From Another Island: Adventures And Misadventures Of An Airline Stewardess

By Sherry Waterman

Author was a stewardess for American Airlines who began her career in 1950.

“A world-travelling airline hostess’ own story of flying, this cheerful, often-amusing tale will be of special interest to women readers. Miss Waterman, daughter of a World War I pilot, and a stewardess from 1949 until a few years ago, states a romantic and near-mystical premise for her career. It has to do with an “island” of imagination all aviators know about, a place just beyond the next stop which holds for them the potential of adventure. And it is also, of course, the rarefied, empty world they travel in thousands of feet above Earth. Pursuing that “island”, this girl’s named life took her across the U.S., down to Mexico, and on to the romantic world of the Far East. She tells the story of that life, of the day-to-day episodes, mishaps, and occasional tension it produces, with throughout respect for her job and for her fellow airline employees. And whether the scene be a teeming Oriental city or near-deserted Midway Island, she finds something of value to see and report to her readers. A very pleasant little book, with plus interest for young adults.”—Kirkus Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barakaldo Books
• Release date: May 19, 2020
• ISBN: 9781839745133

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FROM ANOTHER ISLAND

ADVENTURES AND MISADVENTURES OF AN AIRLINE STEWARDESS

BY

SHERRY WATERMAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

Prologue 6

1—An Introduction to Flying 9

2—These Are the Girls 12

3—The Men in the Cockpit 17

4—Those Old Airline Stories 30

5—Here We Live 44

6—The Men in Our Lives 52

7—The Passengers 57

8—Strange Cargo 65

9—The Layovers 72

10—And the Things We Brought Back 87

11—Wake! 97

12—When We Played God 107

13—It Was Not All Good 111

Epilogue 115

Help for the Hopeful—So You Still Want to Be an Airline Stewardess! 117

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 121

DEDICATION

TO MY FATHER

Prologue

Some years ago, in his book Island in the Sky, Ernest Gann, the pilot-turned-author, referred to the special, guarded world known only to airmen—their island in the sky whence he took the name for his book.

Captain Gann referred to an invisible world to which the flyer always returns for peace and solace, and profound enchantment...a magic island in which the factors of life and death assume their proper values.

Though invisible, this island is real, and no airman would deny its existence—although he might be at a loss to describe it.

In the twelve years during which I was so closely associated with the world of flying—nine of them as a stewardess—I gradually became aware of another island—also intangible, but no less real—that influences the lives of those who make flying their profession.

This is the island which lies just beyond the next flight—or, maybe, the one after that. It is the space on a blank flight plan marked DESTINATION. It is, more simply, to the airman who seeks it, the place he has yet to see.

It is not an island in the accepted geographical sense, although it may be. It may also be a great city, or a jagged mountain range, or a sun-seared desert as old as time. It has as many names as it has seekers, and its names change constantly as it is discovered, and explored—and another island takes its place.

Not everyone who flies for a living searches for the island of which I speak—only those to whom flying is truly a way of life. Much has been written in the last half century about that group of people—primarily men—who make up what is often referred to romantically as the flying fraternity, the winged brotherhood, or the airman’s world. Ever since those few memorable moments in 1903 when the Wright brothers lifted their awkward craft from the windswept dunes of Kitty Hawk, those privileged ones who have made flying their profession have been thought to inhabit a special world of their own. That they actually do, no one believes more firmly than the inhabitants themselves. Many phrases have been coined in an attempt to describe this esoteric existence, and the three I mentioned above are only a few. Detailed descriptions of it are usually understood and appreciated only by other inhabitants of what, for lack of a better name, I too will call the flying world.

Just as every civilization has its different societies and groups, so does the world of flying. Among the many and varied segments which make up this world are the military flyers, whose lives serve a grim purpose; the private pilots, who fly for the sheer joy of it; the corporation pilots, who fly for business firms; and, of course, one of the largest groups of all—the pilots, the navigators, the flight engineers, and the stewardesses who fly for the commercial airlines.

Comparatively little has been written about this last group, because their activities are seldom of a spectacular nature—and indeed they prefer it that way—but their everyday existence, in many cases, combines adventure and excitement in degrees well beyond the daydreams of those in more prosaic professions.

It is of this community in the flying world of which I write. It is the one I know better than all the others, the one I have been a part of for so many years. Indeed, it is one of the few areas in the profession in which women ever attain citizenship—there being very few career pilots among women—and it is seldom that a stewardess flies long enough to be considered truly a member of the flying fraternity. Length of service is not the only qualification, of course. There is an indefinable feeling for flying which some girls have before they ever set foot in an airplane, which comes to others only through time and experience. Some never feel it, but it is not these of whom I speak here.

