Pan Am Unbuckled: A Very Plane Diary (4 page)

Pago Pago Plus One

Pretty much all flights across the Pacific, out of San Francisco went via Honolulu. When we knew we were scheduled to Tahiti, what we cared about the most was which day of the week our flight was leaving. If we were leaving on a Monday, our Papeete layover was about 36 hours. If we flew the flight that left on a Thursday, our Papeete layover was 4.5 days.

This day, we were on a pattern that gave us the long layover, and that was really great. We were lucky. We had a full passenger load and we were going into Pago Pago before continuing on to Papeete— but the long layover made the hard work worth it. I volunteered for the back galley, even though it was a full passenger load, and the back galley would be hard work. There was a delay for a mechanical which was making the departure later and later—and this made things bad for passengers and crew. Pan Am couldn’t cancel the flight— and the passengers were getting more and more upset.

Finally, after what had been a 4-5 hour delay, we left Honolulu. By then, most passengers were not interested in a meal, but just fell asleep. We went through the cabin and pulled down the window shades. Because I was working the back galley, I was assigned the first crew rest. I was all tucked in with a pillow and blanket at the back rear exit when I heard the call bell. From where I was sitting, I could see the call button lit up in the galley—but it was MY rest time, so I didn’t respond immediately. It rang again.

Highly annoyed— that this would cut into my crew rest time— I went ahead and answered it. I looked down the aisle and there were no lights on in the economy cabin. Now I’m really annoyed that it must be coming from first class. Where was the first class crew, that they weren’t answering their lights? I just wanted to answer it and get back to sleep. The last row in first class had a lit call button. This lady was very irritated. I asked her if I could help her and she said ‘yes, you really have to do something about the children in the first row in economy. I can’t get to sleep with all of the noise.”

She was right. When I looked, I realized that the passengers in the first row of economy were Samoan children who were rather large— and there were five of them crammed into a three-seat row. I asked them what was happening that they were not in their assigned seats.

“Our mother made us move.”

“Why?”

“She needed to lie down.”

“Where is your mother?”

They pointed to a woman lying down— three seats back and across the aisle. I went back prepared to tell the mother that she must reseat her children with her—as it was illegal and unsafe to have them piled up the way they were. I was about to make my speech, when I realized that she didn’t look well.

“Are you all right?”

“No.”

“Can I do anything for you?”

“No.”

“Do you know what’s wrong?”

“Yes” she kept her answers simple.

“What?” I persisted.

“I’m having a baby” she groaned.

“No!” was all I could think to say back. She was a large person with the type of physique that one couldn’t easily recognize that she was pregnant. She was laying down— in pain— and was having a baby! I stood in the aisle and rang that call button with a vengeance—repetitively.

Finally, one of my crew members came into the aisle to see what was wrong.

“This passenger is about to have a baby. We need a first aid kit. We need to notify the cock-pit. And, we need to make an announcement to see if there is a doctor onboard.”

While she hurried off to take care of that, another flight attendant came up to help. Together, we asked the passengers in the row in front of her if we could re-seat them and took them to the rear aft jump seats. About this time, a man sheepishly walks up to me. I instantly realized that this must be the father. “You need to go take care of those children” I instructed.

Meanwhile, the mother-to-be was starting to make some unusual noises. I, being all of 23 years old and having never experienced child birthing, could only think of the scene in
Gone with the Wind
where Prissy says
“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies.”
About this time, fellow crew members showed up with a first aid kit from the cockpit— and were miffed that the cock-pit door was now locked, so that we couldn’t get back in. (Later, the captain told us that they were busy determining all of the vectors, so they could say exactly where the baby was born, and didn’t want to be disturbed.) I started rapidly reading the manual in the first aid kit section on how to assist with a birth.

About this time, I also made the announcement “Is there a doctor on board?” in both English and French, as this flight had many French speaking passengers on board. From where I made the announcement in the back galley, I could see all the way up the aisle to first class where an elderly man with grey hair— sort of styled like Einstein— slowly got up from his seat. Turns out he was an octogenarian psychiatrist who in medical school had observed one birth. The senior purser thanked him and graciously asked him to sit back down.

Back in row 13, I read to the crew the first-aid kit’s list of things we were going to need—the biggest and most important of which was an un-read newspaper. (Since the unused newspaper hasn’t been touched by human hands, it’s considered sterile.) Three of the crew went off to find the unread newspaper, and once again, I was alone with this lady. I learned that this was going to be her eighth child. She explained that the family had come to Hawaii to visit with other family members and had delayed their return, as they did not live in Western Samoa and were keenly interested in this new baby being an American citizen and born in Hawaii. She told me that she thought that she had felt contractions hours before—during the delay in Honolulu.

