TACA
Pan Am had two types of “stand-by” for stewardesses—24-hour, which meant you had to be ready to fly at a moment’s notice, and TACA, which meant you had to be available by phone to accept a flight for the next day. The month I was TACA, I got out a felt pen and started...
FED UP
I soon realized that, despite the excitement of waking up in a fancy hotel halfway around the world every week, I wasn’t cut out to be a stewardess. Each month you had to bid on a schedule of flights for the following month by listing the available ones in your order...
MORE SNIPPETS
“My training flight was from New York to Frankfurt. We left six hours late—the first 747’s were full of glitches—so, of course, when we arrived at 3:00 in the morning, there was no crew bus to take us to our hotel. One of the stews had rescued a diminutive cake that...
COLLAGE
A number of years after the fact, I wrote about my experiences as a “stewardess,” as we called ourselves.
“My recollection of the training school in Miami is like a bad collage—snippets of irrelevancy:
LINNY
I spoke too soon. I did do another drawing from life after Thayer—which I came across when I was looking through my old artwork the other day. My freshman year of high school, I babysat three sisters over a period of several months. The eldest was Linny, in the...
OUTCAST
This is Thayer, son of Davona and Lou, who bought the duplex on Raymond Ave. where I spent the happiest years of my childhood. I made this rough sketch in the spring before they evicted us. I mention this because it’s the last portrait I would draw from life. From...