Pan Am Interview

A newspaper article printed in the Grangemouth Advertiser about my departure to Miami.






How strange life is!

One morning, on impulse, I decided to treat myself to breakfast in the airport restaurant. It was the early morning shift and my one hour break was due at nine am. I was hungry for some real, cooked food as opposed to the cup of hot tea with milk and small chocolate bar that I usually ate. I sat down at a corner table which had not yet been cleared by the waitress. The previous customer was kind enough to leave a copy of the London Times newspaper on the table instead of throwing it in the trash and that act of kindness changed my life forever. I picked up the newspaper and began to read it and lo and behold there was a very large advertisement on one of the inside pages. The advertisement read:

Young women between the ages of twenty-one and twenty five; height, five foot three to five foot eight; weight, ninety five to one hundred and forty pounds; are invited to apply for the position of flight attendant with: Pan American Airways the world’s greatest airline.

“I don’t have a chance,” I thought to myself but I might as well try.

I mailed my request for an application form to the address listed, and promptly forgot about it because when I returned to the BEA employee lounge I saw that a large notice had been thumbtacked to the notice board. All employees who were interested in a career as a steward or stewardess were invited to submit an application, which I did immediately. When the time came for my interview I felt sure that I would be hired but I wasn’t. The disappointment was acute, so acute that I spoke to one of the supervisors at work and asked for an explanation. I was puzzled. Why wasn’t I hired? Others less qualified than myself had been given the job.

I was stunned when the supervisor gave me my explanation. The interviewers thought that I was too glamorous. They were looking for people who could navigate the aisles of the small BEA aircraft, serve refreshments and get the aircraft ready for landing in the short amount of time available. They didn’t think that I could move that fast, but they were wrong of course.

A few days after I received the bad news about not getting the BEA job, there was a large envelope waiting for me when I got home. The envelope contained a Pan Am application form for the position of flight attendant, together with a letter of instruction. I filled out the form and then hurried out to a corner photo booth where for one shilling I could have a head and shoulders instant photograph taken. The following day after work, I mailed everything back to the London address provided, but still without any hope that I would be granted an interview, far less such a glamorous job, even if I thought that the small instant photograph had come out rather well. To my surprise I was granted an interview even though I had checked the box marked NO in answer to the question; do you know how to swim?

When the day of the interview came, I dressed very carefully but had learned a valuable lesson from the negative results of my BEA interview. This time I dressed conservatively. I looked neat, clean and smart but not too glamorous, and it worked.

The Pan Am interviews were held in a well established, glitzy London hotel and on arrival at the hotel, the doorman directed me upstairs to a very large suite that had been reserved for Pan Am. After entering the room the small amount of confidence that I had mustered, dropped to an all time low. The room was filled with a bevy of beautiful young women. Some of them were absolutely stunning to look at, and from the conversations that were going on, I gathered that many of them were currently working as models and actresses. The interview was grueling.

There was a panel of six, three men and three women and they meant business. I sat in a chair in front of them as they grilled me for over an hour. They asked me whether I would be willing to relocate to the United States because the Pan Am base in London was going to be closed.

            Without any hesitation I said, “Yes.”

They asked me questions about my life, my family, my hobbies and my current job. They wanted to know which foreign countries I had visited and seemed pleased to learn that I had already travelled to Belgium, France, The Netherlands, Italy and Greece. I told them the story of how I was stricken with appendicitis on the island of Mykonos resulting in myself and my companion missing our passage back to Piraeus where we were to travel by train from Athens to Ostend, in order to take the ferry back to England. The situation was very dramatic.

On the morning of our departure from the island of Mikonos my friend and I were having some breakfast at quayside café when all of a sudden I felt a searing pain in my abdomen. I passed out and a woman who identified herself as a nurse found someone who helped carry me to a nearby doctor’s office. When I regained consciousness, the doctor, who spoke perfect English, told me that I had an inflamed appendix and the situation was critical because he was not a surgeon and there was no hospital on the island. He shot me full of pain killers and his wife radioed the mainland for help.

Help came the next morning but it was not the kind of help that we were expecting. Two fishermen carried me out to a rowboat and they rowed my friend and I out to an ocean liner that had anchored in deep water. It was not a scheduled stop for the ocean liner, but the captain had received the request by radio, to stop and pick up an emergency medical case. It was like something out of a movie. When we reached the ship there was no way to get on board except to climb up a rope ladder that was suspended over the side. I looked up to see that many, if not all of the passengers and crew were on deck craning their necks to have a look at the emergency medical case.

