The Virginians: Visiting the relatives Part 1

 My parents, Jo (mom) and Carroll (dad)*, were Virginians by birth and upbringing. The first time Jo left the state of Virginia was when she married Carroll and went to live in Florida with him. Carroll had spent much of his adulthood traveling and working around the country, first in nearby states like West Virginia and North Carolina, but then to California, Arizona, Washington and Oregon. But for both of them Virginia was home. It was where their parents and most of their siblings resided. So as a child, when we flew we flew to visit family in Virginia.

We always split our visits between Jo's people who lived mostly on farms in the Tidewater along the Rappahannock River, and Carroll's people who lived in the Appalachian mountains of southwest Virginia.  Carroll's father Charlie Parks died when I was too small to remember him. Jo's father James Tyler (called Tyler) was still alive for the first eight years of my childhood. The photo above is me with Grandfather Tyler in his home. So I remember mostly going to visit Jo's folks first. The Tidewater was also much closer to Washington, DC and it was easier for her family to come to the airport to gather us up.  

Jo was the only girl in her family. She had five brothers. There had been another girl, the first child born to Tyler and Lillian, but she had died within days of birth. The picture above is her with her brothers probably in the 1970's at my cousin Lucy's wedding (from left to right is Howard, Jo, Tommy in the back, John next to Jo, Charles, and James). Three were older than her, two were younger. James Tyler II (called James) the eldest was already married when she was a young girl. James was a farmer and lived a few miles from his father. James' children Franklin and Turk ( James Tyler III) were just a few years younger than Jo and felt more like brothers than nephews. Next in line was John, then Howard just a couple of years younger than Jo, and the brother with which she was closest. Then there was Tommy, who was eight years younger. Their mother Lillian died within days of Tommy's birth. 

Jo's father, my grandfather Tyler, could not see himself raising an infant or a young girl (she was 8), so Jo was sent to live with her Aunt Sue on the farm adjacent to her father's property. Aunt Sue already had two daughters one a little older than Jo and one the same age. Jo spent the years from age 8 to age 18 living with her Aunt Sue, and her cousins Mary Edna and Florence. Tommy was formally adopted by an uncle John and his wife, who had been unable to have children. John's farm was several miles away from Tyler.  The photo probably taken in 1949 around the time of my parents' marriage, shows Herb, Florence, great Aunt Sue, Mary Edna and Hub, the family in which my mother grew up. 

Jo had two other uncles (great uncles to me), who also lived within a few miles of Tyler, they were Tom and his wife Wade and Wallace and his daughter Nanny Florence who was Jo's best friend growing up. The photo below is great uncle Tom, great uncle John, grandfather Tyler, and great uncle Wallace, probably from the 1920's. 

When I was a child visiting mama's (Jo) family included seeing her brother Howard and his wife Mickie first. Howard was in law enforcement and they lived in Rockville, Maryland. Howard was usually the one to pick us up at the airport. Howard and Mickie had two boys, Randy was the same age as me, and Ronnie (who as an adult goes by Scott) was the same age as my brother Charlie. We would often spend a day with them in suburban Maryland, which was not much different from the California suburbs where we lived. Then we would drive down to grandfather's house in the Tidewater.  

For most of my childhood, in addition to my grandfather Tyler, we would also see my Aunt Sue and her husband Hub, her son Herb and her grown up daughters Mary Edna and Florence, my uncle James and his wife Wade, at least one of his sons Turk and his wife.  Sometimes Franklin would bring his wife and children, Stuart and Becky, in to visit at the same time. We would also see Uncle John and Aunt Alene and their children Johnny and Lucy, great uncle Tom and his wife Wade, great uncle Wallace and Nanny Florence, and great uncle John and his wife. Sometimes Jo's brother Tommy would come from Newport News while we were there and bring his wife Gayebrook and their three children who were the same ages as my brothers and I. 

This collection of dozens of relatives mostly living on farms all within a few miles of each other, seemed exotic to me as a child. I was growing up in a brand new suburb of San Francisco where all the houses were identical, and all the people in the houses were from somewhere else originally.  I did not realize at the time that it was my experience in the California suburb that was unusual, and not the reverse. Everyone I grew up with had parents who had migrated to California for work from somewhere else. Many of them had come from crowded cities in the east, a few from mid-western farms or towns, but we were all from somewhere else, and no one had aunts or uncles or grandparents living within easy driving distance. I began to understand how unusual my childhood neighborhood was when as a sociology graduate student I began to read studies of urban communities like Herbert J. Gans Urban Villagers.  I really understood it when I went to live in Johnstown, Pennsylvania where I had my first position as a college professor. But as a child, a world where dozens of one's relatives were close by and got together on a regular basis, where people lived in 200 year old farm houses, which did not all have running water, was very unusual and exciting. 

While my grandfather was still alive we stayed with him while we were visiting. His house had been built in the 1700's. It was a wooden house that sat on piers rather than a foundation. A less than stellar drawing of this house, based solely on my memory at 74 (I did it today) is above.  It was a two story rectangle, wider than it was deep. At some point, later than its original construction, a wide porch had been added across the entire first floor, and then even later had been screened in to block flies and mosquitos. It had a simple, but steeply pitched roof, the ridge ran horizontal to the front and back of the house, with a gable at each end. There were redbrick chimneys at each end of the house.  It had been painting white at one time, and the functional shutters on the windows had been painted green, but it was all faded during my childhood. My father was an avid photographer and there are many, many pictures from my childhood, but for some reason, not one single picture of my grandfather Tyler's house. 

The downstairs had two large rooms separated in the middle by a wide hallway that contained the steep stairs to the second floor. The hallway also held one of those gorgeous old carved wooden hall benches that had a large tall mirror, a seat to sit to remove boots, and many hooks for hats and coats. The hallway also had a single light bulb dangling and a refrigerator (probably circa 1948). Grandfather Tyler had the house wired for electricity in the 1940's but only downstairs, and only very minimally. There were dangling lightbulbs in the main living room which lay to the left of the entrance hall, and in my grandfather's bedroom which lay to the right of the hallway, as well as in the hallway itself. The electricity was used for the lights, for the refrigerator and for a large radio. The lack of electricity was quite the novelty for a child raised in the California suburbs. So was the complete lack of indoor plumbing. The house had no running water, no bathrooms, no sinks. 

My grandfather's bedroom was strictly off limits and I have no memories of ever seeing past the doorway. But the living room was the center of all activity and most of our time was spent there. It was quite large. On the front side near the windows were a couch and comfortable chairs. There was also a piano, out of tune and very tinkley that I was allowed to bang on whenever I wanted. My grandfather also had his desk and his easy chair and multiple bookcases on the rear side of the living room. In between was a large table and chairs for at least six people, where most meals were eaten. Also standing a couple of feet in front of the fireplace at the far side of the room, was a metal stove for heating with coal, with a pipe for smoke that went into the fireplace and up the chimney. We were only ever there in the summertime, so the stove was simply an object in the way of running and play. In describing all the things in the living room, it makes it sound quite cluttered, but it was a large room and there was plenty of space for small children to run around  and play. 

