Source: Chicago Sun-Times
Author: Scott Fornek

When Chicago nurse Harriet Fry landed a job in 1930 as one of the first stewardesses, the plane's body was largely plywood and canvas, the pilots wore goggles and packed six-shooters, and passengers were allowed to smoke -- once the gasoline fumes disappeared from the cabin.

Kathryn Parks did everything she could to talk her 23-year-old kid sister out of taking the job.

"I was scared -- short and simple," said Parks, who turned 100 last month. "I didn't want them to have trouble and come down, and she might be killed.

"I put up a lot of things against it, but she was already set on it."

It was 75 years ago this month when Fry, legendary chief stewardess Ellen Church and six other women flew into the history books as the original "Sky Girls" working for Boeing Air Transport, a predecessor of United Air Lines.

Later dubbed "the Original Eight," they helped sell the public on air travel, launched a career for hundreds of thousands and kicked off a history rich in adventure, opportunity and glamor.

Their successors still look back fondly on those early days.

"We were more or less a celebrity," said Helen Elizabeth McLaughlin, 84, who flew as a "hostess" for Continental Airlines in the 1940s and wrote Footsteps in the Sky: An Informal Review of U.S. Airlines Inflight Service.

First responders on board

"People would come out to the airports to see the crew and see us take off and land," said McLaughlin, who lives in Downstate Coal Valley, in the Quad Cities area.

They've gone from "sky girls" to hostesses to stewardesses to flight attendants. And with terrorism, plane crashes and unruly passengers, the job has changed even more than its title.

"We're aviation safety specialists now," said Candace Kolander, 39, coordinator of air safety, health and security for the Association of Flight Attendants.

"Flight attendants are the first responders on board that aircraft," she said. "We have to be the first responders for medical situations. We have to be the first responders should there be a disruptive passenger on board. You have to be the first responders for firefighting."

'Not given to flightiness'

A flight attendant for 19 years, Kolander said one of her most important tasks is showing passengers how to use the oxygen masks and pointing out the exits, but she laments it's "when everyone ignores me."

"But when we have that beverage cart, everyone can tell you exactly where you're at in that aisle," she said.

At first, they were all nurses.

While working at a hospital in San Francisco in 1930, Church, then 25, stopped in Boeing Air Transport's office to ask about fares to her hometown of Cresco, Iowa. She struck up a conversation with Steve Stimpson, a traffic manager for the airline.

Stimpson was already interested in putting someone on planes to assist passengers, and the two of them discussed using women for the job. He quickly dashed off a letter to his boss.

"It strikes me that there would be a great psychological punch to having young women stewardesses or couriers, or whatever you want to call them," he wrote. "Imagine the national publicity we could get from it, and the tremendous effect it would have on the traveling public."

Stimpson recommended nurses.

"I am not suggesting at all the flapper type of girl, or one that would go haywire" he wrote. "You know nurses as well as I do, and you know that they are not given to flightiness -- I mean in the head."

'Always liberated'

After some resistance, Stimpson got the go-ahead. He immediately hired Church as his chief stewardess.

Church was "a lady of the old school," said Vicy Morris Young, 81, historian for Clipped Wings, a group of retired United Airlines flight attendants.

"She had been brought up with manners and bearing," said Young, who knew Church and Stimpson.

They hired seven other nurses, four from Chicago -- Fry, Cornelia Peterman, Margaret Arnott and Alva Johnson -- and three others from San Francisco: Jessie Carter, Ellis Crawford and Inez Keller.

Fry had grown up on a farm near Dixon but moved to Chicago after nursing school. Later in life, she told a newspaper interviewer she was "always liberated."

"I never did like to sit on the sidelines," she said in 1975.

Age limit: 25, and single

Wearing matching green wool jackets, skirts, capes and berets, they took to the skies May 15, 1930. Inside the cabin, they wore nurse's smocks and caps.

All had to be single, 25 or younger, weigh no more than 115 pounds and be no taller than 5 feet 4 inches.

"They are all about medium build -- in other words, no funny little ones nor great big ones," Stimpson wrote to one of his bosses in 1930.

They were paid $125 a month -- about $1,447 in 2005 dollars -- for 100 hours of flight time.

A flight from San Francisco to Chicago took 20 hours, with a dozen stops before the final destination. The crews changed in Cheyenne, Wyo.

Besides serving cold food and hot coffee, they handed out chewing gum to stop passengers' ears from popping in the unpressurized cabin and ammonia inhalant and a mild sedative to ease bouts of airsickness. They mopped up when that didn't work.

Parks, a resident of the northwestern Illinois town of Polo, couldn't believe it when she asked her kid sister, "What conveniences do you have on the plane?"

Fry told her the toilet was a bottomless can that emptied into the skies.

"I said, 'Don't you dare fly over here,' " Parks said.

'Who the heck is the girl?'

They weren't popular with the pilots.

"The pilots were temperamental characters in those days," Stimpson explained in a 1962 interview. "They wore big fur coats and two-gun holsters and goggles, and they didn't want girls meddling in their planes."

But eventually, the pilots came around, and -- if no passengers were on the plane -- they would invite the "sky girl" into the cockpit, where she would sit on a sack of mail.

"Sometimes the pilots would do hedgehopping about 500 feet from the ground," Fry wrote in an account published in McLaughlin's book. "We would frighten the pigs, and the farmers did not like that."

