AN AIRLINE CAREER BEGINS

It's surprising how a career starts. Looking back on my life, I guess it was fate. I started out as a dental technician to join a good friend who, like me, was waiting to join the Army. I needed something to do. The army provided me the opportunity to work with dentists, and this ended up leading me to the United States. The unpleasant situation which made me to give up this profession, forced me to seek another career path, which fortunately led me to one that I got to love. Back in the 1940's the airline industry was really just getting started. I didn't know it at the time, but here I was on the ground floor with United Air Lines which, in the future, was to become a major American airline.

I reported for work in November 1946, as a reservations agent. My job was to answer the reservation phone and book the caller on a flight to the destination requested. There were no computers in those days; each flight and date had a page with spaces for the number of seats available. When I started, our airplanes were 21 passenger DC-3s. When each 21 spaces were filled out with names written in, the flight was sold out. United's main route was from the West Coast to New York, with stops in various cities enroute.

I had my first flight as an employee in December of 1947, when the company sent me to Chicago to attend a two weeks training course. It was quite an experience; it took us three days to get there. Our DC-3 was about half full. The Stewardess, that's what they used to call these lovely ladies, gave us all blankets, as whatever heating the aircraft had was not enough for winter operation. We made three stops enroute and, at two of them, Salt Lake City and Omaha, we landed but had to stay overnight due to snow storms. At the two stops where we could not take off, United put us all up in a hotel. Finally we reached Chicago.

The United Airlines training classes were held right at the Chicago Airport. As I remember, we had about twenty participants; most from SanFrancisco, as this was to be united's main station at that time. All of us were accommodated at a nearby hotel. We would be picked up every morning and transported to the airport. The weather was terrible, the wind blew, and it snowed almost every day. Chicago's nickname as the "Windy City" certainly was apropos. The two weeks went by fast and we were soon enroute back to beautiful SanFrancisco.

While I was attending classes in Chicago, my mother moved to SanFrancisco to be with me. This was very fortunate as I had only been at work for a few days when I came down with the measles. It was just at that time that United decided that they had hired too many people as they were anticipating receiving a number of DC-4 aircraft from the military. The military was reducing their need for all the aircraft they used for the war, but ended up delaying their return to the airlines for almost six months. The SFO reservations manager had the job of deciding who would be furloughed. As I was one of the last hired, they tried to reach me at home to give me the bad news. Since I was sick in bed, my mother took the phone call. Instead of telling me, she somehow got an appointment with the reservations manager and talked him out of furloughing me. I don't know exactly what she told him, probably something about how dedicated to my job I was, how much I loved my job, etc. I guess it worked as I kept my job. (Never underestimate the power of your mother.)

 

Being a reservations agent was not a difficult job. I got to talk to a lot of very interesting people who wanted to fly somewhere and learned about all the different destinations in the USA. Flying was not the popular means of transportation that it is today. The old DC-3s were not pressurized so they couldn't fly over about 13,000 feet. Today they can fly at 30,000 feet or higher. The turbulence back then could be high at times and weather would often result in delays or cancellation of flights. In some ways, this has not changed. Mother Nature still has a say in this.

I remember being at the airport when welcomed the first DC-4 in SanFrancisco. Compared to the DC-3s, it had 44 seats instead of 21, and I remember remarking to a fellow employee: "Where in California, are we going to find 44 people who all want to go somewhere at the same time"? Filling 21 seats on a DC-3 was not always easy, back in 1946 we would often have to assure people that flying was safe, that they wouldn't get a nose bleed and that the stewardess was a registered nurse (as it was in those days). I had been with the Company for almost a year when, in November of 1948, United had a fatal crash in Brice Canyon.

As it happened after every commercial air line crash, people would cancel reservations. Phone activity would drop dramatically. It was at that time that United and Eastern airlines made an agreement on personnel. Since neither airline competed for passengers (United was primarily an East West carrier and Eastern a North/ South carrier). The agreement called for United to loan personnel to Eastern during the winter, and Eastern would loan personnel to United in the summer season. This agreement was very timely for us as the Brice Canyon crash cut deeply into our passenger loads and once again we had more employees than needed. That's when I was asked, "Would you like to spend the winter working with Eastern Airlines?" I thought for about thirty seconds… and responded YES. It was on my first anniversary with United that I found myself enroute to sunshiny Miami.