Air Stewardess
I
THE shatter-proof windows by my elbow quiver, a mute defiance to the air that rushes past them on the other side. It seems a pity that the approaching darkness can’t be so readily defied. For, far below, under that deepening veil of night, lies a dramatic chapter of the past, a tale imperishably written over rock and desert, and destined to survive into the heart of time. Even as I stare, the winding Trail dissolves, retreats into the shadows, is lost. After a while my eyes give up. But, in my mind, picture after picture has awakened, framed in suffering and in dogged courage, until I, too, am lost in those absorbing shadows half a mile away. From the immensity below, the black arm of night is reaching up another phantom canvas. . . .
I see a sleeping caravan hemmed in by rock and sand, a little patch of life adrift in a hostile wilderness. The tethered horses stir uneasily, their noses in the wind. All day the half-starved team has dragged along under the throbbing heat, past ruts and bones that serve as line marks for this perilous new trail. The Overland! The man is sprawled in a rough blanket, asleep. The children, huddled close for warmth, lie on the floor under the patched canvas top. They, too, are sleeping. The woman . . . her eyes alone are open to the oppressive darkness. A child coughs in his sleep. Gently she spreads over him her dress, a thick and dingy homespun, incredibly ugly. By the feeble lantern I can see her clearly, the feet hidden in the flare of heavy petticoats, the stringy hair caught in a braid behind her head, the skin leathered by sun and wind, by the interminable alkaline dust; the rough brown hands, the eyes . . . and now I am aware of nothing else. Her eyes absorb me. Steadfast, compassionate, they show me something that the beauty parlors of to-morrow will never have for sale, a quality which will enshrine that weary, weather-beaten face upon a pinnacle—forever lovely. Pioneer Woman . . .
Reluctantly I come back to reality. The blue flashes from the outboard exhausts have helped to play strange tricks with my imagination, and now, by comparison, my own immediate setting seems even more fantastic than before. The metal walls, the leather seats, the monstrous symphony of sound. I turn and gaze across our narrow space.
The girl is still there, a silhouette in indigo. She is gazing steadily ahead under the right wing tip. Gradually she emerges in the uncanny light, her hair, her features, even her tailored clothes taking on a dim blue radiance from the exhausts. I can make out the line of one slim leg crossed over its silken twin. Every few seconds the white beam from an airway beacon flicks across her face. I can see her eyes clearly. The light is tricky, and in my ear the engines hum their 1600-horsepower lullaby. But somehow, somewhere, — I could almost swear to it, — I have seen those reassuring eyes before.
II
The newest career in the world. And, equally, the strangest.
It is dark. The lights of Salt Lake City have fallen away. The tri-motor is laboring up, all engines wide open, headed at a black wall that towers seven thousand feet high — the Rockies. Chicago early next morning. Midafternoon, New York. The great rampart, dark and mysterious, looms in the distance. The ship roars through Immigration Pass, into a thousand miles of desolation.
The young stewardess looks vigilantly up the aisle from her seat aft. The long cabin is suffused with an unearthly illumination from the engine exhausts. The shaded reading lamps are all switched off, some of the window blinds are down. She can make out the twin line of white pillows on the tipped-back seats, the blanketed forms, most of them asleep. Ahead, out of sight around the mail compartment, are the pilots; but the cabin, with its freight of passengers — that is her own responsibility. She has tucked them in, made them comfortable for the night, has checked over the coffee and hot food in the ship’s galley. Now she must keep watch.
An eighth of an inch from her elbow, on the other side of the glass, the air is beating past at two miles a minute, and outside the heated cabin it is fifteen below zero. No towns, no houses; only sheer wilderness and the spaced flash of the airway beacons. . . .
