“Birdie”
Boeing Stratoliner in flight
A friend and I am planning to be in London at Christmastime by way of one of Delta’s airplanes. This reminds me of the book “Birdie” by Kathryn Bankston with a little bit of help from Birdie Bomar. It is about Delta’s first in-flight stewardess. (you can’t call them stewardesses now!)
It took me a while to read it mostly because I found myself thinking of air flight experiences of the few I’ve had, or remembered flight attendant announcements from email forwardings. Then I remember Kathryn at church. Then I remember our chats with her at The Blue Ridge Grill. So I had to quit my “that reminds me of” attitude and get back to the text again.
One of my own examples come from the time I waited an hour and a half sitting in a plane waiting to fly to a Brotherhood meeting in St. Louis. There was a bad storm in St. Louis at the time, so the plane would not be leaving Atlanta for this hour and a half but we boarded on time. A very long sitting time until the pilot came on to give a weather report and telling the flight attendants to make final arrangements for takeoff. A few days afterwards I felt obliged to write to Delta to suggest that when you’re sitting in a pressurized capsule getting ready to fly into a storm there are two words that you don’t want to hear, and those two words are “final arrangements.”
Stewardesses, by the way, is the longest word you can type using only the left hand. (But, does anyone besides me type these days?)