At the far end of the living room, opposite from the hall entryway, was a door next to the fireplace. That door opened into a small, ramshackle, wooden passageway that had a solid wall on its back side and open screening on its front side. It was narrow and often full of spiders - which I hated with a passion as a child. In the middle of this covered passageway were two doors, one a screen door opening to the front of the house, and opposite it in the solid wall, a wooden door that opened to the back. There was a small wooden deck on the backside where work like washing clothes  was done. That back door was also the access to the well in the back of the house from which all the water came, and to the outhouse, which was in ill repair and only used to dump the contents of chamber pots. No one wanted to sit in that outhouse unless you relished the idea of getting bit by a black widow spider. 

Every day a fresh buckets of water were drawn from the well by the adults (they didn't trust small children not to fall in!), and one bucket with a metal dipper was left in the passageway for drinking water. If one got thirsty while playing outside, one could just step through one of the outside doors into the passageway and grab a dipper of cold water from the pail. 

The passage connected the main house to a smaller building that was the kitchen. This is something that one can see in famous southern colonial times homes such as Monticello, a kitchen separated by some distance from the main house. As a child it was explained to me as being a fire precaution, and a way to keep the heat out of the house during the summer. Years later I also realized that it was a common arrangement in houses that were built during slavery to keep the slaves that brought in the produce, meat, etc. and did the cooking out of the main house.

The original owners of the house, built in the 1700's, had definitely been slave holders, not something I thought about as a child. I did know, probably more than most white working class children in the 1950's about slavery, and about Jim Crow laws. Jo and Carroll were very outspoken about how wrong the Jim Crow laws were, about how important voting rights and economic rights were and said on more than one occasion that one of the reasons that we did not live in Virginia near our relatives was because they did not want their children to be brought up with those prejudices. All the members of Jo's family referred to those of African American heritage as "coloreds" or used an even more distasteful word. We were quietly warned not to make an issue of it with relatives, but that we must never use those words and always use the "more respectful term of Negro." 

[Unfortunately, my parents did not realize that the absence of Jim Crow laws and formal, legal forms of discrimination, did not mean that there was an absence of racism in California. The racism was just more hidden, swept under the rug. In Virginia as in much of the south, Blacks and whites lived alongside each other, in the same communities, with laws like Jim Crow and other forms of custom regulating their interactions to keep them socially separate even though they used the same streets. In California, real estate practices, some legal, some just customary, isolated Blacks, and other races into separate neighborhoods from whites. Our California neighborhood, was in the 1950's almost 100 percent white. Only when I went to high school did I learn about the other neighborhoods in the city where the Blacks, Hispanics and the very large Chinese- and Japanese-American communities lived.]

The kitchen was a very simple box of a room, probably not much more than 12' x 12'. A huge black cast iron woodburning cookstove dominated the room. Wood had to be chopped to fill it, and bringing in wood from the woodpile was a daily task. My mother was a good cook, she made really tasty but fairly simple foods, and was adept  at using the wood stove for just about any type of food prep, including baking bread. The kitchen also had a good sized prep table and lots of cupboards and storage for dry goods and pots and pans. The big, galvanized steel wash tub, big enough for an adult man to sit down in was also stored in the kitchen. Bath time involved hauling multiple buckets of water from the well, heating them in huge stock pots on the wooden stove and filling the wash tub with hot water. 

The same tub, placed on the back deck behind the passageway was used for washing laundry. Laundry washing also involved heating water on the stove. Also we used a large corrugated  metal washboard, that one scrub clothes against to get out the dirt. Children could be give the task of "agitating" the laundry in both the wash and the rinse "cycle", with a large wooden paddle. We would pretend to be captains of boats paddling towards  adventure while we stirred the clothes round and round. 

The stairs to the second floor started several feet from the front door of the house and rose steeply across its depth. At the top the stairs opened on a narrow hallway, running to two large rooms at either end, one over the part of the living room and one over grandfathers bedroom. In addition there was a very small bedroom on the living room side between the stairs and the large bedroom. When we visited my parents, Jo and Carroll, slept in the room above grandfather Tyler, and my brother Charlie and I slept in the large room over the living room. When Frank came along he slept in a cot in the room with my parents. 

Both bedrooms had very large, ornate metal bed frames with soft, squishy mattresses, and actual linen sheets. There were wardrobes rather than closets, and bureaus where linens and clothing were stored. One of the most important features of the bedrooms was the multiple chamber pots under the bed. All bodily elimination had to be done in a chamber pot. The pots were cast iron, but covered with white ceramic. They each had a fitted lid to keep the odors under control until they could be emptied. I did not like chamber pots. They hurt my butt! But at least as a small child, I was not responsible for the emptying and rinsing of the pots. If one needed to go during the day time, one had to climb up stairs to use a chamber pot. My grandfather had two in his bedroom, but we were not allowed in there. 

My brother Charlie and I always had to share the bed at grandfather Tyler's house. We did not like this. We would fight and fuss, and someone would be yelling for my mother "he's touching me" or "she's touching me". Often my parents would lay a long bolster pillow down the center of the bed and tell us to stay on our side. This did not always help. 

The last summer my grandfather Tyler was alive, I was 8 and Charlie was 6 1/2. Charlie convinced our parents to let him sleep in the little bedroom in between. That bedroom was full of things, trunks with old clothes, trunks full of books, all kinds of amazing treasures. The little bedroom also had the trap door that opened to the attic crawl space where other wonderful things were stored.    

Summer 1959: My brother Charlie (7), Frank (not quite 3), grandfather Tyler, me (Sue 8 1/2), Jo (mom) behind, cousin Lucy (9 or 10 despite being smaller), and Aunt Alene wife of Uncle John, Jo's second oldest brother. We are standing in front of grandfather Tyler's house, you can see the sagging gate and the country road beyond the gate. 

There will be more memories tomorrow. 

__________

*When people were introduced verbally to Jo and Carroll, they almost always misunderstood which name went with which person. This amused my mother and made my father angry. It was one of the many things about which he was very touchy. 

Why I Tip Generously: Lexington, Chevy Chase, My First Marriage and the Feminist Tip

This is more stream of consciousness than an organized memoir.

I was thinking about going to breakfast tomorrow (Sunday), at the Pine Mountain Grill in Whitesburg, and how much I was looking forward to it. This is something my husband and I do every Sunday, we only miss it if the snow is too deep or one of us is seriously ill. Part of the pleasure of going is how nice all the wait staff are to us, how cheerily they greet us, and always try to seat us at our favorite table in front of the great stone fireplace. Even if we show up on a different day and time, there is always several workers who recognize us and greet us warmly and treat us so well. 

Part of the answer is to our treatment at Pine Mountain Grill is that we are both very respectful of people who provide us service, but it doesn't hurt that we established many years ago that we were great tippers. These days we try to tip 100% of the bill whenever possible. I started thinking, how and when did I start being a person who tipped more than customary, and realize it all began in Lexington in the 1970's. 

When I went to live in Lexington, Kentucky in 1975, one of my favorite neighborhoods within walking distance of student housing was called Chevy Chase. In particular, I loved the little shopping district at the point where East High Street took a sharp bend and became Tates Creek Road (both major spokes of the wheel that was Lexington), and Euclid Avenue ended and suddenly became Fontaine Road. 

