Pan Am Unbuckled: A Very Plane Diary (5 page)

Tease For Two

With the wind-down of the war in Vietnam, the naval refueling facilities on Guam were put up for sale by the U.S. government. None of the big petroleum producers at the time, like Gulf or Texaco, thought that it would be profitable to buy them. But, my uncle Jimmy, J.L. Walker, was a senior partner in a petroleum development firm called Purvin and Gertz and his company bought up as much as they could. They saw a future in Guam because of business from Japanese tourism. The Japanese had already built hotels on Guam, and it was fast becoming a favorite with Japanese honeymooners. Purvin & Gertz offices were in the U.S. and Europe, so in order to do business, they flew their executives all over the world to complete the deals. It was on a flight leaving Guam that I met up with two of them.

We were flying back to Honolulu on the leg from Guam with a very light load in the back, and only two passengers in first class. It had been a tiring pattern and we had been gone for a number of days. So, to give the crew a break, and because I liked to do it, I worked the back galley in economy—even though I was the senior purser.

It should have been a ‘piece-of-cake’ for the whole crew. So, I was surprised when the flight attendant working the first class cabin, came back to complain. She said “I really need your help. I’ve got these two men up there that are making our lives miserable. It doesn’t help that they’ve been drinking too much, but really! Their behavior is over the top.” Since this was a flight attendant who I had flown with many times before and I knew her to be very competent, I was intrigued as to why this was such a BIG deal.

There were only two of them. How bad could they be? But she insisted that I come up and DO SOMETHING. So, I followed her up. And there they were—two men in their 30’s, dressed in business attire, and unfortunately, taking full advantage of riding in first class. By that, I mean, they were already on their second 10
^th
of liqueur. Drinking too much at high altitude was, and is, a common problem on planes because, no matter what, with less oxygen in the cabin, people metabolize alcohol at a much greater rate.

Even as I approached them from the rear, I could see that their heads were hanging off the head rests and they were lolling in their seats in Row 4. As I walked past their row, from each side they reached out to grab me. Now, I saw what the problem was. These guys were groping, he-hawing and having WAY too much fun harassing the flight attendants. After I extricated myself from their hands, I tried to have a conversation…but they weren’t interested in talking. They just wanted to know if I would join them in the mile-high club in the lavatory, the first class lounge, or anywhere of my choosing…totally obnoxious….totally inappropriate. I could see that I wasn’t getting anywhere with them, so I used what I thought was the last resort and said that if they didn’t straighten up I would have to tell the captain. That got them to stop but only momentarily. They were right back at it again before I could even turn around.

First Class passengers were always treated with kid gloves. It was important for the crew to successfully handle any “irates” and especially a first class “irate”. (‘Irate’ was airline jargon for passengers who were upset or had a problem.) Finally I went into the cock pit to look for the SIL (Special Information Log). In passing, the cock-pit crew asked how it was going, and I said it was fine except for the two jerks in first class. The captain said “whoa, be careful there!” I said “I know, I know! I will handle them with kid gloves. They are the only two in first class, but these guys are something else…unbelievably horrible!”

The captain asked me “Well, do I need to go back?” I said “Let me look them up on the SIL and see if there is something I can do on my own. But I won’t hesitate to ask you to come into the cabin if I don’t get anywhere,” The SIL turned out to be a bomb-shell. There in black and white, next to these passenger’s names was “Purvin & Gertz”. HOLY SMOKES! And I let the cock-pit crew in on what I was figuring out.

The two young executives were employees of my uncle. The cock-pit crew actually started laughing. They said “are you sure?” And I said “I am….and now I am going to go take care of this ALL BY MYSELF.” The first officer was so curious, that he got permission from the captain to leave his seat. He donned his uniform hat and went into the first class galley so he could see and hear everything.

I strolled up to Row 4 and rested an arm on the arm-rest on either side of the aisle in front of them. I swung my weight onto one hip and in my best southern accent said “Well.” They started back into their bantering…“Oh, you have come back to sit on my lap…you’re ready for it…glad to see you again…” I just stood there smiling so that I could get eye contact, and asked them for their business cards. They seemed a little bit confused, but when I explained that I really needed to know if they were worth my efforts, they quickly whipped them out of their wallets.