Number 8, the one with the baby, is asleep already, although she protested that she could not close her eyes. Poor thing, she needs all the sleep she can get. The baby is to be operated on tomorrow in Detroit. The stewardess walks up and peers for a minute. Just so, nearly a century ago, stood her great-grandmother, shielding the flickering candlelight from an ailing child inside a covered wagon. The old Overland Trail ribbons below . . . and Number 5 — at last he has put his cards up. All the way from Oakland he was playing solitaire — shuffle, cut, deal, seven hours at a stretch, his face expressionless. But on the outcome of this transcontinental dash is balanced the future of a gigantic plant, the welfare of thousands of employees. Now he is hunched up in his seat, eyes closed, mouth drawn in a hard straight line. He might be asleep too, but the straining muscles of his hands betray him. . . . Number 3, the one with the cough, is giving his tired throat a rest. He sleeps. . . .
Back again to the rear seat. A cup of hot coffee. The measured thunder of the engines goes on without a change of note. The girl feels the ship sway sometimes, sink or rise a little. Tomorrow night she’ll be over the Trail again, headed West. Backward and forward, month in, month out, the menacing blackness of winter, the stupendous mountain sunrises of summer. Twelve times around the world already in mileage, more flying time than some of the women headliners put together.
Covered wagon, pony express, overland stage, cowcatcher railroad, famous Limited — and now these huge air transports, each the sensation of its day. History, in different guise, repeats itself, for the sum of achievement is still the sum of the spirit that goes into it.
III
The air stewardesses on the transcontinental run from Chicago to Oakland number twenty-five, a select hand-picked band. They work in relays. As the ship crosses the continent, guided by the elaborate roadbed of a great airway, — teletype circuits from Pacific to Atlantic, radio phones, airway lighthouses, radio range beacons, government weather stations, emergency fields, incessant radio reports, incessant inspections, — the stewardesses come and go.
A nine-ton transport swinging on to the loading ramp amid noise and bustle and precision of movement is a breathcatching spectacle — to the passenger. The stewardess is used to it. She stands there waiting, with the padlocked satchel of company mail. She flies so much that she can look upon an airplane and not see it, listen to an engine and not hear it.
Her interest is centred upon the passengers in the cabin, and most of her waking hours are spent in the interior of an air liner. Actually it is not unlike a Pullman. The ceiling is a foot above her head, and on cither side of the aisle is a row of adjustable reclining seats. There are magazines, reading lamps, ash trays, pipes for heating, air vents, a lavatory with hot and cold water. All so familiar and yet so matter-offact that one accepts it with hardly a second thought for the incredible picture that it spells — the comforts of home, wrapped up compactly in a club car, tearing through the clouds.
Everything is as landlike as possible, and handled with ironclad routine. Airways are still new, but not too new to have discovered that such ironclad routine can be maintained only by hand-picked deputies. For the stewardess, as for all others connected with a transport ship, the qualifications come high. Many call, but few are chosen.
There is no job on earth so attractive to the American girl as the one that takes her off it, or so an applicant list five thousand strong would seem to indicate. Five thousand applicants pining to be elected to an airway job, to go down in history as ‘one of the first women to — etc., etc. . . .’
But less than one per cent present the qualifications necessary to gratify the desire. About one candidate in every two hundred and fifty passes on all points; the incumbents, therefore, may well be said to have some claim to exclusiveness.
‘How do you select the girls? How do you know which ones will be airworthy and which won’t?’ I asked an airway executive. I had just completed a long trip in one of the lordly trimotors. The stewardess was a charming girl, clad in a chic green uniform and bristling with all sorts of genial information about the country down below. With her pleasant voice, her poise, — and poise in a flying passenger cabin is surely a gift of Heaven, — her general capability, she had obviously been recruited from professional ranks. Where?
‘Well, to begin with, every one of them has to be a trained nurse, a graduate from some big hospital.’
‘A nurse? ’
‘You see, we must have women who are experienced in handling people. It is n’t so much that we need actual medical skill, but we have to be prepared for all kinds of passengers — not merely the fair-weather ones. People who are nervous, overwrought, fussy on a long trip; what is year-long routine to us is all an adventure to them.’
Remembering some of the cranky passengers I had flown with on former occasions, I began to see a gleam. What unsuspected processes, I wondered, might not have been going on in the mind of my girl in green as she had handed back my ticket? Behind that friendly smile, for instance, had she been filing me away for future reference: ‘Business man — seen better days — give him a match box and some gum’?