The place was a tacky jumble of buildings, signs, and small stores and restaurants. There was the Tast E O Donuts, jewelry store, drug store, a used bookstore that one of my roommates haunted for paperback romance novels, a children's toy store, laundry-mat, and Jerry Spry's Hair Studio. Young men trained under Jerry Spry learned to cut hair using rulers and calipers, precision cuts they were called.

One of the most popular establishments in Chevy Chase, was Charlie Browns, a lounge and bar were on the first floor and restaurant seating was on the second floor. Interestingly Charlie Browns still exists and looks not much different than it did in the 1970's. As a poor graduate student I generally only ate at Charlie Browns when someone else was buying. Once in 1977, my best friend, Elise, from college had gotten married and her new husband was first cousins with the hottest weatherman in Lexington, Brad James. Brad, his wife, Elise, her husband and I the grateful friend, all went to see Star Wars (the original, didn't have a subtitle in those days) together and afterwards Brad treated all of us to dinner at Charlie Browns. Brad and his wife were really lovely, interesting people, and my friend Elise was always a great story teller so the evening was filled with great stories and good laughs and wonderful food. 

Not too long after that fun experience at Charlie Browns I had another one, that I remember a little less charitably. I had a crush on a male faculty member who was not many years older than me. One time he asked me out to dinner and took me to Charlie Browns. I don't actually remember anything at all about the meal, the conversation or anything else, except how it ended. This fellow gave a little speech about how the restaurant industry exploited its workers and paid them less than minimum wage, and expected tips to make up the difference, all of which was true, and restaurant owners should pay their workers more. But then this man used that as an excuse not to leave any tip at all, saying he wasn't going to prop up the capitalist class. I was deeply embarrassed and ashamed and if I'd had any money at all I would have left it as a tip, but I didn't. The only person who suffers when you don't leave a tip is the wait staff. 

Around the same time I remember reading an article about the "feminist tip", probably in Ms. Magazine one of the few subscriptions I paid for in grad school. The article argued that women were more likely to work breakfast and lunch in restaurants, while men were more likely to work dinner, as a result because breakfast and lunch were cheaper than dinner, women made much less in tips for the same amount of work. The article argued that while 15% was fine for an expensive dinner out, that one should pay 20% or 25% tip for breakfast or lunch. I took that article to heart, and when I started working full time and had income enough to start eating out regularly, I began making my minimum tip one dollar, this was back when breakfast might cost you $2.50 or less. 

My first (ex) husband, in the 1980's worked in the restaurant business, first as a waiter then as a chef; his mother worked as a waitress for decades. We often went out to eat together during our marriage, and I admired how they treated those that served them, and how they tipped. That marriage may have ended more than 40 years ago, but the lessons about how to treat restaurant workers and how to tip stayed with me. 

When my husband and I first started going out regularly for Sunday breakfast it was fifteen years ago and most of the wait staff at Pine Mountain Grill were students of mine. It was the semester that my introductory sociology class had two Tylers, and one of those two Tylers (whose last name is unfortunately lost to the fog of memory) worked the Sunday morning breakfast shift. He was a really good student, an A student, outstanding in the class. It was also about the time that people first started talking about raising the minimum wage to $15 (of course now it should be $20 or more for the same buying power). At the time breakfast for both of us cost just about $15, so I started giving $15 tip. I had two things in mind, that at least for one hour of the day, our waiter would earn $15 an hour and also, I thought that if I tipped well, no one would think that I gave him a good grade because of how he treated me as a customer (I know that last little bit is pretty convoluted, but sometimes that's how my brain works). 

Over the next six or seven years, I saw a half dozen of my male students take jobs on the wait staff of the Pine Mountain Grill, and we tipped them all the same, about 100% of the bill. As the bill rose so did the tip. Not long after I retired, I stopped seeing young men working as waiters. Instead middle aged women have taken over most of the breakfast waiting duties. I still tip 100% of the bill, even now when it's gotten to $25 for the two of us for breakfast. It will probably go up again soon, even if just to cover the cost of coffee which is skyrocketing with the tariffs. 

I don't expect everyone to tip the way I do. But I do expect everyone to tip, I don't care how your service was, or how grumpy your waiter was. You still should tip at least 15%.  If you can tip more than do so. But you should also lobby your legislators to raise minimum wage for currently tipped workers. You should vote for people who want to raise the minimum wage over all and especially for currently tipped workers. 

Becoming a Bookkeeper

 When I was working at Cherry Tree Aviation, my desk was in the center of everything that happened. Everyone who came in and out went by my desk. Most people (both employees and customers) hung out in the central lobby area because that was where the coffee machine and the cigarette machine were. One of the people that I got to know while working there was Peter (not his real name), who owned a plane that he hangared with Cherry Tree Aviation and went flying frequently during the work week (a perk of owning his own business). He was a very jovial fellow, like to joke and tell stories, liked by everyone.

When Peter learned that Cherry Tree was closing down and I was losing a job, he asked me if I wanted to come work for him at his small manufacturing company. He had a very small office with two people, a bookkeeper and an accountant. The bookkeeper handled all the accounts receivable and the order desk, while the accountant handled the accounts payable, and all the accounting issues like payroll and taxes. The bookkeeper was a young woman my age who was married and expecting her first child and planning to quit work about a month before her due date, which was coming up soon and he hadn't found a suitable replacement. Like John Pritchard, Peter had decided that I was probably capable of learning the job even if I didn't have formal office or bookkeeping training. 

Two weeks later I started work at Peter Works (not its real name). Most of the building space was taken up by the machine shop were their product, car and motorcycle headers, were fabricated by skilled machinists (like my father). At the very front of the building were two offices, the smaller of which was where the bookkeeper and accountant worked, and a slightly larger inner office that was Peter and his partner's. Peter was the idea guy, the one who talked to customer, made deals and designed the headers. His partner was an older, gruff fellow who was the one who turned the ideas into reality, he had engineering and machinist training and spent most of his time in the machine shop supervising and guiding the half dozen young men who fabricated the headers. 

For those who don't know headers are a fancy exhaust system (generally for cars pre-1980, but also for motorcycles) that help exhaust flow away from the engine and improve engine performance (increased horsepower and torque), so important for people who raced stockcars or motorcycles. Customers ranged from individuals, to small car and bike shops, to large distributers like JC Whitney in Chicago that had a huge catalog business of all kinds of car and motorcycle parts. [The image is of a set of headers designed for a small block engine Chevy car 1955 to 1957). Header design is specific to a car make and type, as the pipes must fit into tight spaces in an engine. 

It turned out that the bookkeeping was the easiest part of the job to learn. I was taught how to do double entry bookkeeping in paper ledgers and how to make daily reports to the bank on income and outflow of money. The hardest part of the job was working the order desk. I had a detailed catalog to refer to, but still needed to learn a lot of specifics about particular car makes and designs. It was necessary to know the exact size of an engine in cubic centimeters (ccs), and whether the engine had any additional modifications. If I didn't know an answer I had to track down one of the bosses and ask, but unlike the young woman I was replacing, I started taking notes, so that I would only ever have to ask a particular question one time.

