From Devi... It was just fun and surprising to see myself and my buddies in the Wall Street Journal. They really were the good 'ole days!! AND ALL MY STORIES ARE TRUE!!
About 450 American Airlines retirees gathered for a reunion last week near Los Angeles International Airport, where most of them worked at some point in their careers. Like many gatherings of old-time airline workers these days, the reunion was bittersweet—a celebration of great careers, great friends and long-gone great times.
Pioneers who helped build American into what was once the world's largest airline grimaced with talk of lousy service, frequent delays, reorganization and a pending acquisition by US Airways Group Inc.
Retired chairman and chief executive Robert Crandall attended, recounting how American in the 1970s was a small, failing carrier with old planes and bad labor disputes. The company moved from New York to Dallas, launched an industry-leading computerized reservation system and the first major frequent-flier program. The airline would triple in size.
"We did something exceptional," he told the cheering audience. Here are some of the stories from that crowd:
Ms. Bellows was one of the L.A. reunion attendees to show up wearing a vintage uniform from the 1970s.
She recalled one time a full 747 flying from Los Angeles to New York was loaded with 125 kosher meals, but only 50 people said they had ordered the special meal. Flight attendants got hysterical, she said, when they realized they would get to the back of the plane and have only kosher meals to serve. So Ms. Bellows decided to create a contest. She announced a "special promotion" for that flight. The first 50 people who raised their hands would receive a special meal American was testing. Hands shot up quickly. Flight attendants stripped the kosher label off and "there was not one letter of complaint," she said.
Another time on an L.A.-to-Philadelphia flight in 1977, she had to decide whether to separate a couple in first class engaged passionately under a blanket. They were in the last row of first class, out of sight from everyone but the crew and an elderly woman seated across the aisle.
Another time on an L.A.-to-Philadelphia flight in 1977, she had to decide whether to separate a couple in first class engaged passionately under a blanket. They were in the last row of first class, out of sight from everyone but the crew and an elderly woman seated across the aisle.
"I said they paid for first class and nobody can see them, so let them go," she recalled.
Panic set in when the elderly woman asked to speak to someone in charge after landing. Fearing a major complaint, Ms. Bellows was relieved when the woman only wanted her to document what had happened.
"My daughter thinks I'm senile and she'll never believe me," the woman told her. Ms. Bellows wrote on the back of her business card, "Everything your mother says about this flight is true."
To ease a very long delay one Christmas, Ms. Bellows decided to entertain passengers by starting a Christmas carol singalong. "The whole plane started singing," she said.
Would that kind of fun happen today? "It would if I was flying," she said.
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