‘All these girls,’ the executive went on, ‘are trained for discipline and hard work. Hospital routine eliminates all the lightweights early in the game, and you can depend upon the graduates. It’s a grand training for any girl, no matter how you look at it. It teaches her to be neat as a new pin. Just one slovenly stewardess would be enough to reflect on a whole air line. And it teaches her the art of being firm, without giving offense; how to prepare meals tastefully — none of the rough-and-tumble, slapdash picnic stuff. And when it comes to responsibility, she can spell it backwards. Above all, you can depend on her to think calmly in an emergency.
‘You see, it’s just these qualities — call it character, if you like — that are of A1 importance to air-transport companies. That’s why we have to go through our waiting lists with a finetooth comb. Of course, that does n’t mean to say that we disparage the other virtues. A pretty face has n’t yet been known to cause a slump in the history of any kind of passenger traffic! But it is n’t essential. Physical requirements with us mean something else again. For instance, all our girls are between twenty and twenty-seven years old; their average height is five feet four, average weight a hundred and twenty-five pounds. A male steward would be likely to increase the poundage unnecessarily.
‘We don’t even consider a girl who is n’t a hospital graduate. However,’ — he pointed, smiling, to two large wicker baskets full of letters, —‘that does n’t prevent others from applying for jobs, as you can see for yourself.’
I glanced at random over some of the applications. The postmarks were from all over the United States, some from abroad, most of the letters penned with evident sincerity, some even with confidence. They advanced their ideas of qualification: one adored first driving; another was a cabaret hostess, used to entertaining; another was handy with rough horses; still another ‘did n’t mind the risk.’ All of them sought to give an impression of recklessness and dash. The company, in turn, sought dependability; so all of them were destined to receive a polite rejection, not one among the divers senders being qualified to step into the smartly tailored uniform of company stewardess and to preside over the passenger cabin of a giant tri-motor.
Perhaps I can show you why.
IV
The duties of an air stewardess are elastic.
Normally her job is this. First, she has charge of the ship’s papers, which are many, and of the company interairport mail. She has to take tickets and check baggage slips. There is a lot of paper work in running an air liner — have you ever noticed the two fat wallets of papers carried by train conductors? She has to keep track of equipment such as blankets, pillows, and silver. Kleptomania is not entirely unknown among passengers. She has to adjust ventilators — shut out drafts, let in more air — and she must keep her clientele supplied with magazines, writing materials, maps, soap, towels, aspirin, ash trays or matches, gum for airsickness, cotton wool for noise — whatever their fancy may happen to demand, short of pulling rabbits out of hats.
She dispatches telegrams and radios. She is thoroughly drilled in the geography of the country over which her ship flies and points out the noteworthy features. Three air passengers out of every four are not unmindful of an expectant audience waiting at the journey’s end, so far be it from them to miss a thing. Moreover, this historic West that slides away beneath them is not a mere movie or a book, but the actual thing. If that patch five thousand feet below happens to be the spot where Colonel Lindbergh once alighted in a parachute, they want to know about it; and, anyway, which of those funny little ridges over to the left was where the Indians fell upon a train of covered wagons on the seventeenth of March, 1851? The stewardess answers innumerable questions. She secs that her charges get to sleep comfortably on the night trips, wakes them in good time for breakfast, stands by with restoratives for invalids. She has charge of the first-aid kit and is also called upon to cope with the sudden pangs of ‘air appetite’ that descend upon the flying public.
Here again it is her job to temper hospitality with tact and a firm hand. She must see that inexperienced travelers do not eat more than is consistent with good judgment, and must diplomatically caution those who bring along their own reserves of caviar or chocolate layer cake. Greasy foods, for instance, have been found to be responsible for certain ‘passenger trouble’; they have consequently been eliminated from the menus of air transport companies.