I liked both parts of the job. I found working with numbers and details to be calming. Even the part where at the end of the day everything had to total up with no more than 1 penny difference was enjoyable. On the rare days that I had made a mistake the hunt for the missing  money to correct the error was challenging and fun. Talking with customers on the phone was also fun, most of the time. There was always some guy somewhere who didn't want to talk to a "girl" about technical stuff and would insist that I get him a man to talk to. Usually when that happened I would have Bob the accountant (often the only other person in the office at the time) take the phone. Bob was a good man, and a great accountant, but he knew nothing at all about cars or headers. Usually after the guy talk fruitlessly to Bob for a while, he'd be willing to do business with me, because I generally knew what I was talking about. 

Bob was an interesting character. He was a high functioning alcoholic, something everyone knew. But twice in the five months I worked there, he did not show up for work for two or three days in a row. The bosses would say "oh, Bob's gone on another bender," and nothing was ever said to him when he would show up again, sober and ready to work.

I particularly liked dealing with the small car and bike shops that would buy directly from the company. Over the months I developed friendly, bantering relationships with several of the men who ran those shops. One in particular I remember was a custom bike shop in Ohio. They ordered headers almost weekly and the owner was a funny and pleasant guy with an amazing voice. 

In addition to the headers we also sold t-shirts and bumper stickers with the company logo. Requests for those often came in the mail from teens and adults with five dollar bills for the t-shirts. It was my job to select the right size shirt, package it and mail it out to the client. 

There were only two problems I had working at Peter Works. The first I simply decided to ignore (and not tell my father about). The shop was not unionized, and about two months after I began to work there the International Machinists decided to try to unionize it. They began picketing the building during working hours. Now I was raised in a union family, and my dad was a member of the International Machinists, and I was brought up never to cross a picket line. It made me very uncomfortable (and as I said I couldn't tell my father about it) but I decided that I wanted to keep the job, so kept coming to work despite the pickets.  Part of my argument to myself was that Peter gave all the machinists raises, so that their wages were actually above union scale to keep them from organizing, and none of the workers were interested in foregoing those higher wages to sign a union card. Of course, Peter did not give out benefits like health care or retirement, but most younger workers didn't have the foresight to realize how important those were. The whole situation made Bob and me grumble, because our pay (mine was only $2 an hour) did not change, because at that time there were no unions for office workers to join. 

The UPS drivers who picked up our shipments also would not cross a picket line, but the pickets would leave as soon as the workers did at 4:30 PM, and the truck drivers were willing to make us their last call of the day, and show up after the pickets and the workers (including me and Bob) were gone. This arrangement with the truck drivers unfortunately made it easier for the second problem to arise. 

Small manufacturing companies without large capital investment often face a problem. To sell a product you have to make it, and to make it you need to buy materials (in the case of headers this is mostly steel), and pay wages of workers. This is acerbated by the fact that it often takes a long time, weeks if not months for small companies to get payment from their customers. To solve this problem banks would offer accounts receivable loan funding. Accounts receivable funding still exists, often from on-line lenders as well as established banks. How it works is that when a small manufacturing company ships product to a buyer, the bank will loan them about 80% to 90% of the value of that as yet unpaid shipped invoice. This means that for every item you ship out your door, you get money the next day from the bank to pay for new materials and current wages while you wait for your customer to pay you. When the customer does pay you, you pay back the bank for the loan plus small interest, and pocket the remainder (so less than 20% to 10% of payments coming in stay with the company, and the bank gets what they loaned out plus interest. This was why at the end of every business day, I had to send Peter Works' bank a report, the report had to include: bookkeeping summary for the day, a photocopy of all the invoices for products shipped out that day, and every few weeks a check for the money owed the bank. 

That year, 1974 was in the middle of a recession (the recession lasted 1973 through 1975) and it was made much worse by the Arab Oil Embargo that began in November 1973. Gasoline was not just much more expensive than it had been, it was also scarce. I had given up driving a car to work altogether in 1974 because in California one could only get gas every other day (depending upon whether your license plate ended with an even or an odd number), and waiting in a gas line could take hours that I did  not have. I bought a really nice 10 gear bike, a Peugeot, and rode the bike to work along the San Francisco bay. It was a glorious way to commute. But the difficulty in getting fuel and the overall recession hit companies like Peter Works heavily because they provided parts for vehicles that used oil products. 

Because of the International Machinists picket line in front of the factory, all our product was shipped out after I and all the other workers other than the owners had left. As a result rather than reporting shipping invoices the day they went out, I would find a stack on my desk in the morning when I came in, enter them into the books, copy them and add them to that days bank report. It was in my fourth month there that I slowly realized what was happening, and it took a phone call from one of our largest customers, a large retailer that carried Peter Works headers in their catalog. The call was a complaint about not having received a shipment of headers that had been ordered. I found that confusing, because I had recorded and reported invoices for those products, with shipping labels to them in the previous weeks. 

It took me a while to put the pieces together, but what was happening, was that after hours when only the owners were there, they were creating fake invoices and shipping labels for products that did not exist (they didn't exist because they didn't have enough money for the materials to make them). Through me they were sending false information to the bank and getting funding for product that did not exist yet in hopes of getting enough funding to actually create the product and ship it before the deception was discovered. I began to realize that I had been asked to lie to customers about their orders being produced and when they would be shipped, when there was little certainty of that happening. 

The knowledge of the deception and cheating took a great toll on me. I did not like having been used as part of this scam. While I did not report what was happening to anyone outside the company, I did immediately proffer two weeks notice. Those last two weeks there were the most uncomfortable working situation I think I've ever had. 

I don't know what the consequences, if any, to the company and its owners were. I do know that the company still exists today, located in a different city, under the same name, still making headers, which is why I have changed the name of the owner and the company. It was my first real brush with the corruption that exists in business, and a major factor in why I have come to distrust those who make large amounts of money through business. I have come to know many honest small business owners over the years. None of them because rich from their businesses. I tend to be suspicious of those who do. 

Working in Aviation: Cherry Tree Aviation

 

Writing about my experiences flying on company passes and about the role of the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) in commercial aviation, gets me thinking about the eight months I spent working for a fixed based operator (FBO) at San Carlos Airport in California. I was a recent college graduate with a BA in sociology. My plans for graduate school had fallen through at the last minute because there was a recession and funding had been cut for the program I had been accepted into. My only option was to come home to my parents and start looking for work. 

Not one of my college professors had ever talked about the kinds of work that a degree in sociology might support. If they talked about anything it was graduate school, and at the time I didn't consider graduate school in sociology to be an option. Years later I learned about all kinds of jobs in local, state and federal government that welcomed folks with sociology degrees. But at the time, in 1973, I only knew to look for businesses. Luckily I had strong typing skills, so I went looking for jobs that would use that skill. 

