Oh Snap! When Flight Attendants Glammed It Up
There's a great scene in Steven Spielberg's
Catch Me If You Can when Leonardo DiCaprio's con artist character tries to elude the cops by pretending to be a pilot. As he
waltzes through the airport, he enlists the help of some glamorous stewardesses (yes, that's what they were called back then) to camouflage him with their identically glamorous outfits. A lot of the photos in this slideshow hearken back to a time that
some call air travel's glory years, when service was still good and passengers weren't herded like cattle. Some would also call it a time when stewardesses (there were "cabin boys" too) were treated as sex objects who were supposed to wait on you hand and foot and possibly hint at . . .other services. (For a time, there was a policy that only unmarried women could be stewardesses.) Let's take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly in this flight attendant flashback.
Chantelle
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5 Comments Post a Comment
Sigh that was cool and disturbing at the same time.
1I never totally understood why 'stewardess' was considered such an inappropriate term, but I didn't realize how tarted-up they actually were.
2My great-grandmother was a stewardess for Northwest and she absolutely loved it. At the time she was divorced and had a young daughter, and all the stewardesses were supposed to be unmarried, no kids, etc. So she was the first divorced mom stewardess. But she got to travel all OVER the world. She met my great-grandfather, who was a pilot, and they went to Japan and met a family with a gravely sick daughter and I think they paid for medical treatment for her, or something of that sort. Well they came back a year or so later and the daughter was still alive and well and they gave her this gigantic pearl, as a token of their thanks.
She always had the best stories to tell. One time some snooty actor guy (famous in his own time, no one I knew) was flying with them and her friend was waiting on him and his agent. And back then they carried these super duper heavy metal trays with all the teas, coffees, etc on them and the friend had weak wrists and the snooty actor guy wouldn't even acknowledge the girl for the *longest* time. Finally his agent was all "he wants coffee" or something, so she snuck some laxatives into the drink and she said "the last time I saw him he was holding his butt, running down the terminal!"
I want to be a flight attendant so bad!!!
3@ mguy... that is the greatest story.
4mguy — that's an adorable story. It does sound like it was a great opportunity for women back in the day. Perhaps now, too, but I've heard about how hard and unglamorous the job is now...
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