Then one afternoon Joan told me she was going to have a glass of wine with a friend who was a Pan American Airlines flight hostess, and she asked if I wanted to join them.
“God knows I have nothing else to do,” I assured her. We met Katie Miles in a small hotel on Madison Avenue and Twenty-eighth Street. She was late, but when she arrived, she stopped traffic.
Katie was a drop-dead beautiful girl in her midtwenties. She had red hair, violet eyes, and a porcelain complexion. Slender and tall, she sashayed across the room, and every eye followed her. She was wearing her Pan Am uniform, which I came to learn was absolutely forbidden. No stewardess ever—repeat ever—was to appear in a cocktail lounge in her uniform.
No matter. Katie always broke the rules.
She spotted us, headed for our table, tossed off her overseas cap, and collapsed onto the banquette. “God, it was beastly hot in Calcutta,” she said, sighing deeply.
Those seven words changed my life.
Five
The next morning, Joan and I called in sick to Remington Rand and scurried over to Pan Am’s office near LaGuardia Airport to apply for jobs. The requirements in those days would bring on a class-action bias suit now. You had to be between twenty-one and twenty-six years of age, between five-two and five-seven in height, and your weight had to be commensurate with height. You couldn’t wear glasses. You had to be pretty. You had to have an outgoing personality. You had to have a college education or the kind of job experience that would have made you at ease in dealing with the public. And you had to speak a foreign language.
I had just turned twenty-one. Joan was twenty-eight, but of course she put a doctored birthdate on her résumé. I didn’t have a college degree, but the interviewer told me that my experience as secretary to an advertising executive would be sufficient.
We both had a near heart attack when we learned about the foreign language requirement. Joan had had a little French in college, and after four years at Villa Maria, thanks to the Congregation de Notre Dame de Montreal, I could pray in French a lot better than I could converse in it.
The interviewer said we’d be called in for further meetings, but in the meantime we were cautioned, “Girls, bone up on your French.”
There was a French expatriate living in the Barbizon for Women, so we paid her a dollar an hour to bat the breeze with us, suggesting she concentrate on such items as “Fasten your seatbelt” and “La toilette est ici.” We also ate at restaurants neither one of us could really afford in an effort to familiarize ourselves with French haute cuisine. That money was wasted. The frozen meals served on airlines in 1949 did not require a working knowledge of any cuisine. “Try to get it down,” would have been sufficient linguistic skill for us to master when it came to mealtime.
We had been asked to submit our birth certificates. It took several copies of Joan’s before we successfully altered the year of her birth and made her twenty-six instead of twenty-eight.
Pan Am had three divisions: Atlantic, Pacific, and South American. The Atlantic division encompassed Europe, Africa, and Asia, linking with the Pacific division in Calcutta. We were being considered for the Atlantic Division, for which LaGuardia Airport was the base. Idlewild, now Kennedy International, and now one of the most important airports in the world, was at the time “that mudhole in the middle of the potato fields of Long Island.”
Joan and I passed the second interview.
Mother was torn. On the one hand, she was thrilled at the idea of being able to tell everyone that her daughter was a Pan American stewardess. On the other hand, she was terrified that something might go wrong with the plane. An added consideration was the fact that I already had a secure job. Mr. Hiles liked me; suppose the new job didn’t work out. Not to mention that I was making fifty-five dollars a week now and Pan American would only pay fifty.
But she was fair. She did accept the rationale that since I’d only just turned twenty-one, I shouldn’t yet have to worry about clinging to security. Plus there was a final reason for her to hope along with me that Pan Am would hire me. At heart Mother was adventuresome. During the summer, on her own, she would take one-day outings on a Hudson Day Liner or a bus to the mountains or the shore. She also would often take the train to visit her sister in Rockaway, and there she’d blissfully stroll along the boardwalk. She loved the look and smell of the ocean, a love I inherited.