Now, I had them exactly where I wanted them. I looked at the cards and fingered them by flipping them with my thumb. “Oh, I see here that you work for Purvin & Gertz.” One of them leaned back and puffed out his chest and said “Oh, yes…we got sent out to make some deals in Guam…they send us because we’re important players in management.” I let this vein of conversation go on as long as they wanted to keep talking about themselves. It was all I could do not to laugh. (Later, I heard that the first officer in the galley behind the curtain was already laughing.)

I waited until they finished their little brag and then I leaned in again and said “Oh, you know what, I can’t wait to tell my uncle all about you two.” They said “Oh yeah? Who’s your uncle?” I said “Uncle Jimmy…don’t you know my uncle Jimmy?’ And they said “Uncle Jimmy?” And I said “Yeah…J.L.” They looked at each other and said “J.L.? Who’s J.L.?” They looked completely confused. Then I said “J.L Walker.” They both came to a sudden, abrupt stop. They looked at each other and looked at me. One of them said “”J.L. Walker?” I said “Yes, J.L. Walker, CEO of Purvin & Gertz.” They both blanched. I think they stopped breathing. I very slowly put the business cards in my uniform pocket and gradually walked away. I heard from one of the flight attendants that one of the men threw up in the forward lavatory. Could it have been the liqueurs? For the rest of the flight we didn’t hear a peep out of either of them.

First Class is usually the first to disembark after landing. It is one of the perks of being first class. But, that day when we landed in Honolulu, the two executives stayed in their seats until the whole rest of the plane had disembarked and I had come forward from the aft jump seat. They quickly stood up and simultaneously started apologizing. Once again, I just let them talk and listened. I thanked them for the apology, but I didn’t offer them any assurances. Instead I simply said “I hope you won’t ever act like this on board any other Pan Am flights— and I’m going to keep your business cards just in case.”

I never did tell my uncle anything about them. When my mother heard the story for the first time, years later, she was actually very upset with me. She said I should have told him and he would have had them fired. She was probably right— but I think they learned their flight lesson that day.

Baby Lift

It was the beginning of April, 1975 and I was on layover in Guam. I had been married for 11 months— but five of those months I had been away from my husband, working with the Dooley Foundation in Nepal. Since I had been away so much of the time, it was VERY important that I actually spend my wedding anniversary, on April 21, with my new husband. So, when I got a call from the Guam station manager asking me to volunteer for a re-route to Saigon, I was hesitant. I was afraid I would miss my wedding anniversary with Doug— back in San Francisco.

The station manager assured me that I would be back at my home base in plenty of time to celebrate with my husband. And, if I agreed, he may need some help to encourage other members of the crew to volunteer as well. He said that when he met with us he would explain it further. Within a couple of hours, all of the crew members on layover who were contactable were assembled in the Guamanian Hotel lobby. Everyone was out of uniform—mostly in swim suits—and the smell of coconut suntan lotion was in the air.

News in Guam was flown in everyday from Hawaii, in the form of news papers and broadcast news reels. Because of Guam’s limited access to news, no one on the island was aware of what most Americans already knew that day: that US troops were withdrawing from Vietnam!

The station manager explained that all available commercial aircraft in the Pacific were being re-routed to assist with the withdrawal from Vietnam. It was very last-minute and even the US government did not have a clear plan of what to do. Meanwhile, the station manager had received a Tel Ex from scheduling in New York to re-route and get a 747 and crew back to Tan Son Nhut
,
because the Red Cross was assembling orphans for evacuation. He reminded us that it was important to recruit only volunteers—because of the US government and Pan Am policies that civilians were not required to fly into an active war zone. (This was a bit of a contradiction, because, in fact, we all had been issued a duplicate set of Geneva Convention cards identifying us with the rank of an officer in case we were ever detained or captured while flying inside the war zone.)

To a man, everyone volunteered to go. A 747 aircraft was commandeered from a regular scheduled departure, and within hours, flight service and crew were at the Guam airport, ready to ferry a plane. We had minimum commissary on board and no amenity provisions like baby supplies, but we did have the needed fuel to fly to Saigon and back.

