![]() You walked through the terminals with your head really high and you knew everybody was staring at you.” Sex, of course, was part of the equation, crystallized by the publication in 1967 of Coffee, Tea or Me? Purporting to be the “naughty” and “uninhibited” memoirs of two stewardesses, the book-frank but not particularly salacious-sold more than a million copies and spawned three sequels. We were all thin and had these great figures and wore white gloves and hats. They were just sculpted to your body, so everybody looked fabulous. I remember our uniforms-they were all custom-fitted. “People admired us when we walked through the terminal. “We were almost on the same level as a movie star,” says Sonnie Sims. It would be only a slight overstatement to say that stewardesses in the 1960s were to glamour what firefighters and cops have more recently been to heroism. Yes, most stewardesses would have answered, endorsing both sides of the equation. “Marriage is fine! But shouldn’t you see the world first?” asked a 1967 United Airlines ad. Right, but not before a bit of larking about (“This morning, sight-seeing in New York-and in about five hours, I’ll meet my date for dinner in San Francisco,” read a 1961 recruiting ad for American Airlines), the draw was obvious. And for tens of thousands of young women like her, women who were spirited and daring, who may have wanted to meet Mr. ![]() “I just really wanted to travel.” Well, sure. “None of that appealed to me,” says Sims. Not every stewardess at every airline had the opportunity to knock a bowl of cereal into John Lennon’s lap (he refused to laugh it off) or get shot at during takeoff by the Vietcong (they missed), but, for most, flying was an adventure in and of itself at a time when the average woman got married at the age of 20 and when opportunities outside the home were limited to teaching, nursing, and the secretarial pool. The Vietnam flights were fun, too, in their way, though when the young soldiers she had just spent hours getting to know deplaned in Saigon or Da Nang, she would lock herself in the bathroom and sob, unable to say good-bye. Flying with the Beatles was fun: she saved the utensils and everything else they touched in airsickness bags and sent it to her kid sister back home in Minnesota. tour and the government-contracted flights that ferried soldiers to Vietnam and, if they were fortunate, back home again. ![]() She also flew on special charters such as the plane that took the Beatles from city to city in 1966 on their last U.S. As a 20-year-old college dropout, she began flying for American Airlines in 1962, a time when air travel in general was a far more rarefied experience than it is today: even on routine flights she would pass out roses to women passengers and serve seven-course meals on fine china and linen tablecloths. In the early 1960s she might have been described as a leggy blonde then, as now, it was a skill set that could open many doors. Sonnie Morrow Sims, for one, fit the bill in all particulars. ![]() A good smile (all teeth, no gums) and some ability as a conversationalist were further prerequisites. Readers who grew up in the 1970s or later may need to be reminded that stewardesses are what flight attendants were called once upon a time when they were uniformly young, single, slim, attractive, and female. They were the best-dressed, best-groomed runaways the world has ever seen. ![]() Many flight attendants are proud of having been stewardesses, and well they should be. You’ve probably always been told that flight attendants hate being referred to as stewardesses, that to do so is a faux pas on the order of asking for a Turkish coffee in a Greek café. ![]()
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