Support also came from other quarters. Now seventeen and a senior in high school, my younger brother John thought Pan Am was a great idea. Over six feet tall and still growing, blessed with Irish good looks, twinkling blue eyes, and dark brown hair, skinny as God made them, he was a good dancer and a lot of fun. By then Mother and I were the only two who called him John or Johnny. Everyone else called him Luke. The name my father had given to both his sons only as a middle name, for fear they would find it too Irish, had become the name by which they chose to be called.
Finally Joan and I were down to one final interview. Frantically we went over the departure speech we might be asked to give. “Bonjour, Messieurs et Mesdames. Je m’appelle Marie Higgins…” We practiced being fluent with such vital phrases as “Would you care to have a Chiclet?”
In those days the hostess passed out chewing gum before departure and landing. The act of chewing helped passengers to equalize the change in air pressure in their ears as the plane took off and landed.
The day came for us to take the French test; when it was finished, though nervous, we decided that we’d done okay. M. Raviol, who had given us the test, kept smiling and nodding as we answered the few simple questions he slowly and carefully asked us “en français.”
Two days later we got the call: “Quit your jobs, girls. You are Pan American stewardesses.”
I really hated to break the news to Mr. Hiles; he had been so nice to me. But it had to be done. His first stunned reaction was, “But I have just finished teaching you how to spell.” Then he sighed and became philosophical: “My theory, which you have just proven, is that a good secretary lasts for three years. Then she gets a better job or gets married.”
With my mother and brother John, 1945.
He and his wife invited me to dinner the evening of my last day at Remington Rand. “Bring a date,” he urged.
I didn’t know whom to invite. I had gone out occasionally with a couple of other guys in the company after Jack, but I wasn’t interested in any of them—and to be perfectly honest, they weren’t interested in me.
On the other hand, I reasoned, might this not be the time to make a move to catch Warren Clark’s eye?
My mother had undergone some minor surgery a few months earlier, and Mrs. Clark had invited John to dinner while Mother was in the hospital, telling him to be sure to bring his sister as well.
The dinner went splendidly. I thought I was being particularly charming, including eating the pistachio ice cream that Warren had brought, but which only he liked. But then, after coffee, Allan, the middle Clark brother who had just become engaged, got up to go to his fiancée’s home. John and Ken disappeared to meet their friends, leaving only Mrs. Clark, Warren, and me at the table.
Then to my dismay, Warren stood up. “I’m on my way,” he announced cheerfully.
“But, Warren, we have a young lady here, a guest,” Mrs. Clark protested.
“Mother,” he said, “there is another young lady residing in Parkchester, who at this moment is watching at the window, pining for her prince.”
“Warren, you can’t mean that little blond girl!”
“Mother, you don’t seem to realize. She’s built like a brick…”
“Warren!”
“A brick establishment, Mother,” he said innocently. “Nice to have seen you, Mary.”
Not exactly encouraging, I reasoned, but still, why not invite him to the farewell dinner? So he might refuse; I’ll be away a lot. I won’t have to bump into him at church.
It took all my courage, but I made the call, half hoping he wouldn’t be home. But he was
.
I chatted with him for a moment, telling him I was about to become a Pan Am stewardess.
He congratulated me.
“I think it’s going to be really fascinating,” I stammered, playing for time.
“I guess it will be, Mary. Good luck.”
There was a good-bye edge of finality in his voice.
“My boss and his wife want to take me to dinner on Friday night. Would you like to join us?”
“This Friday night. Oh, I’m sorry, Mary, I’ve got something on.”
“No, a week from Friday night,” I told him.
He couldn’t think of a reason to refuse again.
When we hung up, we had a date for dinner.
My cousin Al Hayward was Warren’s closest friend. Later I learned that Warren joked to him that he was robbing the cradle, taking out Al’s kid cousin.
He met the Hileses and me at the Pennsylvania Hotel. We went to dinner at Charles, then a popular restaurant in Greenwich Village. At 10:30, the Hileses left to catch their train home, and Warren suggested a nightcap at Ernie’s Three Ring Circus, an after-dinner spot nearby.