Something that younger people don't realize is that in 1973, almost all jobs advertised in local papers were categorized by gender. There were two separate columns - jobs for hire male, and jobs for hire female. Rules were rigid and a young woman could not just go after jobs advertised for males. I was dogged, every day for two weeks, I got up, opened up the morning paper, circled all the jobs I thought I might possibly qualify for, then got in the car and drove to each and every location. Some required a call ahead and an appointment, but most one could just show up and fill out the employment form. Most employers gave you a typing test (which I aced), and many also gave a general knowledge test (which I also aced), but in the end, almost all of them hired a young woman with formal secretarial training over the young woman with a BA in sociology. In those two weeks I applied for at least 60 jobs. 

At the end of the first week, one of the places that I interviewed was a small aviation company called Cherry Tree Aviation at the San Carlos airport about 10 minute freeway drive from my parents home. The president, John Pritchard, of the company which was very small, interviewed me and liked me. He was particularly interested in the fact that I'd gone to Oberlin College. He had spent more than a decade working for the FAA at the big tracking station just outside Oberlin and knew the community and the college well. But in the end he told me they decided to go with a young lady who had formal secretarial training. And I went on to another week of job hunting.

 The second week did not provide any job offers either. I was not too discouraged, but rather, more determined than ever to start looking anew the next week. But that Saturday, I got an unexpected call from Mr. Pritchard. He said that the young woman they had hired had not worked out and was I still interested in working for Cherry Tree, if so I should come to work at 8 am on Monday. He told me on the phone that I might not have formal secretarial training, but he knew Oberlin College and if I was an Oberlin graduate than I ought to be able to learn anything I needed on the job. 

So the third Monday in June 1973, I started working at Cherry Tree Aviation. A fixed base operator was the workhorse of general aviation in those days. Cherry Tree Aviation did multiple things in the field of aviation.  First, the company had two pilots and two planes that could be chartered for a wide range of purposes. Second, they owned hangars that could be rented by individual plane owners to keep their planes, and they owned tie-down spaces (places outside to keep a private plane). Third, they had a professional mechanic who maintained their own planes but who could also do work for private individuals with planes. The mechanic was allocated a large hangar for maintenance use. Fourth, they rented space to even smaller, specialized aviation businesses: a parachute jump and skydiving school, a small flight instruction school (who had one plane and two instructors), and a two person helicopter company that did charter work. Fifth, they operated aviation fuel tanks and fuel trucks that scouted the field constantly looking for visiting planes to fuel. Sixth, Cherry Tree entered into a partnership with a man who sold planes, both new ones for Piper Aircraft and used planes. 

Technically I was hired to work for the aircraft salesman, a man who went by the name "Tom" Sawyer. That actually should have been a hint about the man's character. I was to be his secretary, do all of his correspondence, answer his phone, etc. I had a desk in the central  office area, where everyone gathered for coffee and conversation, and the other secretary for the company answer phones. As it turned out, there being a recession going on, plane sales were almost non-existent, and so I got called upon to do lots of other things for anyone who needed something done. Mr. Pritchard would ask me to help him come up with advertising campaigns, and have me work on promotional materials. The pilots would ask me to do paper work for them. Even then I often ran out of things to do. So I started volunteering to do things like learning how to move the planes around and to wash them. I would bring clothes to change into for that, from my "office dress". 

It was the kind of business where one could go many days in a row without anything much happening, and then something would happen and we'd have multiple requests for charter work. Much of the charter work we did would come without any warning. For example, we did charter ambulance flights for the military. It took me a long time to understand what was going on. This was still during the Vietnam War years, and it was not at all uncommon for young men who were tired of serving to go AWOL and run off into the rural areas of California. Then something would happen to them, they'd break a leg, or get sick, or get in an accident, and suddenly local law enforcement or hospitals would notify the military that they had an AWOL soldier or sailor in their jurisdiction. The military would hire us to go get their wayward men. Depending upon the severity of the illness or injury a nurse or maybe even two nurses would have to be hired for the flight from the local nurses registry. There would be a sudden flurry of phone calls and arrangements to be made and the main secretary would need my help to handle all of it. 

After I'd been with Cherry Tree for about six months, the Navy called us with a job to retrieve a man in a full-body cast (he'd had a motorcycle accident) from Chico. We were given several days to plan for this, and it was going to be on a Saturday, so the pilot asked me if I'd like to ride "shot-gun" with him, get to go flying on a beautiful day. It was a gorgeous day, the sky was so blue and it went on forever, there were no clouds anywhere and you could see great distances, that thing that pilots call CAVU (ceiling and visibility unlimited). I actually got a chance to fly the plane for a while, and do some simple slow banks and turns. It was an amazing day. We picked up the man and a nurse at Chico and came home. The man was quiet and said almost nothing. When the flight was over, and the man had been placed into a Navy ambulance and taken away, the pilot reached under the seat I'd been sitting in and pulled out a pistol. It turned out I actually was riding "shotgun" so to speak. He explained that while they had never had a problem, these men were in fact fugitives and might fight to get away. The only reason that he had decided it was safe to bring me, rather than the other pilot who was also former military and trained with firearms was that they knew the man was in a full-body cast and could barely move. 

Another kind of charter flight that we often did was for news organizations, TV stations and newspapers when there was breaking news and the reporters wanted to get there quickly. These also were things that often happened with little warning and involved an all hands on deck response. During my time at Cherry Tree Aviation there were several earthquakes in nearby parts of northern California, for which TV camera crews were eager to get footage. One time when the task of talking to the news departments and scheduling flights for crews, I made a rookie error. I put the camera crews from two competing network affiliates in one plane. No news center wants their aerial footage to be from exactly the same angle as that of their competitors it would seem. 

Not only was there a recession happening, but in October of 1973 an event occurred that rocked the small aviation industry, as well as many other industries that relied on oil from the middle east. On October 6, 1973 (the war started on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur and also was in the middle of the holiest month of the Muslim world Ramadan)  an alliance of Arab nations lead by Egypt and Syria made a surprise attack on Israel. The war lasted until a truce was called on October 25, 1973. One of the many consequences of this war was an embargo by Arab oil producing states against the U.S. and other nations that had supported Israel in the conflict. The oil embargo went into effect almost immediately. Supply of aviation fuel was dramatically cut and prices skyrocketed. Aviation fuel sales had been a major portion of Cherry Tree Aviations revenue. Suddenly, the company only had enough fuel for their own planes, and none to sell. Not only did they need to stop selling fuel, they needed to sell their fuel trucks and lay-off all the young women who worked the fuel trucks. 

A little side note here: selling aviation fuel at a small airport is a very competitive business, at least two other fixed base operators at the very small San Carlos field also had fuel trucks running around the field trying to sell fuel. John Pritchard had very effective, if highly sexist idea. All the other operators hired young men to run their trucks. Cherry Tree Aviation not only hired attractive young women (college age or just out of college), they also outfitted them in bright blue hotpants (the term in 1970s for tight, very short shorts). It worked, until there was no more fuel to sell. 

