Here is the Career Opportunity for Which You Have Been Waiting!
If you are interested and feel that you can meet all of the qualifications below, please write in detail and attach a full length photograph.
HEIGHT: Between 5′2″ and 5′6″
WEIGHT: 135 pounds maximum
ATTRACTIVE: “Just below Hollywood” standards
Plenty of Personality and Poise
GENDER: Female
MARITAL STATUS: Single, Not Divorced, Separated or Widowed
RACE: White
AGE: 21–26 years old
EDUCATION: Registered Nurse or Two Years of College
VISION: 20/20 without glasses
Must be a US citizen and available for training within 6 months.
If you feel you qualify—
If? Gaby thought. Come on! She qualified with a capital Q. To get her parents’ blessing she showed them a line in a magazine about how being a stewardess was a career for “Wives-in-Training.” She knew they’d approve of that.
Getting her RN degree at the local hospital took two years, and Gaby worked for a year after that, until she could apply, which she did, on her twenty-first birthday. At the time she was still living at home with her parents and her younger brothers, her older sister long married, with four-year-old twins, another on the way and a husband who operated a forklift. They lived in a little white house near her grandmother’s place. “You’ll be able to wave to me,” she told her young nieces, “the way I used to wave to the planes.”
“Will you wave back?” one of the girls asked.
“Of course I will.”
Gaby chose National Airlines, in part because she’d read that American received 20,000 applications the year before, for just 347 stewardess positions. Not that she doubted her qualifications, not for a minute, but Gaby went for National anyway, and was accepted, the only applicant out of 29 being interviewed on the same day. She was jubilant. Hard work and a positive attitude paid off.
She’d been careful about dating after high school, not wanting to get serious with some local boy who’d expect her to give up her dreams for his, produce two babies, preferably one of each sex, wear an apron over her shirtwaist dress and have dinner on the table every night at 6 p.m. No thank you. There was a young doctor at the hospital but he was almost as dangerous as the others. If she confided her dream to him he’d drop her like a hot potato. Still, she went out with him, not that he had much time off, but she never told her mother. And sometimes, when their breaks coincided, they’d get into his car and kiss until the windows steamed up. She’d stop him when he tried to get his hand under her skirt. “Please,” he begged. “Just this once. I’m a doctor. Doesn’t that count for something?”
Ha! Gaby had a goal, and no doctor or anyone else was going to dissuade her. She knew there would be plenty of nurses for him to flirt with once she was out of the picture. Nurses who would let him get under their skirts. She couldn’t worry about that. If some other nurse got him to put a ring on her finger while Gaby was flying, well, so be it.
“Oh, Gabrielle,” her mother cried as she’d packed her bag to head for training in Newark. “I’d hoped you’d meet a handsome doctor at the hospital and give up this crazy idea of flying.”
Now, eighteen months later, she had no regrets about leaving Dayton or young Dr. Larsen. She loved her job. As far as she was concerned it was the best job in the world. In the stewardesses’ dressing room at Newark Airport Gaby applied her makeup as she’d been taught in her program. A good base over the face and throat. Heavy enough to hide imperfections in the skin but light enough to look almost natural, a hint of color to the cheeks, brows penciled in, mascara to upper lashes only, no more high school lipstick. This month she was using Revlon’s Love That Red.
She brushed out her hair, cut in a becoming style that never touched the collar of her suit jacket, and fastened her jaunty cap, which she had to leave on for the duration of the flight, not that she minded. She loved wearing her perfectly tailored and pressed suit, with the crisp white blouse and navy-blue heels, the leather bag swinging from her shoulder.
She wouldn’t need her London Fog overcoat, with her name stitched inside, a detail that made her proud, in Miami. But she’d take the London Fog raincoat, just in case. She swore she would save these two coats, part of her uniform, forever. She pulled on her white gloves, as required.