Come Fly the World

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Pan American World Airways, the only American airline flying exclusively international routes, employed thousands of young women as stewardesses who served as unofficial ambassadors, witnessed Cold War tensions and the Vietnam War firsthand, and helped reshape expectations for women in American society. Julia Cooke's narrative nonfiction account follows several of these women across a decade of adventure, danger, and social change.

The book opens with Lynne Totten, a recent biology graduate from small-town Baldwinsville, New York, arriving at the Pan Am Building on Park Avenue in 1969 for a stewardess interview. Intimidated by the polished women in the waiting room, Lynne nearly walked away. Her political consciousness had awakened during college through anti-war debates, and a painting course in Rome crystallized her desire to see the world. Her father, a World War II veteran, agreed to support her on one condition: She had to fly with Pan Am. Lynne's candor impressed the interviewer, and she received application forms, a sign of acceptance she did not initially recognize.

Cooke then introduces Karen Walker, a California native who arrived at Pan Am's Miami training school at the oldest acceptable hiring age of 26. Karen had worked at a U.S. Army service club in West Germany, where she witnessed racial segregation among American troops, then traveled independently through Europe and the Middle East. The six-week training program covered aircraft mechanics, emergency procedures, meal preparation, diplomatic etiquette, and grooming. Pan Am's training manual, Horizons Unlimited, emphasizes that stewardesses function as cultural ambassadors, learning about diverse religious customs and international cuisines. Grooming instruction, enforcing strict rules on makeup, hairstyles, and weight, occupied nearly as much time as first-aid training.

Cooke contextualizes the profession within the broader history of commercial aviation. Since 1930, the stewardess role had been consolidated as women's work. By the late 1950s, government-stabilized fares meant airlines competed on service, making stewardesses a key selling point for a predominantly male clientele. Airlines hired only three to five percent of applicants and enforced rules requiring dismissal upon marriage or at a set age. Pop culture increasingly sexualized the profession; Coffee, Tea, or Me?, a 1967 book ghostwritten by a male public relations executive, became a massive bestseller and spurred increasingly provocative airline advertising.

Pan Am's involvement in the Vietnam War deepened in 1966, when the Department of Defense began providing rest-and-recuperation leave for soldiers. Pan Am president Harold Gray offered to fly soldiers between Vietnam and R&R destinations for one dollar per month. Each stewardess crewing these flights received a Geneva Conventions identification card designating her a second lieutenant in the U.S. Armed Forces, to be carried at all times in case of capture. Clare Christiansen, a tall, ambitious Ohio woman, had joined Pan Am in 1955 and tried three times to move into management. She volunteered for the Hong Kong-based shuttle, seeing the assignment as offering financial security, meaningful work, and ambassadorship beyond routine service. The flights were emotionally intense: Soldiers appeared staggeringly young, growing silent as the plane approached Vietnam. Stewardesses coped with proximity to danger through small rituals: baking cookies on board, lending soldiers money, and mailing their letters.

A third central figure, Torild "Tori" Werner, joined Pan Am in 1966 after her Norwegian friends submitted a humorous application on her behalf. Tori had aspired to Norway's Foreign Service but discovered that women required a master's degree while men did not. Early in her career, soldiers in Accra, Ghana, boarded her plane and forcibly removed 19 Guinean political delegates at gunpoint, an incident that escalated into an international crisis. Despite her stepfather's urging to quit, Tori declined safer office jobs, reasoning that the work would entertain her a while longer. In New York, she roomed with American stewardesses to improve her English and volunteered at the United Nations.

Cooke traces Pan Am's ties to U.S. government interests from the airline's founding in 1927, when founder Juan Trippe built a mail route into the first commercial airline to circle the globe, aided by secret wartime contracts. In 1966, Trippe ordered 33 Boeing 747s for $750 million, heralding the second jet age. The airline also launched direct New York-to-Moscow flights as Cold War diplomacy, though the route lost money. By the early 1970s, Pan Am's finances deteriorated as its enormous 747s flew with empty seats amid recession, rising oil prices, and mounting competition.

The stewardesses' personal lives unfold against this backdrop of war and upheaval. Lynne attended the November 1969 Moratorium to End the War in Washington, DC. Her first war flight, picking up soldiers at Cam Ranh Bay in Vietnam, left her in tears after a young soldier reminded her of her brother. Karen's fiancé, Alan, disappeared before their wedding; Pan Am fired her for overstaying leave on a solo trip, but she talked her way back. She and Alan eventually married, though his infidelity strained the union. Tori broke off an engagement to an unfaithful pilot and rebuilt her life alone in California.

Legal battles over employment rights intensified through the late 1960s. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission ruled in 1968 that age and marriage restrictions applied only to female crew members violated Title VII, the employment-discrimination provision of the Civil Rights Act. Airlines gradually abandoned these bans, and stewardesses split from the pilots' union to form the Association of Flight Attendants in 1974. Cooke examines race and the profession through Hazel Bowie, a Black college student from Minnesota who applied to Pan Am after an Urban League representative provided applications. Hazel's mother, who had raised her amid the dangers of Jim Crow, feared for her safety. At Pan Am, Hazel bid Moscow routes, where her skin color and vibrant clothing attracted intense curiosity. Pop culture's sexualization of stewardesses provoked organized resistance from groups such as Stewardesses for Women's Rights, though most stewardesses focused on union negotiations rather than feminist activism.

The book's climax arrives in April 1975. The North Vietnamese army drove south, Saigon faced collapse, and children flooded into orphanages as terrified mothers, fearing Communists would kill biracial children, left infants over courtyard fences. After a C-5A cargo plane loaded with 243 children crashed shortly after takeoff, killing approximately 78 children and dozens of adults, Operation Babylift, the emergency airlift of Vietnamese children for overseas adoption, began. Karen, Lynne, and Tori, flying together for the first time, were diverted to Saigon to crew a chartered 747. On the ground, adults formed a chain to pass infants aboard. Tori, the senior crew member overseeing the cabin, arranged to board three undocumented Vietnamese nurses and located a razor so doctors could shave infants' scalps for IV insertion. Karen realized not all the children were true orphans when she overheard agency workers improvising names on paperwork. The plane landed in Guam, and Tori remained on the floor with children in her arms, reluctant to leave.

The aftermath revealed both humanitarian impulse and ethical complication. Over three weeks, 2,242 children arrived in the United States, but investigations found that at least 263 were never eligible for adoption. Birth mothers arrived seeking their children, and courts nearly all ruled in their favor. Pan Am's last flight out of Saigon carried employees and dependents, including four teenage sisters of the airline's sole Vietnamese stewardess, wearing borrowed Pan Am uniforms.

The epilogue traces the central women into later life. Tori rose through Pan Am's ranks, transferred to United Airlines when Pan Am sold its Pacific routes, and never married; she retired at 65 after lung cancer treatment. Lynne quit Pan Am when her husband took a job in Hong Kong and built a career in international relations. Karen quit in 1978 after a first-class passenger snapped his fingers at her, became a newspaper columnist, and appeared on Good Morning America at the 25th anniversary of Operation Babylift alongside one of the evacuated children. Pan Am declared bankruptcy in 1991 after the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act ended government control of fares and routes; within a decade, Pan Am, TWA, Braniff, and Eastern had all ceased to exist. Cooke reflects that as individuals, stewardesses shared an instinct to roam that propelled their growth; as a group, they permanently shifted the American woman's place in her country and the world.