Lake Highlands’ Sherry Hunley (woman on right) and a fellow flight attendant welcome home Vietnam war veterans
Flying in the 1950s and ’60s was all luxury, style and class. Pilots greeted pristinely dressed passengers as they boarded. Beautiful hostesses donned fashion-forward mini dresses and high-heeled boots, served up cocktails and chef-prepared lunches, and when one of them delivered the seat belt instructions, people actually listened.
Back then, women in their late teens and 20s clamored for a flight attendant job, typically available to about one in a hundred applicants …
This year marks a melancholy anniversary for Braniff, the Dallas-based airline that was around until 1982—the 1966 crash that killed 42 people on board the flight.
Reading a story about the fact that the probe into said crash was the first to use cockpit voice recording technology, I was reminded of a more-lighthearted piece we ran back in 2011 (and lighthearted is what we need today, right?) about flight attendants and pilots who served the airlines in the 50s-70s, the tributes and homages to the time — the impeccable style — of the era.
Braniff exhibit at Frontiers of Flight Museum in Dallas
It wasn’t perfect though, recalled pilot Don Maynard, and there were plenty of practices back then that wouldn’t fly today, he told us, describing the hostesses’ pre-flight (pre-feminism, it would seem) weighing-in ritual: “Before a flight, they got on a scale. And they got pinched. Sometimes, if they weighed too much, they were sent home.”
White Rock area resident Miki Snell says the pinch was to ensure the required girdle was in place. But, she says, the women had ways of cheating the scale test. A pencil precisely placed under the scale was a popular one.
We found several neighborhood residents who remember it —memory jogged with some great snapshots — like it was yesterday. They loved to fly and it showed. Full story in the October 2012 issue.