We landed at Tan Son Nhut Airport, Saigon in the late afternoon— at the beginning of dusk. Even before the final approach, it felt eerie looking onto the scene below. The roads were clogged with traffic and jammed with hand carts and people carrying large bundles of anything they could carry. At the airport, the terminal area had block-after-block of people standing around. Usually, on a scheduled ‘commercial’ arrival into Saigon, all of the flight service personnel would go into the terminal to shop or just relax before the return flight. On this ‘military’ flight, we were told to stay on board and get ready for a very quick turnaround. Our aircraft was parked the furthest away from the terminal. Only the junior purser and I were driven, in a jeep, to the terminal OPS.

It was total mayhem in the terminal. There was panic in the air—people yelling and crying. More people were crushed up against the chain-link fencing along both sides of the building. There was this murmured-sort-of-moaning of people staring and pleading and reaching through the fence. I wondered why my junior purser, who was of Vietnamese descent, brought two tote bags with her. Later I learned they were filled with uniforms she had borrowed from other flight attendants. Unbeknownst to me, she slipped away from OPS to find her family members at a predetermined rendezvous point—and gave them these uniforms to wear. When it was time to go back to the plane, we were driven back by Air force personnel. And now, instead of two flight attendants leaving the terminal for the plane, our number had swelled to six women in Pan Am uniforms. Nobody asked for ID’s. The Pan Am uniforms gave the security detail all the identification they needed. US Military policemen were lined up shoulder-to-shoulder, at attention, weapons ready, stone-faced, tall and un-moving.

In OPS, I had been informed that there would be NO passenger count—-which was beyond unusual. It was slowly sinking in…that we were in the midst of something huge. It wasn’t just taking children out of a war zone. We had not been back on the plane for more than ten minutes when the first load of passengers showed up at the foot of the boarding ramp. I told the rest of the crew that we would have more passengers than seats. After talking it over with the Captain, it was decided that we would just put on this plane as many bodies as possible. No cargo or luggage: just human beings. I recall there was one adult Red Cross worker for about every 20-30 children. The children were otherwise totally unaccompanied. They were tiny and frail and we could easily put two in a passenger seat and double belt them in. Four groups of the taller children—mostly boys—were standing in the aft galley area during boarding— waiting. The plan was to have the boys lie parallel on the floor between the rows of seats during take-off and landing—keeping the main aisle clear.

Boarding went quickly and orderly. Eerily, the children didn’t make a sound. They were dehydrated, frightened and in shock. Even infants were not crying. At that stage of the boarding there were still more coming. One of the Red Cross volunteers estimated that between the holding area and the terminal in Saigon, there had to be another 50 babies that they were desperate to get out. The signal was given to get those babies to the aircraft too—so we got them on! Each of the Red Cross volunteers was already holding a child. The remaining babies were put in the luggage bins above the seats. These bins were weight-tested for over 40 pounds and were designed as a drop-down bin so that the entire container tilted down to open and load. We arranged the pillows and blankets the best we could to cushion the children in the bins.

The captain announced we were ready for take-off and to cross check and secure the cabin. I hadn’t closed the front entry door yet. While the crew worked the aisles to close up the bins with the babies in them, I was at the main entry door— where a lead ground agent still stood on the top landing of the boarding ramp. As I rotated the handle to close and secure the emergency door, she suddenly passed through the crack in the door…another baby that she had hidden in her jacket. I was dumb founded and didn’t know what to do. We gave the thumbs up through the portal window in the door, and there I was standing inside the plane holding this child…whose face was completely expressionless—-and what I now know as “the thousand yard stare”.

I didn’t have any children of my own yet and couldn’t appreciate at the time what was happening. But I did come up with the idea that because I would be sitting in a rear-facing crew seat, I could slip this baby down between me and the front of my working smock. The shoulder harnesses would go over my shoulder and the seat belt around my waist. He was going to be safe for take off. Eerily, the plane inside was silent…filled to the brim and not one peep from any of the children.