There are regular mealtimes on air liners just as there are on boats and trains, and in between times it has been found wiser to keep the wolf at bay with fruit-store blandishments. On the twenty-hour run between Chicago and Oakland, three meals are served — dinner over Iowa, breakfast over Utah, and lunch over Nevada — and the company takes no chances. It dictates the menus, provides the stewardesses to set the meals up punctually, and, incidentally, it foots the bill.
Many mothers with babies use the air transport lines in preference to trains so that they may cut down traveling time to a very minimum. A stewardess is used to rolling up her sleeves, producing a bottle at the correct temperature, and going into action as temporary nursemaid. Adult passengers, obviously, have their rights just as much as babies, and just as obviously an irate infant cannot be expected to grasp the logic of this. At the first hint of squalls fore, the stewardess glides up the gangway, ready to divert the flying baby’s howl into a gentle half-roll or wing-over.
Airsickness, contrary to general belief, is the least of the stewardess’s worries. The percentage of airsick passengers is under five. Even with this small number, the trouble is almost always caused by nervousness on the part of those who have never flown before.
As for the flying — through long summer days when the ship seems to hang motionless while earth and sky move very slowly past, when the air is diamond-clear in all directions for a hundred and fifty miles, when blue sky and brown horizon form a circle round the ship, when even a cynic might feel gulpy at the splendid panorama, the vast heart of America spreading below him. The air lines follow their schedules to the minute. Plains give way to foothills, mountains, snow peaks, give way again to desert — mile after mile the landmarks on the grand old Trail unfurl, call up an echo of the gallant history of the West.
There are other times, too, and less pleasant to remember. The gloom of winter afternoons, black overhead, queer lights reflected from the snow beneath; the dark, savage rock masses washed by intermittent swirls of snow. The passengers are nervous. The stewardess knows that up front in the cockpit the pilots are doing their stuff, steady and imperturbable as ever. It’s up to them, that end of it. But the other end, back here in the cabin, facing these anxious eyes, this is her domain, this is the human side. Smile — and make it convincing. Serve coffee and biscuits, offer lights for cigarettes, keep up some cheerful chatter, make it sound natural, don’t even glance at the windows. That last takes restraint, even though the stewardess knows that there is no reason for alarm, or the ship would have turned back long ago.
The passengers relax; if a mere girl is n’t worried, why should they be? The plane plunges headlong through the vicious weather, and, below, the wilderness is brooding and hostile. . . . Then the next landing to refuel, the longing not to leave the little haven of warmth, the security of solid earth. ... A peek over the pilot’s shoulder at the weather report ahead. His 4 O. K. We’re going through. All aboard!'
Off again, into five hundred miles of darkness. . . .
V
All this that I have described is routine stuff. It is always the unexpected which must pay the piper, and consequently the unexpected calls the tune.
Trip after trip, hundreds of times, the air liners go backward and forward on their smooth schedules, flying serenely from point to point of the giant radio web. The pilots circumvent Old Man Weather. The teletype circuits tick out: ‘On time . . . On time . . . ’ week after week. The passengers are contented. The stewardess’s job is uneventful, as prosaic to her as swinging to and fro in a rocker on the back porch. Then, bang! — all bets are off. The narrow cabin is crowded with Emergency. Something happens for which no black type rules are provided, and then the girl has to fall back on her own resources. It is under such circumstances that most of the five thousand applicants would meet their Waterloo.
‘I did n’t know’ — ‘I did n’t think’ — ‘I did n’t realize’ — ‘It did n’t occur to me’ — or even ‘I did n’t have time’ ... a stewardess hoping to get away with any of these trite excuses before a Board of Inquiry might just as well have jumped overboard.
