the aircraft. You never felt oppressed by a set of rules designed to foil terrorists from hijacking your plane.

Terrorism seemed not to have been invented yet. You might fear that the plane in which you were riding might crash, but you would never imagine it being abducted or downed by gangsters.

My reason for recalling this time of airport simplicity is not mere nostalgia. Though it pleases me to recall days when the business of daily life was so much easier and relatively annoyance-free, I am not indulging in sentimentality about this past.

Instead, my purpose is to heighten awareness about the character of the times in which we are now living. The procedures we are forced to endure when taking an airplane flight should not be regarded as normal. Being required to take off your shoes, among other things, is abnormal, extraordinary, and, for not a few people, humiliating.

If you are quite young, of course, you have never known anything else. Throughout your whole life, you have faced this rigmarole every time you have flown. It probably seems to you acceptable ─ standard operating procedure, in fact.

To young people, it inevitably seems normal to go through a detailed search process each time they travel by air. And most of them come to the airport dressed casually and prepared for being frisked. That’s the way things are and, beyond that, the way it must be ─ or so they are tempted to think.

Airport procedures, along with the other forms of surveillance so widespread in contemporary life, make me uncomfortable, to say the least. I cannot argue that all of them are unnecessary, of course. Given the current realities of the world, I must face up to the need for a certain level of security.

But I judge it important to remember what America was like before elaborate security systems were put in place. The kind of freedom we had then strikes me as the kind of freedom at which we should aim at now.

Even though we must maintain a certain level of public security, it ought to be the minimum that is necessary. Signs posted in public, advising people to report others who look suspicious, make me cringe and regret what we have lost.

For fear this may seem a wholly unrealistic plea for a return to “the good old days,” let me emphasize my main point. I do not want young Americans to grow up thinking surveillance on every hand is normal. It is not.

That London now has 500 thousand surveillance cameras planted throughout the city will always be abnormal for me. That our own MBTA takes a photo of every person who enters its stations and who boards buses, will always seem to me a brash invasion of privacy.

I will continue to look back with pleasure, and some amazement, to those days of the Eastern Airlines shuttle. Such times can never be brought back; they would not fit the realities of this era. But they can keep us in mind of a reality closer to what society should be.