Success can only be measured in terms of distance traveled.
—MAVIS GALLANT, GREEN WATER, GREEN SKY
Today, anyone visiting either Lynne or Karen must get on a very small plane, the kind that requires passengers to load their own rolling suitcases onto a rack beside the belly, the kind that anyone over five nine has to duck to enter.
Visiting Tori doesn’t involve a small plane. She still lives in Orange County, save for a few months every summer when she retreats to her family’s yellow cabin on the Oslo fjord. Her nieces and nephews come down on the weekends and they grill out on the deck, sit on the porch, eat, and walk along the rocky outcroppings that separate the small clusters of summer homes. Tori is as quick as they are with a light and friendly commanding air—she knows what she is doing—and a true laugh. When her family leaves in the early evening to get back to their Oslo homes, the sun is still as high in the sky as it is at three p.m. in California.
Tori rose in the ranks at Pan Am. She spent a year in Hawaii training recruits in the late 1970s, then returned to Los Angeles, where her seniority allowed her to choose her every flight. She would never again fly at the whim of the airline except during the single month of the year that every stewardess was required to spend on standby. When Pan Am sold its Pacific routes to United in 1986, Tori left Pan Am for United in order to stay with the routes. She never married. As her seniority grew at United, she could be picky with her flights, keeping up with an enormous network of friends scattered around the world, tracing the ways the cities she had known so well for so long changed rapidly over the course of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.
By accident and by design, the course of Tori’s life continued to bump into the era’s conflicts. During the Lebanese civil war, she watched violence unfolding against the familiar façade of the Phoenicia InterContinental hotel during one of the bloodiest battles of the war, the so-called Battle of the Hotels. During the Gulf War, Tori volunteered to fly troops to Kuwait for Operation Desert Storm. The faces in the cabin reflected an older army, now that there was no draft, with more women and career military officers.
After a long treatment for lung cancer, Tori retired at age sixty-five. She goes on cruises with her stewardess friends and attends the reunions of World Wings International, the association of former Pan Am flight crews. These conventions usually draw between three hundred and eight hundred attendees to cities many of the women know well: Paris, Stockholm, Bangkok, where the Siam InterContinental was torn down in 2002. Tori still serves tea in the delicate cups she bought for her first New York apartment, the thin porcelain decorated with gray branches and pink roses. She talks about the diplomatic incidents of foreign countries of decades past as if she had discussed them over a martini with a prime minister the previous day. She smiles like she really means it. She does.
For years, Lynne came down with the flu every April on the anniversary of the babylift. She never got sick otherwise.
When she and Alex returned to Washington State in 1976, Lynne could not find a job—flying, which she had quit the year before, was the only job on her résumé—so she volunteered at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. She dived back toward her comfort with the international, her tenacious interest in cross-cultural communication. At the museum she met the two Chinese-language professors at the University of Washington who led her to her career in international relations. She worked first as an international student adviser at the University of Washington, helping students from 105 countries study in the United States. During the Iran hostage crisis she attended campus rallies with the Iranian students; she was pregnant with her second daughter at the time. When she picked up newspapers the next day, she thought immediately of her own student days—of how crowd assessments did not describe her own observations on the ground and how the actions of complex people were often reduced to stereotype.
She and her family spent a few years in Germany when Lynne’s two daughters were young and then they moved to Massachusetts, where Lynne worked at a high school. She spent some years staying home with her children—she loved motherhood unwaveringly—and others pursuing jobs in education. Her skill for cross-cultural communication adapted particularly well to the school environment, with its high stakes and the emotions of nervous parents. She especially enjoyed working on college campuses for their youthful energy and for the close vistas they gave her onto the protest movements of the day. The students liked her. Lynne is reflexively maternal, easy with encouragement, and organized, and she wields quietly fierce and informed opinions about international politics. The students at the University of Washington said that Lynne understood them as no one else in the administration did. She had been to nearly all of their home countries.
Today Lynne lives on an island of the Bahamas, a short, beautiful flight from Nassau. She and Alex bought the place in the late 1990s. The house in the tropics would be their retirement home, or so they thought. Within a month a hurricane had stripped the ranch house nearly down to studs. They began to rebuild, beam by beam, tile by tile, themselves; when it became clear that the task was too large to fit into vacations, they quit their jobs and moved down. Their college-student daughters came to help on school vacations. Lynne and Alex have rebuilt the house twice now. Alex answers the phone with a single phrase: “It’s a beautiful day in the Bahamas.”
To drive with Lynne across the island on its windswept, potholed roads is to hear the backstories of many of its residents. Lynne can no longer quiz Pan Am passengers on their lives, so she learns of the people around her. At restaurants she talks to the owners about the new hours, how they’re doing, who their customers tend to be; she tells them about the mutual friend who hurt his back and she buys a loaf of bread to drop at his house on her way out because he is probably in too much pain to shop for himself. Lynne is a nexus for information that does not stray toward gossip. Her small frame has become birdlike in her older age and she walks with compact confidence. She wears her silver hair long and twisted up in the back. Her daughters live in Northern California and London and both work in international relations, one in business, one in the nonprofit sector. Lynne taught them everything she knows about travel: how to move as a woman through the world with curiosity and confidence and deference for local perspectives and customs and how, whether she is near or far from home, that stance erases fear.