Even though a stewardess may possess a great love for flying, with an attendant interest and enthusiasm for all things connected with aviation, the most she can ever be in her chosen field is a sort of honorary citizen. She is a member of the crew—but not the cockpit crew. She flies—but she is not a flyer. She may listen avidly to the endless shop talk and hangar flying sessions among the pilots, and she may enjoy them, and she may laugh in the right places and look properly concerned in others, but there will always be technical terms and descriptions that she will not understand. She will always be on the outer edge of an inner circle.

For the most part, on the airplane the stewardess’s domain ends abruptly at the cockpit door. She may have things pretty much her own way in the cabin, but in the cockpit the male crew members reign supreme. And it is there that the world of flying really begins. The pilots meet it head-on, but the stewardess sees it in little bits and pieces. She may hear scraps of conversation among the crew members as they chuckle over something which all three have heard on their earphones, but then she must quickly return to her passengers and her duties in the cabin. The crew may watch the flaming splendour of a sunrise as it unfolds before them, but she will have to enjoy it in little squares of light and colour as it slides by the windows of her sleeping passengers.

After a period of years, however, all these bits and pieces, all these scraps of conversation, all these shared experiences fit together, and gradually she does begin to be considered, and to consider herself, truly a citizen of the airman’s world.

It is during this time that many stewardesses become aware, as I did, of the existence of another island in the lives of so many of their fellow crew members, for in the communities which make up the world of flying the most avid island seekers can be found among the airline crews. For most, the search is an unconscious one, as it was with me. I was aware of it only at odd moments, as when I would see a strange name in the DESTINATION space of another crew’s flight plan, or would hear a loudspeaker in an airport terminal announcing the arrival of some other airline’s flight from points unfamiliar to me. It mattered not that the name at the top of the flight plan might be that of a desolate and uninspiring place: what mattered was that I had not been there. When the voice on the loudspeaker proclaimed that a plane was arriving from a distant city, I did not comfort myself with the thought that I had just arrived from an even more exotic one. What mattered, at the moment, was that I had not been there.

My own search began with a desire to see the United States. With that, I thought I would be satisfied. But when I had seen my own country—or most of it—and a little of Mexico and Canada too, when I felt equally at home in Texas or California or New York, my thoughts began to turn westward toward Hawaii. Now it became my other island, and when I had seen it I was sure I would be content to settle down and travel no more.

Hawaii was truly lovely. There, one could stand in the shadow of Diamond Head and watch planes take off for the exotic cities of the Orient and the farthest reaches of the Pacific. How could one be content now, when such islands lay only one flight plan away?

Later, when the names of Tokyo shops rolled off my tongue with easy familiarity, when Dewey Boulevard in Manila was just another place to stroll, when the red roofs and green hills of Formosa were common sights to me, I could still shiver with delight at the mention of such names as Bangkok, Hong Kong, Karachi, Djakarta....

The desire to travel on was great. There was so much yet to see. But another desire had been growing steadily within me—the desire to pause a while and reflect upon what I had already seen. I wanted to write it down—the thoughts, the experiences, the little incidents of the journey. Always before, when I had thought of leaving flying, something had occurred to keep me from doing so—a new airplane I wanted to fly before I left, or a new route. Inevitably, when I was ready to leave this time, my airline extended its Pacific routes to include Samoa. It was only a small island, Samoa, and very like many others, but it had a lovely rhythmic name—and I had not been there.

Perhaps I should stay a little longer, I told my chief stewardess, and fly one trip to Samoa, and then...

And then... she said gently, there will be another island. There will always be another island.

And so there will be. And I will go on seeking it. But right now I will pause a while and try to speak for all of those—the stewardesses, the pilots, the navigators, and the flight engineers—who have made the journey with me these past nine years. And who have made it such a memorable one.

1—An Introduction to Flying

Just about any airline stewardess could write a book after she has flown for a few years, I once heard one of the girls say. I guess the reason none of them ever do, she continued, is that they’re too busy living their lives to take time out to write about them."

Having been an airline stewardess for nine years, and having known hundreds of others of the breed, I can attest to the truth of at least two parts of her statement. Most stewardesses have had enough unusual experiences to be able to write a book, and to my knowledge none of them has done so. Why this is so, I really can’t say. It is true that the majority of them lead pretty full lives, but they also have more leisure time than girls in almost any other profession. Perhaps it is this very abundance of free time that sabotages their good intentions and creates in them a feeling that life is a sort of continuous vacation, in which there need be no great hurry to accomplish anything in particular. Indeed, I have found that the very knowledge that, in the course of a working day, I actually travelled thousands of miles, gave me a false sense of accomplishment. It was as though the very distance covered was a measure of my progress through life, and thus on my days off there was little reason to do anything more than sit still and let the world catch up with me.