I climbed up first. The fishermen held onto my legs as long as they could and the ship officers grabbed onto my hands as soon as they could reach them, but there was a period of time when I clung precariously to the rope ladder thinking that my last day had come. The sea was choppy and I was sopping wet when I finally got on board. Luckily I was full of pain killers and the captain provided a cabin with a bunk so that I could lie down. There was no charge for our passage and the unscheduled stop for which we were truly grateful. We made it to the hospital in Athens but even though I had a letter from the Greek doctor explaining that I had appendicitis and needed to have an operation, the hospital turned us away. E and I found a taxi and asked the driver to take us to a cheap hotel where we were able to make a call to the British embassy in Athens. We didn’t have enough money left for a ticket home but we had been wise enough to pay for travel insurance before leaving home. A representative from the British embassy met us back at the hospital where I was duly admitted and within two hours, I was on the operating table. When I woke up, the surgeon asked me to marry him but I didn’t relate that part to the Pan Am interviewers.

I told the interviewers that after experiencing that situation, I felt as if I could handle any problems that might arise while travelling to foreign countries. They were entertained and I was beginning to relax and enjoy the interview.

One of the women actually came over to where I was sitting and asked me to open my mouth so that she could look at my teeth. She began to touch my hair which was neatly rolled up at the back of my head.

            “Is this all your own hair?” she asked.

            “No,” I responded. My real hair is intertwined with a hair swatch.”

The interviewer proceeded to ask me to show her which hair was real and which hair was false. They asked me to walk up and down in front of the panel several times and to my utter amazement, at the end of the interview I was given an envelope with instructions to leave the hotel area, fill out the forms and return later that same day. I was instructed to tell no-one that I had been given those forms to fill out and to keep quiet about the fact that I had been invited to return for a second interview. My excitement level was high. The impossible had happened and I knew that my dream was about to come true. I was going to be a Pan Am stewardess, living in America, working and flying on Boeing aircraft all over the world.

Later that day I returned for my second interview where I was informed that out of three hundred applicants, only six had been chosen and I was one of them. I diligently completed the second set of forms that I was given because this was an application for a visa to live and work in the United States. There were certain conditions that had to be met. I was required to pass an in-depth medical examination, receive my parent’s permission and give assurance that I did have at my disposal one hundred British pounds sterling, a sum of money that I would need before receiving my first paycheck from Pan Am.

My emotions soared to the heavens that day because I had exactly one hundred pounds safely tucked away in my bank account. Pan Am was the world’s largest and most luxurious airline and all their flights were international. Life for me was now full of possibilities and I was walking on air. I was breathless with excitement when I learned that I would receive five weeks of training in Miami Florida and that I would receive a free pass from London to Miami via New York and Puerto Rico (Pan Am had no domestic flight routes). Rooms would be reserved for us (the six trainees) at the Holiday Inn near Kennedy airport in New York, and limousine service would be provided between airports and hotels. My instructions were to do nothing and wait. It would take some time to obtain a visa but I would be informed about the time and place for my medical check up, and I would be notified when to appear at the American Embassy in London.

            “Oh by the way,” said the lady who had examined my hair. “You have a choice. Either cut your hair short now, or we’ll do it for you when you arrive in Miami.”

Soon after that, I made an appointment at a very exclusive and expensive beauty salon in London. I requested a short hairstyle but unfortunately the cut was bad and in order to make up for botching the haircut, the salon owner assured me that it would look better if he gave my hair a perm. That was the last perm I ever had. Luckily for me it was six months before my visa was granted and there was time for my fried, short hair to grow back a little before meeting up with my travelling companions for our journey to the United States of America. Only five of us showed up at the airport for our Pan Am flight to New York and we never knew what happened to the sixth trainee who was supposed to be travelling with us.

Life gets stranger!

Before I could travel to the United States I made a visit to the American embassy in London to collect my visa or green card as it was referred to. To my surprise I saw a face that I recognized sitting a few rows in front of me in the waiting area. I approached the young lady with a question.

            “Hello. Don’t we know each other?” I said.

R turned to me with a smile on her face.

            “Yes, I was a year behind you at college in Aberdeen.”

I sat beside her and to our amazement we discovered that we were both there to collect our visas for travel to the United States, and strangest of all we had both been hired by Pan Am and were scheduled to start our training at the same time. We were both travelling to New York on the same flight and R was one of the six trainees who were chosen out of three hundred applicants

I passed the medical exam but did not enjoy the after effects of the smallpox vaccination that was mandatory for entry into the States. My arm was very sore and the site of the vaccination was red and inflamed. Fortunately there was a waiting period after receiving the smallpox vaccination and I was fully recovered by my date of departure. A Pan Am photographer took some group pictures of us in front of the terminal building, we boarded our Pan Am Boeing 707 and then we settled down to observe the working stewardesses who more or less ignored us for the entirety of the flight. The on-board meal was good, the seats were comfortable and although R cried a little at the thought of leaving everything familiar behind, I shed no tears. This was what I wanted and I was prepared to overcome any problems that might arise. I had the confidence of youth and the promise of what I believed to be a huge salary when the training period was over. Little did I know that the so-called huge salary barely covered expenses in the U.S.A. and my one hundred pounds sterling was gobbled up quickly with the high cost of living in both Florida and New York.