“My mother,” her elder girl says, “has no fear of the other.”
Reader’s Digest rejected Karen’s article on the babylift, but her local paper, the Missoulian, gave her columns of page space. She presented a detailed, nuanced, and rounded account of the flight and wrote that the experience had changed her forever. A year later, Reader’s Digest published the story.
Her last two years at Pan Am were, as she says today, riding the gravy train. She spent the considerable capital she earned for the public boost she had given the airline picking and choosing her favorite routes and taking as many weeks off between flights as she could. During those weeks, she was in Missoula, hiking, fishing, and swimming.
She quit flying in 1978 on a whim after a first-class passenger on a South America flight snapped his fingers at her. Nope, Karen thought, and she was done. She bought a suitcase full of San Blas Indian textiles and flew home. Soon the Missoulian offered her a column. Karen went on to cover an enormous range of topics, from rising crime among well-off teenagers to how Hollywood researched word-of-mouth approval of movies.
She met a tall, handsome rancher with a fierce sense of humor and a quiet generosity. As it turned out, he read her columns. When he brought Karen to his family ranch, she saw that this was exactly what she had traced from the window of the 747 on the polar route all those years before: a place just outside of town, five hundred acres up a winding road. They married; she and her husband began to grow and sell organic alfalfa and bean sprouts that eventually supplied all of western Montana, and Karen had the baby she had wanted for years, a little boy. She loved, absolutely loved, being a mother. She continued to write, though less often. Then a combination of restiveness and financial need took her down yet another path: Karen began a business to vet and place home-care aides. Eventually, her son took over the business. She and her husband raised sheep and alfalfa on a ranch an hour and change outside of Missoula until Karen’s husband died in 2019.
In 2000, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Operation Babylift, she appeared on Good Morning America and on the cover of Reader’s Digest with one of the orphans who had ridden on her plane, the daughter of Massachusetts congressman William Delahunt. This new visibility sparked a new phase in Karen’s life; now it was filled with invitations to weddings and baby showers and travels across the country to spend time with the children she had helped bring to the United States. Two American adults believe themselves to be the infant in a sepia-toned photo Karen keeps on her mantle, her “Vietnamese baby.” Karen says they are both her babies.
Today, Karen possesses a variety of Montana grit laced with introspection. When she flies, she chooses window seats but can’t get used to having to stay seated. She misses the cockpit and perching on the jump seat with her magazines.
As individuals, stewardesses shared an instinct to roam that propelled their personal and professional growth, each woman in her own way. As a group, stewardesses forever shifted the American woman’s place in her country and the world.
To say that travel is different today than it was in the years of the jet age is a dramatic understatement. Still—occasional accidents and terrorism puncture a largely well-regulated industry whose speed and safety has rendered accessible pockets of the world that to most people once felt distant. The overabundance of tourism now may keep humans from places as distinct as the Louvre and Mount Everest, and the environmental impact of the airline industry contributes hugely to the existential threat of climate change. An interconnected world, as refugee crises, financial market crashes, and the swift movement of disease have made clear, brings complications as well as opportunities. Internationalism is newly controversial. And still, to many, it is a signifier of sophistication, a moral imperative, a representation of human progress. “Fluidity, mobility, illusoriness—these are precisely the qualities that make us civilized. Barbarians don’t travel. They simply go to destinations or conduct raids,” writes Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk.
Amid all that has changed, flight attendants’ movement around and knowledge of a multitude of geographies still gives them an elusive fascination to both the grounded and frequent fliers alike. Latter-day versions of Coffee, Tea, or Me?—now written by actual flight attendants—describe both the aggravations of crewing on present-day planes with high passenger loads and minimal airborne perks and the still-appealing flexibility and access of the job. Look through nearly any magazine even glancingly concerned with travel today and you will find flight-attendant packing tips or a favorite travel outfit. The purveyors of advice are still overwhelmingly female and the advice skews toward the aesthetic. The composition of the perfect suitcase today still bears a strong resemblance to the arrangement recommended by Pan Am training books of the 1960s.
Former Pan Am stewardesses have continued to fly for other airlines, and they have become doctors and mothers and national heroes. In India in 1986, a Pan Am stewardess was fatally shot while helping passengers, including several children, escape during a terrorist attack. She won the nation’s highest medal for bravery, the first woman in history to do so. One former Pan Am stewardess, Patricia Ireland, served as president of NOW for a decade. Another founded Voters for Choice, the nation’s biggest nonpartisan PAC, with Gloria Steinem. Former Pan Am stewardesses have worked as diplomats, made documentaries and Hollywood television shows, and written bestselling books—Mary Higgins Clark began her working life as a Pan Am stewardess.
Former stewardesses have stayed in touch with one another. And they have continued to travel, together and alone, using their ex-employee benefit cards to the fullest, visiting old haunts and continuing to buy pantyhose in Paris, shoes in Italy. They have thoroughly mapped the ins and outs of standby—the earliest flight is the best bet, especially in cities with a good nightlife, since at least one passenger will not show up in the morning. A sold-out flight is never actually sold out. Not for them.