‘One time I was up against it,’ a stewardess admitted to me one afternoon as we were cruising high over the prairie stretches of Nebraska. ‘It was night. Among the passengers was a girl who had done quite a bit of air traveling. It was perfect weather, ceiling unlimited all the way, but, for some reason I could n’t fathom, my passenger got sicker every hour. She did n’t respond to any of the usual restoratives, but, sick as she was, she had flatly refused to be put off at the previous landing place so that she could receive proper attention. Her one thought was to get to the Coast. She became steadily worse until in my judgment she was gravely ill. An airplane is a poor place in which to diagnose a case, but it became clearer to me with every mile that it certainly was n’t airsickness. I ignored her protests, went fore into the cockpit, radioed ahead for a doctor and an ambulance, and got off with her myself at the next landing. Well, to cut it short, it was acute appendicitis. If we had n’t rushed her off, the doctor said, she would certainly have died aboard the plane.’
Just a brief story, told in a perfectly matter-of-fact way. But what a picture it conjured up! The big passenger plane tearing along the darkened sky paths like some fantastic creature of the night. Monotonous thunder of the engines. The dim light in the cabin. Passengers, cocooned in blankets, lolling back in their seats, fast asleep, unconcerned. The white face, terribly white, on the pillow and the nurse bending over it anxiously. One hour. Another hour. The nurse fumbling through the narrow passage past the mail compartment. The hurried conference with the co-pilot, a conference of yells and shouts above the engines, above the wind screaming over the glass-windowed bow of the ship. The radio message striking ahead like an arrow over the empty horizon to the next airport. The ambulance clanging through the streets of some sleeping Western town, grazing the tarmac even as the mighty plane swung down with throttled engines toward the landing flood lights. . . .
Appendicitis! One chance in ten thousand, but those girls must be ready even for the longest shot. There’s nothing kid-gloved about keeping passenger flying safe. If the woman had died aboard — nine passengers in a cabin with a corpse! — it would have called for an investigation, would have cast a stigma, however undeserved, on a great transport line. (‘I would n’t travel on that route for anything . . . killed a passenger the other day . . . I read about it. . . . Well, they said it was appendicitis . . .’) The flying public has its superstitions.
VI
Drunks are rare, so rare that word of them passes up and down from Pacific to Atlantic. Naturally, no company will let an obviously intoxicated person aboard an air liner, but sometimes the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.
Once a stout gentleman walked along the Oakland gangway, and, for all his apostolic dignity, it was apparent that coördination between eye and limb had become slightly impaired. The stewardess’s hospital eye marked him instantly, but accepted him as harmless. Soon after the take-off, the gentleman removed his coat, collar, and vest, burst into song, and dived convivially for his hip flask. The stewardess strolled up.
‘Of course I don’t care a bit,’ she smiled, ‘ but we have to think of all the other passengers. Do you mind not drinking while you are aboard?’
‘Mi-dear-gal, y’ can’t be serush?’ replied the thirsty one, with a certain glazed rebuke. The ‘dear-gal’ held him with an eye that had subdued truck drivers in the Accident Ward, albeit her lips continued to smile.
‘Indeed I am!’ she rejoined heartily. The look won. On and off she kept looking until they were well into Nevada, by which time the erring guest had come to associate her face with Prohibition Enforcement and had given it up.
Nothing nasty has ever happened, but—just in case anything should, in case a passenger should go suddenly ‘haywire’ or start a rough-house — the stewardess has a little button beside her seat. If she touches it, a red light glows on the pilot’s dashboard, and in less time than it takes to tell it, the co-pilot, a young man in enviable physical condition, strides aft. For the sake of the other passengers and in accordance with the policy of the line, he is going to try politeness first, but if that does n’t fix it, he is going to fix it anyway. . . .
There was the time a flashy individual came aboard a transport at one of the intermediate stops. The ship was being ‘ferried’ on an off-schedule run; as the passenger stepped into the machine he rewarded the baggage porter with a bill peeled off a roll which would have choked a horse. Just as the ‘All aboard!’ sounded, two furtivelooking citizens hurried up, walked quickly up the gangway, and seated themselves aft. The door slammed, the engines whined, and in a few seconds the ship was in the middle of the takeoff.
