Remembering flying

A repost from 2015...and I now know I have a female cousin in Austin TX who has had her pilot's license and flown planes herself! I hope to see more photos and learn more about her life in the air!

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I did have a few months of my 21st year flying professionally.  I quit college over a failed romance, and took a job as a Flight Attendant for Pan American World Airways (aka Pan Am).  The jets had recently started flying passengers, and that's where I worked.

We had to carry our flat shoes in our purses while walking to the planes, where we removed our high heels which could perhaps punch holes in the lightweight floors as we trod up and down the aisles serving as waitresses for almost a hundred people.

 I was flying the Latin American routes instead of learning in college, while my sister and her boyfriend here are seeing me off, after I was hired in April 1963. (Yes, we all walked from the Miami terminal out to the planes...passengers as well as crew.)  I flew the 2 jets shown below, learning all the emergency procedures, as well as food service.  I also flew in DC-6 and DC-7's, prop planes that flew shorter flights in the Caribbean.  I'll never forget the live chickens in a straw shopping bag which was included along with several children piled with mom into one seat.

Boeing 707

Wikipedia shares:

"Pan Am was the launch customer of the Boeing 707, placing an order for 20 in October 1955. It also ordered 25 of Douglas's DC-8, which could seat six across.  

The 320 "Intercontinental" series 707 in 1959-60, and the Douglas DC-8 in March 1960, enabled non-stop transatlantic crossings with a viable payload in both directions.

Popular Culture loved Pan Am:

Pan Am held a lofty position in the popular culture of the Cold War era. One of the most famous images in which a Pan Am plane formed a backdrop was The Beatles' 1964 arrival at John F. Kennedy Airport aboard a Pan Am Boeing 707–321, Clipper Defiance.^[136]

From 1964 to 1968 con artist Frank Abagnale, Jr. masqueraded as a Pan Am pilot, dead-heading to many destinations in the cockpit jump seat. He also used Pan Am's preferred hotels, paid the bills with bogus checks, and later cashed fake payroll checks in Pan Am's name. He documented this era in the memoir Catch Me if You Can, which became a distantly related movie in 2002. Abagnale called Pan Am the "Ritz-Carlton of airlines" and noted that the days of luxury in airline travel are over.

Then almost 50 years later... ABC had the TV show, Pan Am.  And it only ran for one season.

Pan Am is an American period drama television series created by writer Jack Orman. Named for the iconic Pan American World Airways, the series features the pilots and stewardesses of the airline as it operated in the early 1960s at the beginning of the commercial Jet Age.

Actresses in the TV Show Pan Am

Pan Am premiered on ABC on September 25, 2011 and ended on February 19, 2012.

The Pilot Show: April 1963. Dean pilots the Clipper Majestic '​s first New York to London flight—his first as a captain—and searches for his girlfriend, Bridget, about whom Dean learns some shocking news. Maggie, a stewardess suspended for not wearing her girdle to work, is unexpectedly reinstated when the scheduled purser, Bridget, does not arrive. Veteran stewardess Kate is revealed to be a CIA courier who was recruited during a layover in Rome three months prior, and she takes her first U.S. intelligence assignment to switch a passenger's passport. Meanwhile, Laura must deal with people asking her if she is the stewardess on the cover of Life magazine, and trying to do her best while not bothering her sister, Kate, who resents Laura's sudden fame. Colette sees a former lover on the flight, only to discover he is accompanied by his wife and son.

Pan Am won the "Best Series" at the Rose d'Or TV awards, Europe's equivalent of the Emmys.

This TV series took place at exactly the time I was flying; same uniforms, same issues (well without the CIA at least) and different routes.

I only flew to Latin (South and Central America) countries, then back to the states.  Portugal was the only European country I visited, but there were lots of trips to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central America, and the east coast of South America as far south as Sao Paolo, Brazil.  I flew over Cuba a few times on the way to Puerto Rico. (This was just after the Cuban Missal Crisis.)

I stayed in various hotels on layovers where Pan Am made contracts, in many Latin cities, and San Francisco once. I wanted to meet an old school friend there, but her husband met me instead...a strange memory, since I'd never met him.  In Caracas, Venezuela there were various political upheavals including armed conflicts, so we stayed out of town at a posh resort.

Not where we stayed, but this is a park near Caracas

I loved Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and I had 3 days layover there to see the sights.  The flight which I had just worked from New York was a non-stop overnight flight of 12 hours, carrying the Brazilian soccer team.  We really had a strain on the little bathrooms when all those men woke up in the morning wanting to shave before landing and meeting their fans.

 I would often be away from my home in Miami Springs FL (near the airport) for a week to 10 days.  There might be a trip every day, and sleeping in a different bed each night.  Or there might be one trip of 12 hours, then a layover for 3 days.  I had no seniority, so I got the flight schedules that were least desirable. But I initially loved all of them.

Not mine, but a typical Pan Am Crew of Flight Attendants (aka Stewardesses) ready to go to work

The traveling waitress life had a toll on me.  I may have been recovering from my broken romance, but I was also away from home for the first time with no friends to speak of.  I was immersed in a culture of mostly Hispanic women and men, and I felt pretty lonely.

As a stewardess I stretched myself too thin with days and nights of work, then partying much of the time I wasn't working. I think I was having a bit of delayed adolescence.

British Stewardess, Betty Riegel welcoming passengers in the same style uniform which I wore.

Our uniforms were tailored, but with all the good food I was eating, I already was stretched to the limit in mine.  The blue cloth was not as bright a blue as shown in the TV series, either. 

Soon I was so glad to leave the supposedly romantic traveling life of a waitress in a plane to settle down with an old friend who wanted to get married.  At that time stewardesses weren't allowed to get married or have children.  And suddenly that was exactly what I wanted.

Incidentally, my little sister also quit college in her third year and became an Eastern Airlines stewardess.  I don't remember if she flew longer than I did, but she also left flying tp trade in the high flying life to live on a farm in Tennessee as a "back-to-the-land" hippy.  Us two Rogers girls weren't meant to stay in the air that long, I guess. (Our romantic ideals were perhaps inherited from our mom, and reading lots of books, rather than being given good solid down-to-earth advice. It was the 60s after all, which gave us conservative gals permission to go wild.

I do still enjoy a flight now and then...squeezed usually against some giant person or another...but I really enjoy a take off which feels so grand to the bottom of my shoes.  Glad I never really had a lot of "G's" like an astronaut, or this might be chicken feed.

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Read Betty Riegel's story I Lived the High Life as A Pan Am Stewardess HERE.

Wikipedia is my source for most quoted materials and photos.

Images of the two advertisements are from PanAmAir.org.

Information about Pan Am the TV Show comes also from Wikipedia HERE.

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Sharing this post with Sepia Saturday (perhaps again) because these are young people in uniforms as well...and it's been more than 50 years ago that I flew the skies for Pan Am.