I felt the aircraft taxiing around. Our captain was taxiing at a faster than usual rate of speed. There was no meandering to the runway for take-off. The take-off was very steep. Even though the military had assured Pan Am that they had secured the perimeters to the airport and that enemy fire could not reach Tan Son Nhut
,
the captain was not taking any chances. The steep ascent was to avoid any possibility of receiving ground fire.

Once we were airborne and leveled off, the crew was on their feet, in the aisles, opening the bins. All the babies were fine, so we left them there, safe and resting. The little boys—there had to have been 20-25 of them—we repositioned to our jump seats, on the floor of the nose area in front of first class on the main deck, and to the banquet seats of the upstairs first class lounge.

It quickly became apparent that we had none of the provisions that we could have desperately used….like diapers and formula. The food that the commissary had put on board was too spicy and totally alien to the children. It was too bad that we didn’t have lots of ‘Pan Am’s sticky rice’. We didn’t even heat up most of the entrees. I don’t remember there being the heightened awareness about dehydration that we have now, but we did realize that these children were thirsty and we gave them lots of water. Milk was not something they were used to digesting and the Red Cross volunteers asked us not to give the children the sodas. (Probably because of the caffeine—but the sugar would have given them something more than just the water during the flight.)

The trip back to Guam was a few hours flight—which wasn’t too long to manage, but long enough to have our hands full. We did our best to give service to our little passengers. In order for me to work I had to secure the child I was holding. Someone held it while I put my smock on backwards—so the bib top was on my back. Then, we slipped the baby down between my back and the bib, with him facing out—where he could watch and see everything. That is how that child spent the whole flight…on my back, peering out over my smock, while I worked around the aircraft doing the duties of a purser.

Because we had no diapers, some of the children were in pretty bad state by the time we landed. And because we didn’t have the right kind of cuisine for the children’s palate, there were a number of them who had vomited. The two smells together let us know all we needed to know about how desperate these children were. I notified the flight engineer that ground crew needed to meet us in Guam with a lot of back-up supplies. I also wanted to know who was actually going to meet these children and disembark with them. I found out later that the Red Cross had scurried to get more volunteers in Guam who could help transport the children from the plane, and then be able to care for them for a number of days before they were sent on to Honolulu. The flights out of Guam to Honolulu would require more seats than we had used transporting them out of Vietnam. (Those flights would be handled according to FAA regulations.) But, on that day, we had no special information log of passenger nationality documentation or TB x-rays or anything else. We didn’t even know their ages or names!

During the flight, the children revived a bit. They had not been buckled in during flight and some were wandering up and down the aisles of the plane. They seemed to be sensing the relief of the adults and had become considerably more animated— and acting like children. The ones that were still scared and frightened were curled up in their seats, trying to hide. One had managed to climb into an empty food cart bay in the aft galley. For landing, we had to find each of them and buckle them in. One attendant said she no sooner got them buckled up than some clever child would figure out how to unbuckle them again. There was a language barrier, and many rows had no adults, so the children thought it was all a great game. On final descent, we re-closed the baggage bins with the infants dozing inside. Once again, I fastened my baby to my front, securing it with my apron, for landing.

It was a hard landing…which was unusual. Even to a seasoned, sophisticated traveler this can feel a bit scary. Airlines prefer that pilots have soft landings for passenger comfort. A hard landing is actually safer, and on that day the captain wasn’t taking any chances with the aircraft. The children were startled and some started crying. Again, the crew was on their feet quickly after the landing, keeping the children in their seats while we taxied, and assuring the Red Cross volunteers that everything was okay and we were safe.

When they rolled out the boarding ramp in Guam, and the Pan Am ground agents opened the front and aft entry doors, they were shocked. Somehow, word had not gotten back to them about our actual number of passengers. And because the Guamanian Red Cross volunteers had not all yet arrived, they really didn’t know what to do. These were not passengers capable of disembarking unassisted. The cock pit crew came down the first class staircase after we landed in Guam. For the first time, they looked back in the cabin to see their load, and were stunned. None of us understood or appreciated what that number of children looked like. The flight service was so busy during the flight that none of us had actually stopped to look around. But when we had those few moments—-waiting for the transport busses—- we had a chance to look at what we had accomplished. We didn’t make an exact count… but based on available seats and bins, there must have been between 4-500 children and babies on board.