The flamboyant gentleman — he was later discovered to be a professional gambler — turned in his seat to take a last view of the airport ; his smile froze as he caught sight of the furtive pair, the only other passengers. His hand moved stealthily toward his left armpit. The two toughs leaned forward as one man, their right hands buried beneath the lapels of their coats. The cabin filled with menace. Everybody remained perfectly still. The stewardess thought fast. She was penned in the rear of the cabin. If anything started, she could hardly miss getting shot. For a moment she remained as still as the gangsters, then the thought struck her — the gasoline tanks, the control wires! She pressed the danger button. The co-pilot came back instantly. She put her mouth close to his ear and described the situation.
For a while they sat there grimly, but there was no tangible reason to take action, still less to precipitate it. The co-pilot could not stay aft indefinitely. He had work to do up front. He went along to the forward bulkhead, turned around, fingered the gun in his holster (the ship was carrying United States mail), favored the passengers with what the stewardess described as a dirty look, and returned to the cockpit.
For two long hours the stewardess sat at her post, her fingers close to the call button, while the ship pounded up the rim of the high Sierras and slid down the vast slope into California. The co-pilot poked his head into the cabin every five minutes or so. The three passengers remained immobile, covering each other uninterruptedly. When the tires finally met the concrete, the pilot taxied fast to the unloading ramp. He had radioed while still in the mountains and a couple of motor-cycle policemen were leaning casually against the passenger depot. The gambler and the two toughs faded down the gangway; the cops closed in behind. That south view of her late guests traveling north, declared the stewardess, was the most satisfying scenic effect in her entire career.
And not all emergencies happen in the air. Weather, especially thunderstorm weather, has extraordinary vagaries. That means landing at emergency fields, for the pilots would rather be hours late than take the risk of plastering the passengers against a mountainside or otherwise mixing them up with the scenery.
Once in a thousand times, perhaps, the ship has to remain for a long time on an emergency field, chocked beside the caretaker’s farm. Then the chic uniform and immaculate silk blouse of the stewardess go hang, while their owner peels potatoes, tends store, improvises beds, quiets the children, and assists some farmer’s harassed wife to organize the slim resources. Clean shoes and silk stockings plough through deep farmyard mud, while the stewardess averts her eyes and tries not to let her smile appear too glassy.
It takes more than mere charm to combine flying and farm cooking, good humor and the quirks of nervous passengers, service and sleeplessness, if anyone should ask.
VII
Eleven thousand miles a month is the distance each of these sky girls averages, the equivalent of five and a half times around the world every year. Although the new profession is barely two years old, its senior members have already flown from ten to twenty times more than most passengers do in a lifetime, and competition in the ranks is keen. Each wants to be the first woman to chalk up the million-mile record.
Katherine Maye and Ida Novelly, both of California, tie for the national record, with a total of over 300,000 miles apiece. Winging behind comes Cornelia Peterman, with 200,000 miles, and next in line appear Valerie Tucker and Oletta Hasley, with more than 150,000 miles each to their credit.
Paradoxes are numerous. For instance, while there are but twenty-five of them at the time this is written, the girls rarely see each other. Two sisters, both flying over the same beat, have not met on the ground in more than two months. They exchange greetings in mid-air when the big transports pass each other daily. Again, mileage does not always mean scenery, for some of the girls have not seen the country they fly over for weeks. They have night duty. Their daily routine is precise and unvaried, yet they scarcely ever sleep two successive nights in the same state.
Any night, every night, the transcontinental ships roar across the vast width of our country. At two miles a minute they reel off those great stretches which the pioneers of another day conquered so heroically, mile by indomitable mile. It is another element, but it is still the same spirit.
The pioneer, driving his teams, trusted the stars to guide him in the cool of night. To-day the pilot has radium dials and airway beacons. But stars or dials, one horsepower or sixteen hundred, poke bonnets or natty berets, their womenfolk have not changed intrinsically. Win or lose, the pioneer woman sticks by the man up front. His dangers are her dangers. Her life is in his hands, and that’s all right with her, too. As in the wagons, which creaked and swayed and trembled in their mile-an-hour progress, so inside these man-made titans of the air is the same text still reverenced and golden: ‘No back-seat driving, please.’