When we were seated there, he ordered both of us a drink. A comedian came on. His material was pretty raunchy and sailed over my head, but hoping not to look stupid, I took my cues from the people at the other tables, and laughed along with them.
Warren had begun writing something on a paper napkin. He looked up at me. “Don’t laugh,” he said. “You don’t understand what he’s saying, and anyhow, it isn’t funny.”
He continued to write, and I could see that he was jotting down names. I asked him who they were.
“The people I’ll have at the wedding,” he told me. “Fly for a year. Get it out of your system. I’ll take my mother to drive-in movies when you’re away. We’ll get married at Christmas. People are more generous then.”
I stared at him.
“Don’t go girly and cute,” he said. “You know we’re going to get married.”
I did know it. I’d never been more certain of anything in my life.
Six
The following Monday, Joan and I reported to LaGuardia Airport to begin our three-week training course. Flight school in 1949 was held on folding chairs in an empty hangar. Two senior pursers were the instructors.
There were eighteen of us in the group. We were invited to stand up, give our names, and tell where we were from and what we had been doing before we joined Pan Am.
All the minispeeches were routine until a Southern girl with flashing eyes stood up. “Ah’m Bonnie Lee Harding,” she announced. “And Ah worked for American Airlines and Ah got fired.”
We waited.
“A passenger put a bag that must’ah weighed a ton on the overhead rack,” Bonnie Lee explained, her tone heating up at the memory, “and Ah said to him in ma nicest Southern belle manner, ‘Excuse me, sir, but Ah’ll have ta ask you to take that bag down and put it under your seat.’” In those days the airplane’s overhead luggage racks consisted of loose hanging bins made of rope, and I had heard that during turbulence heavy objects often came tumbling down into the aisles.
“He refused in a very ungentlemanly, brusque way. Ah asked him again. And he refused and told me that he’d just flown on Eastern Airlines and he’d put that same bag overhead on the rack, and it was just fine with everyone.
“Well we had to secure the cabin, and Ah knew the Captain was probably all set to get mad at me for delaying him, and Ah’m afraid Ah lost my temper. ‘Eastern!’ Ah said, ‘Captain Eddy’s Flying Circus! You’re lucky you didn’t have a cow up there over your seat, Mister.’” Bonnie Lee sighed. “Unfortunately, ma passenger was a top executive with Cooks Tours and had just given American tons of business, so Ah got fired. And now Ah’m happy to be with all of you.”
Some class members looked bewildered. Joan and I felt very much in-the-know. Our stewardess friend Katie Miles had filled us in on the nicknames of the airlines. Eastern, founded and owned by Captain Eddie Rickenbacker, had a reputation for carrying a lot of live animals, which was why it was known as “Captain Eddie’s Flying Circus.” Pan Am was “Pandemonium World Scareways.” TWA was “Teeney Weeney Airlines” or “Try Walking Across.” Air France was “Air Chance.” Sabena was “Such a Bitter Experience Never Again.”
After we’d all been properly introduced, the purser asked anyone who had been given the French conversation test by Monsieur Raviol to raise her hand. Joan and I were the only two. “You’ll have to take the test over with Phil Parrott,” we were told. “We just realized that Monsieur Raviol is only qualified to give the Portuguese test.” Joan and I looked at each other in horror. No wonder Monsieur Raviol had asked such simple questions and had such a dreamy look. He knew less French than we did.
As a flight attendant for Pan Am, I became involved in a media event when I walked an orphaned child from England down the steps from the plane to meet her new adoptive mother.
There was one obvious solution to the problem: avoidance. I spent the next year ducking Phil Parrott, and Joan spent seven years ducking him.
In the three weeks of training, we learned basic first aid, including how to deliver a baby—a not uncommon possibility at that time, we were warned. War brides were still arriving from Europe, their servicemen husbands’ tours of duty now over. Travel agents weren’t supposed to sell tickets to anyone who was more than six months pregnant, but that rule was most often honored by its violation. I was to have a number of enciénte ladies on my flights whom I nervously anticipated would be visited by the stork while still above the clouds. Fortunately, they all made it to terra firma.
