Everybody loves planes!
And with that thought in mind, and coinciding with a great oportunity for someone close to myself, I’ll dedicate this post to her:
As it’s commonly known, the flight attendants, or cabin crew, are traditionally females… generally wearing a tight handkerchief around their soft necks … well that’s indeed true, but a curious fact about it is that their origins are not female-based : the first steward was a young male named Heinrich Kubis, a couple of years before the first WW.
After this trial, the sons of the main businessman and heads of the airflights companies started to work as stewards at the planes, and they started to be called “cabin boys”, whose main purpose wasn’t security (as it is now), but just serving and granting a fine flight to the passengers.
As times passed by, aviation evolved, getting prestigious day after day, more and more cabin boys were needed, untill disaster knocked at the world’s door: the Great Depression (1927).
…
…
Something happened by that time: not many work positions were avaliable, and a huge number of people applied for every job, and a steward job wasn’t the exception. But something unexpected happened!… A huge airline from that time (Transcontinental and Western Airlines) recieved over 2000 applications for a handful of steward positions… from women!!
And then someone’s mind just started to work: hey! no matter how cool, goodlooking, handsome and charming a boy is, he will never, never be able to compete with a girl at face-to-face public jobs.
Companies easily changed their “cabin boys” for good-looking youg girls, who wanted (and needed) the job, and so the legend was forged.
But the part where the main character lives happily ever after doesn’t start here: in fact, for those premier girls who dared being the first stewardess in history didn’t have an easy time: while being poorly payed (around 1$ per hour… working over 100h a month) they had to deal with gropers, padding butts… and as in every sad story, at some point a white flag appears, with a good-looking knight riding a big horse… in this case it was called Rights Fight
Black people were fighting for their rights, women were fighting also for equality!!
Maybe the next post will further explain the last part… it’s getting too long 🙂
Summarising:
At the end, they could earn some respect for their job, and even though most of the people won’t know, there’s another curious fact conceerning stewards and stewardesses: they’re not there to serve snacks: they’re there to ensure the safety of the flight, so be respectful to them, they don’t deserve ill manered weirdos trying to mess with the harmony of the plane and disturbing their workplace just ’cause they want to.
The Lost Dimension 