They flew so low that when they zoomed over Fry's grandparents' farm on wash day, "I could see the patterns on the clothes hanging on the line," Fry wrote in a 1958 newspaper account.

The public didn't need to be won over. The stewardesses received fan mail, and applications flooded in.

Years later, Stimpson remembered a customer calling in the early days to ask which crew would be on a specific flight. Stimpson checked, called the man back and told him the names of the pilot and co-pilot.

"I don't mean them," the customer said. "Who the heck is the girl?"

56 years in the air

Other airlines quickly followed suit. And women clamored for the job.

Jo Humbert joined Pennsylvania Central Airlines in 1945 and retired from United in 2001 after 56 years on the job.

"When I started out, ladies wore hat and gloves, and men always had a suit and tie," Humbert said. "They used to bring you gifts."

Her passengers have included actors Bob Cummings, Gig Young and Debbie Reynolds, Adm. Hyman G. Rickover and future Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush.

Gen. Douglas MacArthur flew on a Capitol Airlines charter flight she worked in 1952.

"The weather was so rough, he started getting white in the face," Humbert said. "I got some ice and put it on the back of his neck."

Maximum height: 5-foot-6

Ona Gieschen went to work for TWA in 1946 but initially could not get hired as a stewardess because she was a little more than an inch taller than the maximum height of 5-foot-6.

"I was told with a passenger seated, my derriere would be right at eye level," she said. "They had strange rules at that time."

She worked other jobs for the airline before returning to the employment office in 1948.

"I think it's possible they changed the requirement," she said. "Or it's possible I bent my knees a bit."

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the union, lawsuits and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 forced the airlines to abandon restrictive policies limiting the job to younger, single, unmarried women.

But some restrictions lingered for years, said Georgia Panter Nielsen, 68, a retired United flight attendant, union activist and author of From Sky Girl to Flight Attendant: Women in the Making of a Union.

Just last year, 13 former flight attendants won a lawsuit accusing United of discrimination because the carrier had stricter weight requirements for women than it did for men from 1980 until 1994.

"In Asia, they were still advertising for virgins for Air China in the 1990s," Nielsen said.

'I've got to get these people out'

Flight attendants helped convince the public that flying was safe.

But they faced their share of danger over the years.

Chief stewardess Vicy Morris Young, who was pregnant, was on her last flight for Standard Airlines on a July morning in 1949. Pilot Roy White flew the Lockheed C-46 through some cloud cover over the Santa Susana Mountains near Van Nuys, Calif.

"That's when the crash happened," Young said.

The plane hit the mountains at about 1,800 feet, rupturing the fuel tanks and igniting a fire.

"We bounced up and hit it a second time at about 2,300 [feet] this time, and we came down a third time and pancaked down the side of the mountain," she said. "It was amazing that anyone lived at all."

Still strapped in her seat in the wreckage, Young began shouting orders.

"There is something that takes over," she said. "All I was thinking was, 'I've got to get these people out.' I kept saying, 'Move away from the fire!' Move away from the fire!' "

Only 15 of the 45 people on the plane survived. Both pilots and one of the other two stewardesses were killed.

Young broke her back, pelvis, ankles, legs, "just about everything you can think of," she said, but "after many surgeries," she was able to walk, and her baby -- "a beautiful, bouncing boy" -- also survived.

"When you are in a disaster at age 25, every day you wake up on this side of the grass, you'd better be happy," said Young, 81, who lives in Cathedral City, Calif. "I was luckier than most."

At least 258 flight attendants have been killed in accidents and crashes on U.S. carriers since 1968 -- 25 of them in the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings -- according to figures from the National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration.

Shepherding troops to war

In the 40 years she has been a flight attendant at American Airlines, Sharon King has met Katharine Hepburn, playwright Arthur Miller, Robert F. Kennedy and Ray Charles.

Charles even gave her the braille copy of Playboy magazine he was reading on a Los Angeles to New York flight in 1977.

But King said her most memorable experiences have been working flights transporting troops to the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm and the Iraq War.

"I find them emotionally unsettling because you are taking men and women into harm's way," said King, 61, a South Loop resident. "I always cry when I am wishing them 'godspeed.'

"I feel privileged having the opportunity to fly those troops," King said. "You are flying with the best passengers you will ever have in your life.

"We say we'll be right here to bring them home."

'Proud? You bet I was.'

The "Original Eight" are all dead. The last, Margaret Arnott, died in 1995 at age 88.

Most flew for about 1-1/2 years.

Church went on to serve as a captain in the Air Evacuation Corps during World War II and was awarded the Air Medal. She died in 1965 at the age of 60 after a horse riding accident almost a year after she married and became Ellen Church Marshall.

Fry also returned to nursing. But she discussed her days in the skies often, including a 1977 chat with Johnny Carson on the "Tonight Show."

She married twice, dying as Harriet Iden in Glendale, Calif., in 1979 at the age of 72. United flew her body back to Polo for burial.

"Was I proud of Harriet? You bet I was," said her older sister, who still lives in Polo.

Stimpson, the "Father of Stewardess Service," died in 1974 at the age of 78.

In a 1962 interview, Stimpson predicted women would some day work on flights between planets.

"How could you run any transportation service without stewardesses?" he asked.