We were told that there was always the possibility of a crash landing at sea. “It’s called ‘ditching,’” the instructor said matter-of-factly. We learned emergency procedures. “Just remember, girls, water is harder than concrete. But if you get lucky and the plane doesn’t break up on contact, it will float anywhere from three minutes to three days. Assume you’ve got three minutes. Grab the raft. It’s on the wall between the two lavatories. Be sure you have the survival equipment. Open the emergency exit over the wing. Inflate the raft outside the plane. Then…and now listen hard…” Here the instructor paused for dramatic effect: “Give a mighty sweep of your arm and shout ‘Follow me!’”
Then he explained the reason we were to lead the charge to escape: “You people will know how to use the radio to send Mayday signals, as well as how to help possible survivors.”
We practiced preparing and serving meals on a plane parked in another hangar. Astonishingly, during the entire training period, we never went up on a test flight. My only prior experience off the ground had come two years earlier, in a one-engine, open-cockpit, two-seater plane piloted by a former air force pilot I had met at my cousin’s wedding. He was trying to start his own feeder airline in Far Rockaway. He headed the plane over the Atlantic, then on the intercom told me to put my hand on the stick. When I did, he said, “You’re flying the plane, Mary.”
I knew no one would be dopey enough to let me take over the controls and said so. “See that stick in front of you? If you don’t believe me, move it to the left or right,” he urged. I laughed, twisted it all the way to the right, and we came close to flying upside down. “Let go,” he bellowed, “let go.” As that tiny plane zoomed over the breakers, I fell in love with flight. The pilot, however, was someone I never saw again.
The three weeks training ended, and, bursting with pride, Joan and I put on our uniforms for the graduation ceremony at which we were handed our wings. My hair was long then, and I wore it in a chignon. It was a very strict rule with the airline that hair was not permitted to touch the collar and, as at the Villa, white gloves were de rigueur.
During the training session, Warren came to see me every evening. Whenever I’d dated before I met him, I’d been secretly unhappy about my family’s tiny apartment over the tailor shop. I’d longed to be in our house again, with the big tree that shaded my little room and Mother’s
roses and hydrangeas in the garden. But Warren couldn’t have cared less. He and my mother became fast and devoted friends. She was an ardent Democrat. He was a Republican. The one thing she never forgave him was the fact that, when for the first time I was eligible to vote, he took me to register and “turned me into a Republican.” To my mother, it was a sin almost on a par with marrying outside the faith.
After the graduation ceremony, Joan and I went home to await a call from scheduling. Mine came the next day. I was on standby Sunday, which meant I had to be ready to leave for the airport instantly if needed, plus I was scheduled to fly to London on Monday.
At the time, Pan Am had one daily flight to London. It left at four o’clock in the afternoon and landed at Gander, Newfoundland, at eight o’clock, where there was a crew change. It took eleven more hours to fly on to London, and that was considered too much flight time for one crew to handle.
In Gander we slept in barracks, and, to pass the time, went bowling at a place where the lanes were so warped that I got a strike even though my ball went into the alley. The plane we flew was a four-engine, propeller Constellation. It had fifteen rows of seats, two on each side of a center aisle, for a total of sixty passengers, with an extra last double seat on one side for the purser and stewardess.
The flight deck crew consisted of a Captain, First Officer, Navigator, Engineer, Radio Operator, and sometimes an extra pilot. The two cabin personnel were a purser and steward or stewardess. If the purser was male, it was always a stewardess who worked with him. If the purser was female, the reverse was true. The idea was that in the event of a crash/ditching there should be one set of muscles who could physically lift or haul people onto the ground or sea.
On my first flight, I had four infants on board who were going to meet their English grandparents. We’d no sooner set foot on the plane than one young mother attempted to hand me her two-month-old pride and joy. “Baby will have his bottle now,” she said sweetly.
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