The oil embargo affected the companies income in multiple ways - including the cost of heating the building.  The decision was made to lay off not only the young women who ran the fuel trucks, but also several of the other workers deemed non-essential, that included the young man who had done all the janitorial work (which was picked up by all of us who were left), the accountant, and the young woman who was the main secretary (who had been there for months before me). Pritchard justified laying her off, instead of me, by pointing out that I was really Tom Sawyer's employee, not Cherry Tree's, but it was really because he had come to find me a far more useful, flexible and interested employee. Moreover, he knew I'd do things like wash planes and get dirty, and the original secretary wouldn't do anything outside the office. I was also paid less, minimum wage, which was $1.80 an hour at that time. Note that the President took a salary only equivalent to $2 an hour for 40 hours a week, despite all the work he did outside those hours. Only the pilots and the mechanic were paid more, because the company couldn't operate without them. I know what folks were paid, because my new chores included doing the books and the payroll. 

My job became more and more interesting, and more and more varied. Mr. Pritchard would often sit down with me or call me into his office to talk about the business and the problems that it faced. He talked a lot about the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB). It was almost impossible for a small FBO to land a contract with the CAB for a regular "route" between two locations. Mr. Pritchard wanted Cherry Tree to start regular service between San Carlos and Reno, to take gamblers every weekend. We could do charter flights for people to anywhere, but the real money came from having regular flights, where one could fill all the seats and charge less per person. The big airlines also chaffed at the control of the CAB. The CAB limited the number of airlines and the number of transcontinental routes. Any large airline that was awarded one of the plumb transcontinental routes (like SFO to NYC or LAX to NYC) was also required to serve a number of smaller markets that often lost them money. The CAB guaranteed that every community that had an airport that could handle large planes would be served by the large airlines, even if they did so through subsidiary, regional, commuter airlines.  No city would get left behind, even if they weren't a money making market for the big airlines. But smaller air companies, like Cherry Tree, didn't get a chance at tackling those smaller markets either. 

Mr. Pritchard felt that the solution to Cherry Tree's problems was to be bought out by a somewhat larger aviation corporation. By December 1973, Mr. Pritchard had found a buy, and we became a subsidiary of a larger company. Now added to my work was writing reports of income and expenditures, activities and services and sending them daily to the "head" office. They took over accounting functions like issuing paychecks, all I did was report everyone's hours and the pilots' flight hours. I still had all my other responsibilities, manning the phones, scheduling charters, finding nurses for the ambulance flights, moving planes, washing planes, and being Mr. Pritchard's sounding board. 

I haven't said much about the man I officially worked for, "Tom" Sawyer. He was a slick operator, who craved to be much richer than he was. But he had not been very successful as a plane salesman, not for lack of trying, but simply because the market just wasn't there. Shortly before Christmas 1973, about the time that Cherry Tree was being taken over by the larger company. We became aware that Tom who had been a cosigner on the company checks, had cashed a couple of large checks (several thousand dollars each) with only his signature on them (not legal) and one of them had bounced. This was brought to our attention by the San Mateo County Sheriff who had come to arrest him for writing a bad check. Tom was not in the office that day, and none of us knew where he was. While the Sheriff was standing there talking with people, the phone rang and I answered it and it was someone from Pan American Airlines wanting to talk to Mr. Sawyer to tell him that his flight to South Korea was going to be delayed by several hours. We were able to ascertain that Tom was at the airport already waiting for his flight, so I gave the Sheriff all the information, flight number, gate number and the Sheriff talked to the airline agent to see if they could locate and keep an eye on him. Then off the Sheriff went to arrest Tom. I do not know how the story ended, other than Tom Sawyer was no longer associated with Cherry Tree Aviation after that day. 

Unfortunately, the sale of Cherry Tree Aviation to the larger company did not really help its bottom line. By Valentine's Day 1974, the decision was made to close the business down, and I lost my first post college job. Luckily I met a lot of people, who kept their planes in our hangers or used our charter services, through working there. One of them owned a small manufacturing company, Sanderson Racing Headers (which does still exist!) and needed a new bookkeeper. His current bookkeeper was pregnant and would be leaving the job before her baby was born. So I got signed up to work for Sanderson, before my job at Cherry Tree Aviation ended. 

Couple of little add-ons:  

One of the people who hangered his plane with us was a man named Stephen Bechtel, who drove the most beautiful Lamborghini (with a personalized license plate that said  STEEL) which he left in the hangar while he was out flying. I was in love with that Lamborghini. I didn't know until many years later who he actually was and all the things, many of them reprehensible for which Bechtel Corporation was responsible.

Cherry Tree Aviation rented space to a two person helicopter company called Golden Gate Helicopters. The company consisted of the owner/pilot and his secretary/assistant who could also fly. They did a lot of television and movie work, including work for the very popular show The Streets of San Francisco staring Karl Malden and Michael Douglas, both of whom I got to meet on a couple of occasions when they came down to fly out of San Carlos with the chopper. For one episode The Streets of San Francisco even chartered one of Cherry Trees Planes to be the "bad guy escaping" so the whole camera crew, etc. were at San Carlos Airport for that. 

Flying - Part 2

 

In 1960 United Air Lines purchased its first passenger jets, the DC 8 made by Douglas Aircraft. The company through a huge party for all of the workers at the San Francisco Maintenance Base and their families. The party was held inside one of the huge new hangers designed for the jet aircraft. There was food and live music by The New Christy Minstrels. The acoustics inside the hangar were amazing, especially when the band got the entire audience to participate in a round of Michael Rowed the Boat Ashore.  The highlight of the party was the opportunity to walk through the new DC 8 and see all the new features of the aircraft. 

The plane was so large, much longer than a DC 6 or DC 7 propeller plane, and somewhat wider as well. The initial DC 8's had only two rows on each side with only two seats together, just like the propeller planes, but the isles were wider, and the cabins felt much more open. Even someone over six feet tall could fully stand up in most of the plane. 

There was one small catch: pass passengers (i.e., employees and their families riding for free) were barred from riding on the jets when they were initially put into service. The ban did not last all that long.

 As I wrote in the first installment about flying as the child of an employee, all commercial air travel was tightly controlled by the  Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), a federal government regulatory agency that determined which airlines got which routes and how much could be charged for the various levels of service. Airlines were not able to compete with each other on the price, as the price of flights was determined for all airlines by the CAB. The CAB kept prices high so that they would adequately cover all the costs of regular maintenance, up-keep, and all the labor of pilots, stewardesses, and ground crew. The lowest cost coach fare for a round trip ticket from west coast (San Francisco) to east coast (Washington, DC) in the 1960's was about $550. Adjusted for inflation that is the same as about $5,600 today (2025) which is substantially more than a person would pay for a first-class round trip ticket today. In other words, air travel was out of the reach of most Americans in the 1960's. Affluent people, business men, and air line employees were the only frequent fliers. 

What this meant in practical terms was that the new big jet aircraft that United and other airlines now flew non-stop across the country were frequently only partially full, and at some times nearly empty.  As a result the ban on pass riding employees on the jets ended pretty quickly. The airlines realized that filling those seats with employees on vacation looked better for business than having a sea of empty seats. Riding on a pass as an employee came with some rules and responsibilities, one of which was how one dressed. Employees could be barred from flights if they or their family members were not sufficiently dressed up, especially since it soon became common practice for employees to be placed in the first class section, as those seats were less often filled than coach class. So I was always wearing dresses and dress shoes while flying. When I was in college I sometimes envied my friends who were paying for their tickets because they could get on a plane in blue jeans and a sweat shirt, but I always had to be dressed up. 

