Pan Am flight attendants revisit distant way of life
The `girls' join in reminiscing
It's been decades since the former Pan American
Since then, they have earned graduate degrees, become wives and mothers, and pursued careers as ministers, chefs, and librarians. But when they get together several times a year to socialize and raise money for charitable causes while taking cooking lessons or a dinner cruise, they quickly slip back to their time in the sky.
``You have this very special connection," said Christel McCarthy, a landscape designer living in Lexington. ``You were all young. You were all adventurous. You had to be able to adapt to any situation at the drop of the hat."
That meant doing the best they could with Jacqueline Kennedy's soft-boiled egg order at 3,000 feet. Or converting the first-class section of a mostly empty Christmas Eve flight of military families into a Christmas party, complete with choir performances. Or spending five days on the Ivory Coast, waiting for a replacement engine after the original stopped working on a flight from Johannesburg.
When the women left Pan Am, World Wings International, a social and charitable organization of former Pan Am employees, recruited them. World Wings sponsors an annual reunion and has contributed millions of dollars to CARE, a humanitarian organization that delivers emergency aid to survivors of war and natural disasters.
Chartered in 1959, World Wings has 36 chapters world wide, including ones in Oslo, Tokyo, and London. The Boston chapter, which includes women who live in towns and cities from Rhode Island to Maine, is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. The group raises about $2,500 a year, a portion of which goes to Angel Flight Northeast, which provides free flights for people in need of medical care.
For some of the former flight attendants, belonging to World Wings is a way to keep Pan Am alive. The company declared bankruptcy in 1991, and several years later, an airline operating commuter flights out of Portsmouth, N.H., bought Pan Am's assets out of bankruptcy and assumed the name Pan Am Clipper Connection.
But for these women, who gathered recently at one member's Sudbury home for a potluck dinner, there will never be another Pan Am.
Working as flight attendants for Pan Am gave them the opportunity to visit dozens of countries and develop a richer, deeper perspective on the world's cultures and religions, they said. Betsy Sowers, now a Westborough minister, visited places of worship in each country she toured, from a Hindu temple in India to a mosque in Egypt.
``It was completing an education that wasn't completed in the university," said Susan Lango of Sturbridge, who is still a flight attendant for a major US airline.
They also experienced history first hand. Sowers, who attended Harvard Divinity School while flying for Pan Am, remembers that during apartheid black passengers en route to South Africa would ask where they were permitted to sit or automatically head for the back of the plane.
Lango and Carol Fagon, of Sudbury, worked flights full of Vietnamese orphans being flown out of Saigon as part of the humanitarian ``Operation Babylift." They also staffed military flights packed with servicemen, returning them to Vietnam after ``rest and relaxation" in Hawaii. Fagon would collect the names and phone numbers of the young men's loved ones and spend several days on the phone delivering the messages when she returned to the United States.
It was, for the most part, a glamorous life.
Many of the women flew 16-day around-the-world flights from New York to Hong Kong by way of such exotic locales as Bangkok, Istanbul, Beirut, Tehran, Calcutta, and Karachi, Pakistan.
They had layovers long enough to get to know the cities, and they returned often enough to be comfortable. ``You'd be gone for a whole week. Two days in Rome, two days in Tehran," said Elisa Cunningham, of Wellesley. ``It was a vacation really. It wasn't working."
When the flight attendants arrived at their destination, they were picked up by a limousine and taken to the nicest hotel in town.
``Your laundry was always done," McCarthy said. ``You ordered anything you wanted to eat and you signed for it. You knew people in all these different cities and you shopped and you went to parties. You worked hard on those planes, but, boy, once you got there, you had a wonderful life."
Sowers said when she first went to work for Pan Am, soon after ``Coffee, Tea or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses" was published, she was concerned the other flight attendants would be wild partiers who slept around. But she found most were recent college graduates who, like her, just wanted to see the world. After a long flight, the crew would frequently have dinner together before retiring to their rooms, she said.
``It was really pretty tame," she said.
Carol Guerrin, the president of the World Wings International Boston Chapter, said the Pan Am women have become some of her best friends in life. She keeps pictures of them on her refrigerator.
``If you really love your job, you have this special tie with people," said Guerrin, of Derry, N.H., who now sells books for children's book publishers.
Members of the Boston group, most of whom are in their 60s, get together six or seven times a year for cocktails and dinner, to enjoy each other and catch up. These days, they bring their husbands. Conversation always seems to slip back to the old days in the sky.
``You get together and tell stories that nobody else would ever believe," McCarthy said.
They talk about how different flying was back in the late '60s and early '70s, when hair was cropped just above the collar, and the dress code required them to squeeze into girdles and pantyhose before slipping into their uniforms. They pushed roast beef down the aisle on a linen-covered cart and served the finest wines.
They talk about getting weighed every six months to make sure their weight never crept above the designated maximum, and how, for a time, they were forbidden to marry or be pregnant.
And they relive their many encounters with celebrities -- listening to Tom Jones sing along with his airline-issued headset all through a night flight, cooking breakfast for Katharine Hepburn, taking Grace Kelly's meal order from her husband, Prince Rainier of Monaco, because the movie star wouldn't address the flight attendants directly, and explaining to Charles Lindbergh how a
For many of the women, their days in the air were the happiest of their life. Guerrin met her husband, one of the first sky marshals, on a flight he was protecting. Their first date was to the Taj Mahal.
``None of those trips in those days were routine," McCarthy said.
Guerrin, who flew for six years before going on maternity leave in 1975 and never returning, said she thoroughly enjoyed her time with the airline.
``I can't say that I ever really gave it up in my mind," she said. ``I saw places I probably never would have seen. I don't think you ever forget that."
McCarthy said her Pan Am uniform still hangs in her closet, cleaned and pressed.
``I can leave at a moment's notice," she said. ``I kept it just like that. I never really retired .