By now, we had removed all of the armrests and had placed the row of passengers behind her on the forward jump seats— so that there was a row clear on both sides for us to use to assist her— and I could be in the aisle, ready to help. We didn’t have much time before the baby’s head appeared. We positioned the unread newspapers to catch the baby—while two crew members gave her arm support from the row in front and back of her. The mother gave three more pushes and I had a baby in my arms— wrapped in newspapers. It was a girl— and she was beautiful. She had to have weighed more than 10 pounds.

We were still a couple of hours from Pago Pago. I tied off the umbilical chord but didn’t cut it. I laid the baby on the mother’s chest and soon the baby started nursing. We propped the mom up with pillows and blankets so that she was in a little more comfortable position. About this time, I realized that the father was in the aisle walking up and down with an armful of leis that he collected from his children. The lei’s were made of lifesaver rolls, tied in a chain, like sausages. He was passing out the life-savers from the leis, like cigars. He was so proud.

The captain made an announcement from the cockpit, over the PA, that the baby had been born over US territory and that we had a new US citizen on board. Later I learned that a child born onboard an American flagship carrier automatically had US citizenship. The mother told me “I’m going to name the baby Pan Am.”

After a soft landing in Pago Pago, and transfer of the new mom to a waiting ambulance, I washed my face off in the aft lavatory, looked in the mirror and said to my reflection “I’ve had a full day…why am I still at work?” We were about 2/3 of the way through that trip—the next leg was to Auckland.

The Adventurer

The most memorable flight of my whole career was on a leg of a flight from Fiji to Sydney, Australia in 1972. I joined a crew that was pretty tired—having just worked a long flight from Los Angeles. Fortunately, there wasn’t a heavy passenger load and there was only one passenger in first class. That passenger, of course, wanted to dine in the upstairs lounge. Since I was not tired like the rest of the crew, I volunteered to work the galley upstairs and downstairs, take care of the one first class passenger, and cover the cock-pit. That way, everyone else could take a little bit of a break.

The first class passenger was none-other than the famous Dr. David Lewis—who was returning from having had his sailboat towed to St. George Island—while attempting to circumnavigate single-handedly the Antarctica in his boat the
Ice Bird
. His rescue had been by none-other than Jacques Cousteau and the
Calypso
! I listened to him, spellbound, for most of the two-hour flight to Sydney. He told me how his trip was sponsored by National Geographic (NG) and that he was returning to Australia to prepare for another NG-sponsored trip to Micronesia—while his boat was being re-masted and repaired.

Before I knew it, I was agreeing to talk to him further about coming along on his trip to Micronesia. He needed a French translator—which I could do—plus I had grown up around sailboats and knew how to sail. And, I was always up for an adventure. I really couldn’t gauge how sincere he was, but I was excited and intrigued.

When my friend, Renness Mary, met me at the Sydney airport, she said “You wouldn’t believe the crowd outside”. “Oh, it’s my fan club,” I joked. “No”, she said. “There’s some guy that was towed in by the
Calypso
into St. George Island. He’s a famous adventurer and the TV crews are here to interview him.”

I laughed and said “I know who that is. It’s my passenger, Dr. David Lewis. Do you want to meet him?” She said “Really?” I said “Yes, he’s right over there, still going through customs.” We went over and I introduced her. She did her typical Renness Mary…very excited and started talking-his-ear-off. She told him that there was a mob out front and that it was there expressly for him. He wasn’t pleased. He didn’t want his 15-minutes of fame but just wanted to get back to his wife and children—who didn’t know he was arriving.

The next thing I knew, Renness Mary was offering him a ride. That was fine, except that her car was an old, crummy little thing, and Dr. Lewis lived in the opposite direction of where Renness Mary and I lived, in Cronulla— back over the Sydney Harbor Bridge. “Whatever,” I thought, “Classic Renness Mary….jump right in.”

Renness Mary’s car was illegally parked at the curb—thanks to her friends in immigration, so it was easy to get to her car and load up quickly. Dr. Lewis was able to leave the terminal undetected, as the press was looking for the great adventurer, Dr. Lewis—not a grey-haired man with two young girls—one of them wearing a Pan Am stewardess uniform.

By the time Renness Mary had driven him home, she (and I—a bit reticent and eager at the same time) had sealed the deal for me to go to Micronesia with Dr. Lewis. I had a sense of being able to get the time off from Pan Am—due to their very generous leave-of-absence policies. But, I couldn’t promise anything until my time-off was approved by Pan Am. We were to rendezvous at Truk Lagoon by the first week in June.

Pan Am did give me time off and I spent over a month on a trimaran sailing the Caroline Islands with Dr. Lewis. It was an adventure of a lifetime. The study was about ‘predominant wave swell theory of navigation’ and became an article for NG as well as the basis for Dr. Lewis’s book
We, the Navigators
. Dr. Lewis was credited with inspiring a revival of traditional voyaging methods in the South Pacific, and he had been a crew member of the
Hokule’a
on its first experimental voyage from Hawaii to Tahiti. Because of my work with Pan Am, I was privileged to encounter him—and become a brief part of his life and adventures.