Most of my memories of flying on jets are memories of flying first class and all that entailed in the 1960's and 1970's. This included not only family vacations from California back to Virginia to see relatives, but also my four years of solo travel while going to college in Ohio. Cross country first class travel was leisurely and luxurious. Meals in the first class cabin were served on real china plates with real silverware, actual crystal glasses, and sparkling white, cloth napkins. The food was served hot from china serving dishes on a cart directly to your plate. Often one of the entres was roast beef, where a large roast (enough to feed dozens of people) sat on a wooden carving board on the cart, and the stewardess would cut the amount you wanted from either the end the was more well done, or the end that was more on the rare side. When you were old enough (as I was in college) the stewardess would pour you wine in a crystal goblet from the several bottles available on her cart. The food was always delicious. 

The first year that my family and I traveled by jet was also in the first year that Dulles International Airport was open (it opened in November 1962 and we traveled there in the summer of 1963). The Dulles International Airport was the first airport specifically designed for jet planes, and only the second airport directly owned and operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (the FAA). It was initially authorized by President Eisenhower and took 12 years from authorization to opening. Eero Saarinen was the architect who designed its sweeping roof and modern lines. It was by far my favorite airport, so open and airy and modern. And it had the first "digital" clocks I'd ever seen. where the numbers were on cards that clicked over with each minute. 

The most unusual thing about Dulles was its "mobile lounges". Jet planes did not taxi up to the terminal building at Dulles, but sat out away from the building on the tarmac. Passengers would present their tickets at the gate inside the terminal and then be ushered into a large room with comfortable seating all around it. The room had many windows so that passengers could watch what was happening on the tarmac.  

One of my most memorable travel experiences happened at Dulles, to be honest I cannot remember if it was on our first trip in 1963, or a later trip in 1965, although I expect the latter. We were at the end of our vacation, tired and ready to go home. The plane was unusually full, so there was some question about whether or not we would be able to get on. Also unusual was that the president of United Air Lines, William Patterson was also on the flight. I can remember him standing and talking with my father in the mobile lounge. Patterson helped to make sure that we got on the flight, even though we had to be separated and scattered throughout the plane. There were five of us and they were able to seat my mother and my youngest brother together (he would have been 8 at the time), my other brother (12) and me (14) were sitting alone among strangers, as was my father. The plane was full, every seat filled even in first class. And something went wrong. 

I'm sure they told us what it was, but I don't remember it specifically enough, just that there was a crucial part that wasn't working. At first they thought that they could fix it. So they held all of us on the plane while the maintenance crews worked. That took a while. Then the word came that it could not be fixed, that it had to be replaced and the part had to be flown in from somewhere else. That would take some time, but it would take less time than it would to free up another jet and fly it in. It was summer time, and very hot and humid and on the ground, the planes own air conditioning system wouldn't work. 

Mr. Patterson took control of the situation. He told everyone what was going on, told people that he was ordering ground HVAC trucks to come and hook up to the plane, ordering more food and drink, making all drinks free. If anyone wanted to leave they would happily accommodate them, but to my knowledge no one left the plane. If they did they did so quietly without any fuss. The air conditioning got hooked up, the plane cooled off, the food and booze started to flow, and a really big party got going. No one got belligerent or angry, although some adults got quite tipsy and silly. There was lots of laughter and joking and storytelling.  We were on the ground, on the tarmac for four hours total before being cleared for take-off. In our family we always talked about the time the passengers got high before the plane took off. Can you imagine any of that happening today?

Unlike during the era of the propeller planes, the DC 6s and DC 7s, during the era of jet travel my family never experienced being "bumped" and only that one time at Dulles ever had difficulty getting on a flight. During my four years of college when I traveled back and forth between San Francisco and the Cleveland Hopkins Airport, I also never really had difficulty getting on a flight, and usually ended up in first class. However, my sophomore year, I decided that instead of going home for fall break I would go visit relatives in Virginia. That experience was very different. Planes from Cleveland to DC (or to other cities on the eastern seaboard like NYC or Boston) were very frequently full, and not easy to get on for a pass-passenger, even though such flights were far more frequent than the cross-continental ones. 

I set out for fall break in the early morning, and did not get on the flight for which I'd registered. I had to find a payphone, call and re-register to stand-by for another flight. This one in about 3 hours. Lot's of college students who were not children of airline employees also used standby as a way to get cheaper paid tickets, so many of my fellow students were stuck in the airport with me waiting for a flight. There was a young man, who was a couple of years older than me, a senior when I was a sophomore, that was also stuck waiting for an open flight to Chicago. We had worked together in the college cafeterias for more than a year, but had never had time for a long conversation. I think we probably talked on and off for a total of five hours that day, through several missed flights. 

He finally got one to Chicago, but I reached the end of the day without getting a flight to Washington, DC and I was panicking. I didn't have any way to get back to the college, not much money, and my next possible flight was the next morning. It looked like I might have to stay in the airport all night. I found a pay phone to re-register to standby for the first flight in the morning. The woman working in reservations asked me for a phone number for contact, and I started to cry. I told her, my situation, stuck at the airport with no place to go, and an amazing thing happened. She said that she worked there at the airport, and that I could meet her when she got off work, ride the metro-train into Cleveland and stay overnight at her apartment, sleep on the couch and then ride the train back in the morning with her for my flight.  

I remember her kindness, but I don't remember her name or even what she looked like, although I do remember her roommate - a very vivacious blonde. I remember the metro-train, how clean it was, how smooth and quiet it was. I remember the apartment, the couch I slept on and the poster on the wall. The poster was picture of a single large tree in the middle of a field with low hills behind it and the words "Let it Be" on it (the title of a Beatles song). I also remember how miserable it was not to have clean underwear, and how I never, once since that day ever went anywhere without a clean pair of underwear in my purse.  The next day, I got on the first plane and was on my way to visit with relatives - a story for another day. 

One last memorable plane ride: my very last one as a pass-passenger. I graduated from Oberlin College at the end of May 1973. I would not qualify for any more passes as an adult child, not in college after this my last trip, home after college. Unlike most of my friends, I did not go home immediately after graduation. The dorms were closed, but I was dating a man 15 years older than me who lived in town, and had moved in with him for a week. I had a couple of other friends who also lived in town, including a family that I had started as a babysitter for and become one of the family. I had ties to the town that went beyond the college and I wasn't quite ready to give them up yet. One of my friends, not the man I was dating, was a lawyer who who worked for the city of Oberlin as their local prosecutor, and he had plans to travel to San Francisco for a legal convention a week after my graduation. So part of the reason I delayed was so that I could have companionship, rather than fly alone which I had done for four years. 