To return to my original speculation, however: since airline flying is a pretty fascinating business, why hasn’t more been written about it from the stewardesses’ viewpoint? There are many books written by pilots, but they look upon flying from an entirely different angle, and, interesting as it is, they leave untouched many aspects of airline life which, I believe, would be of interest to those who have never known it.

Before I continue, I must give credit to the one stewardess I know of who actually did try to write a book about our lives as she knew them to be. Unfortunately, she tried to do it while she was still flying, and, typically, living with several roommates. Lacking the space and the solitude necessary for her literary pursuits, she took her talent and her typewriter and holed up in the only secluded spot in her busy apartment—her roommates’ closet.

From there, the clicking of the typewriter keys which gave evidence of her progress could be heard for long hours at a time, and all might have gone well had it not been for one unfortunate habit. She was a chain smoker. Within a few days she had a good start on her book—but her roommates could scarcely get near their wardrobes, let alone wear them, so strongly did they reek of cigarette smoke.

The aspiring author, her typewriter, and her cigarettes were shortly thereafter evicted from their quarters, and apparently this early discouragement was enough to nip her literary career in the bud. To my knowledge, she never resumed it.

It is my hope that I can fill the void left by my chain-smoking colleague and give my readers a glimpse into the world of flying as seen through the eyes of the stewardesses—myself and many others. Perhaps the length of my flying career—which far exceeds the national average—is my main qualification in this attempt to write about my experiences. The experiences themselves are hardly unique. Almost any girl who has flown could top any one of my stories with one of her own. The fact that these incidents are routine in the lives of stewardesses enables me to think of them with the same sense of wonderment as I did when they occurred, because these girls did, and do, lead unusual, adventurous, and sometimes even glamorous lives. As often as they began to take their fives for granted, something would occur to renew their appreciation of their chosen career. I heard this attitude put into words by one of my flying partners in a Honolulu hotel room one evening. We had just returned from Tokyo, where, during her layover, she had made a climb to the top of Japan’s traditional shrine, Mount Fujiyama. In the corner of our room stood a cherished memento of her trip—her Fuji Stick, the long climbing stick branded with the names of the stations on the mountainside that she had passed on her climb to the top. Next to it stood the ski poles she had bought in Tokyo, in anticipation of a trip to Squaw Valley upon her return to California. At the moment, she was preparing for an evening swim in the surf of famed Waikiki Beach. The phone rang, and the pilot who was to accompany her asked how her trip had been so far. She gave him the standard answer of one crew member to another. Routine.

Then, as she hung up the phone, she turned to me and said, You know, Sherry, I said my trip has been ‘routine,’ and it has. But when I stop to think about it, I believe that stewardesses do more exciting things by accident than most people do on purpose. I agreed with her then. Looking back on it now, I think it was an understatement.

It is the little things, the amusing things, the routine things, the accidental excitements of the flying world, that I intend to write about here.

My own entrance into this world began long before I donned the blue uniform and silver wings of an American Airlines Stewardess. It began in 1942, when I had my first airplane ride—twenty minutes in a Piper Cub—and knew for the first time the feeling of excitement that whirling propellers and roaring engines have never ceased to stir in me. Or maybe it began earlier, when my father, a World War I pilot, used to tell me stories of his flying days in the pioneer era of aviation, and let me wear the heavy silver wings that had been the proud badge of the early aviators. However it happened, my interest deepened with almost passionate intensity during World War II, when my older brother donned another pair of silver wings as a pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Upon my graduation from high school in 1945, I took advantage of the manpower shortage during the last days of the war to join the United States Weather Bureau as a Meteorological Aide. I could barely spell meteorology at that point, but in time I became a competent and conscientious weather observer. Most important of all, I had daily contact with flying and flyers from my post at Newark Airport in New Jersey. I spent three happy years at this busy airport, and during this time I lived and breathed and dreamed aviation. My working hours were spent at the airport, and, frequently, my off-duty hours as well—the control tower, the hangars, wherever I could be among planes and pilots (especially pilots, since I am, first and foremost, a female). I combed the shelves of the libraries for books about flying and my reading material included such esoteric publications as Recognition of War Planes and Ships of the Imperial Japanese Navy and The Airman’s Guide, an extremely technical periodical distributed by the Federal Aeronautics Administration. My friends were chosen exclusively from among pilots and airline employees, which was both fortunate and expedient, for my conversation sparkled with such vital bits of information