A Pan Am flight attendant sees the world with OAT
November 22, 2011
How much did 18-time traveler Karen Byrne of Petaluma, California, love being a Pan Am stewardess in the 1960s? So much that, a few years later, when she was pregnant with her oldest daughter, she kept rubbing her belly and whispering, “You will fly! You will fly!”
Karen wanted to pass on the wanderlust that defined her as a young woman. A New Jersey girl at the time, she knew she wanted to be a Pan Am stewardess—considered the best of the best in the industry—but she also knew she’d have to work for it. Applicants had to complete a college degree or be licensed as an R.N., and they had to demonstrate proficiency in a foreign language. Karen killed two birds with one stone by majoring in Spanish at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania. Degree in hand, she applied and was accepted to Pan Am’s six-week training school and was airborne from 1962-1965, the peak of the airline’s glamorous Clipper era.
Karen Byrne worked as a Pam Am stewardess from 1962-1965—the era depicted in the new TV series Pan Am.
That’s the period portrayed in the new ABC television series Pan Am, which Karen—and many of her former peers—tuned in to see, admittedly with some trepidation. “I went into the show thinking, ‘Oh god, this will be a mess.’ But I actually did like it.” Speaking to friends in World Wings, the social network of past Pan Am stewardesses, she found that many of them were pleasantly surprised, and their complaints, like hers, focused on the smaller details.
“White gloves in the cabin? How were they supposed to serve food that way? And the way they walked through the airports with their hands in the air like beauty queens? Come on. We met at the crew check-in lounge and boarded together from there—there was never any need to parade through the terminals.”
Karen (left) and her fellow former Pam Am stewardesses found many parallels with details from the show and their own time on the job.
But she did find some of the details right, especially the scene in which an on-call crew member has to change into her uniform in the back of a taxi. “It happened often!” says Karen, “Who among us didn’t do that?” She also found credible the scene in which the female crew members had to weigh-in. “No one snapped our girdles, but they checked if you were wearing one. They could tell if you didn’t have a girdle on, because you wiggled. And if you wiggled, you didn’t fly.”
Some critics have derided the show’s subplot in which a stewardess is recruited as a spy. But Karen says that story rings true to the era. “I was in Turkey in a bar and someone approached me who clearly already knew I worked for Pan Am. He asked me to carry a package back to the States for him.” Unfazed, she asked to see the contents of the package. “When he said no, I just refused.”
Karen was a savvy traveler in general, putting in bids (assignment requests) for international routes with layovers (stays of at least 24 hours on the ground before returning). She would fly into Thailand, get fitted for a silk suit while there, and return the next day to the shop to pick it up. According to Karen, the shops designed their own suits, and each cost less than $20. It was quite a heady experience for a young girl.
Karen (right) and a fellow past Pam Am stewardess still fit in their uniforms, which they proudly display here.
Like many others in that era, she gave it all up for love. When she was hired, stewardesses had to be single, so when she got engaged, she gave notice. “Then Pan Am realized that the married girls were the ones who went to their hotel rooms and got some sleep at night, so they changed the policy.” Karen flew a few more months as a newlywed, but the schedule kept her apart from her new husband, and she left Pan Am for good.
She found herself largely grounded during the years she raised two daughters, but as soon as they were in college, she packed her bags again. “I never stopped traveling after that!” One of her favorite destinations, to which she’s twice returned with us, is Thailand, where she often had layovers in the '60s. “Bangkok is so different now. We were restricted where we could eat, so we didn’t get food poisoning, and you could smell the river. But now it’s so cleaned up and such a beautiful place to visit. And the countryside is gorgeous.”
Karen enjoys interacting with the locals during her adventures with OAT, as she did with these hill tribe girls in Laos.
Now 71, her itineraries still tend to take her off the beaten path. “I don’t care a bit about the newest hotels or the latest things in the big cities. I want to see different cultures, getting out into the countryside to meet the people. That’s what I love!” Her list of adventures bears this out. “I pick places like Morocco and India and Bhutan and the Serengeti. I even did the Gorillas,” she notes, referring to our Rwanda: Mountain Gorilla Trek pre-trip extension. “That was a tough trip—hiking up the mountain in the rain, cutting the bamboo—but then, there were the gorillas. I can say that I’ve done that now.”
Exotic experiences abound in her travel memories. Last year, she treated herself to OAT’s adventure in Tunisia to celebrate her 70th birthday. “I brought a bottle of Champagne with me to the Sahara. I popped the cork and poured some into a plastic flute and got up on the back of a camel to drink a toast. It was the best 70th birthday possible.”
For her 70th birthday, Karen traveled to Tunisia, and celebrated with a flute of Champagne atop a camel.
Despite her zeal, she wasn’t able to pass on the travel bug to her daughters in the same way. “My oldest was a flight attendant for, oh, about ten seconds,” she laughs. “I’m still mad at her for giving it up!” She’s kidding about that, but she really can’t understand not having a burning desire to see the globe. “I mean it: I just love getting on an airplane.”
That remains true, even though she admits that she simply can’t rest in-flight. “I watch everything. I cannot sleep. I hear every bell that rings and see every call light. If no one comes to take care of the passenger, I find myself wanting to jump up! What can I say? It’s what I did, and it’s still in my blood.”
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