On the day of our flight to San Francisco, the plane was not full, so I had no difficulty getting on it, but as was customary, the flight attendants wanted to move me to first class. My friend, Chuck, however, had a coach ticket and so I told I wanted to stay there, and someone else could get the bump to first class. This was only the second time I'd ever gotten to travel with a friend, and was really enjoying our conversation. I was a veteran traveler and Chuck had flown a number of times, but both of us were very much startled by the rather large bump and noise, almost like a small explosion, that occurred during our take-off. After we had gained some altitude, and leveled out a bit, the pilot came on the intercom and told us what had happened. At least one, and perhaps more of the tires on one of the landing gear had blown just as the plane lifted off. This presented no problems at all for us in our trip across the country, but could mean danger in landing in San Francisco. The decision was to continue on, alert San Francisco and take appropriate cautions on landing. 

The trip itself was extremely pleasant and unremarkable, I really enjoyed Chuck's company, we spent most of the time talking about shared interests and shared friends. But as we approached San Francisco, the pilot came back on to tell us what to expect. While everything might be okay, San Francisco was scrambling all its firefighting equipment and lining it up along the runway, just in case. The pilot warned us we would see not only fire trucks but also large numbers of ambulances, and that we would go through all the procedures of an emergency landing. In all my 22 years of flying I had never been through an emergency landing, although I knew after all those years exactly what to do. We had to take our glasses off, stow everything away, put our heads down and brace against the seat in front of us. Chuck and I expressed our appreciation to each other for having a friend to go through this with. 

The landing was the roughest I've ever experienced. Missing two tires on one side, lead to a very bumpy, rocky ride, but the plane stayed level, the fire trucks and ambulances were not needed, and we walked off the plane safe and sound. 

I have flown dozens of times after that last pass-passenger flight, but always as a paying customer. Moreover, plane travel has changed drastically since the 1970's. The CAB was eliminated in 1977. Airlines have been free to set their own rates, and also free to go bankrupt. My last trip by plane (probably my last ever plane travel) from Kentucky to San Francisco in 2013 was even first class, but it is nothing like it once was. 

Flying - Part 1

DC 6

As a child, I flew fairly frequently, not because my family was affluent, but quite the opposite, because U.S. airlines found that by giving their workers free travel they could pay well below the usual pay scale for various occupations. My dad was a licensed machinist, a member of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW) union, who worked for United Air Lines (UAL) at their San Francisco main maintenance based from the time I was 6 months old until I was 25 years old (and he was 65).  

For the first fifteen years of my life, my father and all the other IAMAW workers for the airlines were paid substantially less per hour than machinists in other industries. The airlines argued that they provided workers and their families with free air travel, an untaxed benefit in those days, and therefore did not need to pay their employees more. This was successfully challenged by the Great Airline Strike of 1966, but that is a story for another blog post. This post is about what it was like to be a frequent flyer in the 1950's and early 1960's, as a pass-riding employee family and child. 

The earliest trip I can remember would have been when I was three and a half, when my brother Charlie was just over a year old. That meant that we needed three seats on the plane, two for mom and dad, one for me, and Charlie would have to sit on mom's lap. As an employee family riding on a free pass, we were always on "stand-by" meaning that we would call in, tell the reservations agent our intentions as the flight we wished to take, but have no actual guarantee of getting on that flight. We had to show up in person at the gate and wait until everyone else was boarded, and if there were enough seats left over we got on. If not, we stayed at the airport and waited for the next flight that might take us in the direction we wished to go. 

Charlie and me in 1954

The uncertainty meant that my parents had to plan for food, drink and diapers for Charlie. They had to be ready to take naps in the airport. Because we were low income we could not afford to buy things at the airport (or on the plane where meals were not free), so we brought our own food - sandwiches or sometimes cold fried chicken and lots of fruit. Sometimes we got on the first flight, sometimes we waited for hours, but we always eventual got a flight. 

The first plane I remember riding in was a DC 6 which had four propeller engines, two on each wing (see photo at top of post). Made by the Douglas Aircraft Company from 1946 to 1958, it was the primary work horse of U.S. airlines during those years. The body of the DC 6 is not much narrower than modern jets (excluding "wide-bodies") and there were only two seats on each side of the plane, so a family like ours that needed three seats was always in at least two rows and as the last comers, often not rows near each other. The seats on those small DC 6's were wider and more comfortable than what you find on today's jets. The isles were quite a bit narrower. 

The DC 6 did not have a highly pressurized cabin. It did flew at a much lower altitude than present day jets do. That meant many things for a child: amazing views of the world below the plane because we were much closer to it; skimming just above the clouds most of the time, but sometimes actually flying through clouds which always felt mysterious and fabulous; and a really significant change in pressure on take-offs and landings that was really felt in your ears. One of the tasks of stewardesses (yes, stewardesses, they were always young, unmarried women) was to pass out chewing gum to every passenger both before take-off and again just before landing. Chewing the gum would help people adjust to the changes in air pressure and relieve the pain in their ears. It was also a task that stewardesses were glad to hand over to a bright, cute blonde child who felt very grown-up going from row to row offering people gum. There were other small tasks that the stewardesses might give me to do, but the one that sticks in my mind the most is the handing out of gum. 

Not only did the DC 6 fly lower than today's jets, but it was slower, had less fuel capacity, and had much less range. In addition to the technical issues that limited range, all civilian air traffic was controlled by the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB) a government regulatory agency. The CAB controlled which airlines got which routes, how much they could charge for each route, and how many hours that pilots and cabin crews could work. In the 1950's the CAB limited airline crews to 8 hours of work per 24 hour period. NO overtime allowed. An airline that allowed a crew to work longer than eight hours, even if it was just a few minutes could be heavily fined by the CAB. So if one was traveling from one coast to another in the United States, one could not do so in one plane with one crew because it took too long. 

Now my family's trips by plane were always from San Francisco (where we lived) to visit my parents' families in Virginia, where we were from. In the 1950's those trips were never non-stop. The best flights had only one stop in a major hub like Chicago, but often the only flights we could get on were shorter hops, like to Denver or Salt Lake City, and then required at least two more hops to make it all the way to Virginia (to National Airport, now Reagan in DC, or Friendship, now BWI Thurgood Marshall, in Baltimore). 

Multiple stops and plane changes were probably irritating for paying customers, but they could be seriously problematic for stand-by flyers like ourselves. It was not uncommon to lose our seats to paying passengers at an intermediary stop. Sometimes that meant a few hours of sitting in a strange airport waiting for another flight, on rare occasions it meant an unbudgeted and difficult to afford overnight at a hotel. When I was six and our family had expanded to five members, Charlie was four and baby Frank was less than one, we had a trip where we were first "bumped" (removed in favor of paying passengers) in Salt Lake City. This was not problematic as one of mom's brothers lived nearby in Ogden. So we had an unscheduled but delightful visit for several days with my Utah cousins. Then come Monday we got a flight from Salt Lake to Chicago and got bumped again. The next flight that was at all possible was at least 12 hours away the next day, so all five of us including a wailing baby ended up in a very cheap Chicago motel room with no air conditioning in August. Not a pleasant memory. Luckily we found a flight the next morning and were in the arms of family again in Virginia. 

In my second installment I will talk about how the introduction of jets changed our experiences as pass riding passengers.