Ed Barker helped build National. Robert A. Reeder/TWP

Ed Barker has flown high in his life, from his boyhood rubber-band model planes to his first single-engine solo near Hyattsville to his long career in naval air intelligence. But his memories of the summer he spent helping build National Airport are all of low places -- swamps and pits and tunnels where he strained under the load of construction gear.

Now, with National about to celebrate the opening of its new $450 million terminal, Barker, 77, can look back at a life as firmly attached to the airport as a wing is fixed to a fuselage. The delights and frustrations of the aviation age are as clear to him as the day he first crashed one of his balsa-wing toys.

A few decades back, Barker is willing to admit, he was ready to give up on the dowdy old terminal where he helped install heating and air-conditioning equipment in 1940. While raising a family in Bethesda in the 1950s and 1960s, he could see that the noise of airplanes coming and going from National was troublesome, and the parking a horror. He thought the airport might have to be moved.

But he has seen enough of the glassy new terminal to shrug off any doubts that National belongs right where it is, and to declare his love for the place all over again. "I look forward to catching a flight out of there," he said. "It looks great. With that panoramic view of Washington, it is ideally situated."

Many Washington area residents have long memories of National, but few residents go back as far as Barker, who grew up in the District and remembers Huckleberry Finn-type summers camping near Key Bridge and rowing canoes past the mud flats where the airport would be built.

Barker first succumbed to an obsession with flight in junior high, when he began building light wooden model planes with rubber-band engines and large propellers that turned not much faster than a ceiling fan. He flew the toys in competitions all over the area, even inside Constitution Hall, where a winning entry might remain airborne for 10 minutes.

"Part of the art was to get a rubber band that was long enough but not too tight so that the propeller would turn just fast enough to keep it going for a long time," he said.

After graduating from McKinley High School in 1938, Barker became an aeronautical engineering major at Catholic University, studying under Jewish refugees of the growing Nazi empire in Europe. His parents often had taken him across the river to watch planes at Washington-Hoover Airport (where the Pentagon is now) -- a field Barker remembers as nothing more than a large patch of dirt sprinkled with oil to keep the dust down.

In 1939, he took flying lessons at Queen's Chapel airfield near Hyattsville. Even then, he said, airplanes from Washington-Hoover posed a noise problem. On some summer days, he and his friends would pull a boat up near shore to listen to concerts near Memorial Bridge, and they would notice that passing planes were an annoyance. But Barker was too much in love with the idea of flight to care.

In the summer of 1940, he found a job with a building contractor at what he considered a monument to the new age: National Airport.

Standing today near his office at the Naval Research Laboratory and looking across the river at the new terminal, Barker is a trim figure in neatly pressed slacks and seersucker jacket. He was just as fit and slim in 1940, but remembers spending the summer awash in sweat and dirt. He said he had to watch carefully to ensure that older co-workers -- not too happy about a college boy taking a sought-after $3-a-day job -- did not trip him or do something else that would get him fired.

He missed National's opening ceremonies in 1941, but by 1942 he was a young naval officer flying in and out of the airport to his posts in Norfolk and New Brunswick, Maine. To him, National was a triumph of modernity. "Compared to Hoover Airport and Queen's Chapel, which to me were the old days, it was the greatest," he said.

He traveled in South America, Europe and Africa after the war, then returned to resume his Navy career, visiting air shows and keeping track of what other countries were doing to improve their aircraft. After officially retiring in 1980, he was recalled to duty for special projects and also worked for what is now Lockheed Martin Corp., with National being a frequent starting and ending point for his trips.

Barker recalls that during World War II, his sister would park right outside the main terminal to pick him up. But by the 1960s, he was searching for parking spaces and, along with lots of other drivers, glaring at the reserved spots for members of Congress and other political dignitaries. He applauded the opening of the Metro line, even if it still was a hike to the terminal.

To Barker, National Airport's golden age isn't over. It is the place one of his sons, a Microsoft executive, uses to hop all over the country. Barker and his wife, Pauline, are still frequent users, including their annual trip to Hawaii, for which they always take an early morning TWA flight to St. Louis to catch a nonstop flight to Honolulu.

Barker said the black-tie gala at National next week is a fitting tribute to the new terminal. He would love to go, he said, "but I haven't been invited. Do you know anybody who could get me in?"