News, views and top stories in your inbox. Don't miss our must-read newsletter Sign up Thank you for subscribing We have more newsletters Show me See our privacy notice Invalid Email

In a matter of weeks, my life changed beyond all recognition, writes Betty Riegel.

One minute I was an ordinary 22-year-old girl from Walthamstow in North East London, who had grown up in a council house, the next I was living a five-star lifestyle and travelling the world for free, mingling with royalty and celebrities.

It was 1961 and I couldn’t believe my luck when I was one of 17 British girls picked from 1,000 interviewed to be a stewardess for Pan Am.

It was the world’s most glamorous airline and this was one of the most desirable jobs in the world for a young woman back then.

I was already working as a stewardess for a small English airline called Silver City when my friend, Dawn, saw the advert in a national newspaper.

The company was coming to London to recruit because it liked the ‘well-scrubbed look’ of English girls.

“We are looking for young, single ladies aged between 21 and 27, of good moral character, with good posture and appearance and weighing between 7st 12lb and 9st 8lb”, said the advert.

While I loved my job at Silver City, there was nothing glitzy about it. We travelled across the Channel and back six times a day and I battled with terrible airsickness.

We earned £7 a week – barely enough to feed ourselves and we relied on eating the leftovers from the cold meal trays we served on the flights to stop us going hungry.

It was a world away from Pan American, the world’s number one airline and the epitome of glitz, glamour and sophistication.

Everyone who was anyone flew with Pan Am, from royalty and world leaders such as US President Eisenhower and the British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, to Hollywood stars like Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra.

Pan Am had just launched the Boeing 707, the world’s first commercial jet, and it was the start of ‘the jet age’.

I imagined strolling down the aisle of a jet wearing that iconic blue uniform and elegant white gloves, serving Manhattans to presidents and lighting the Marlboros of movie stars.

Our hearts sank when we saw over a thousand girls had turned up for the interviews at a hotel at London Airport, now Heathrow.

We queued up to be weighed and measured – I was a trim 8st 6lb and didn’t have to watch my weight.

I felt sorry for some of the bigger girls who stood on the scales in front of everyone and were left in tears when they were told they were over the limit.

I had two interviews and had to do a little catwalk walk so members of the board could check my figure.

Pan Am not only had strict rules about appearance, they wouldn’t employ women who were married, divorced or had children and you had to retire by 32.

A week later I received a letter telling me I had been selected, though my friend Dawn hadn’t been successful.

While most of my peers were getting married and having children, I was saying a tearful goodbye to my parents, Ruby and Sidney, my brother Geoff and my boyfriend Ernie and jetting off to New York for six weeks of training.

Times were changing and I was part of a new breed of women who wanted to experience life before we settled down.

I was very close to my family so it was a wrench when I found myself flying to America to begin the biggest journey of my life.

I’d never seen anything like 1960s Manhattan, with its skyscrapers and mix of nationalities and cultures.

Pan Am had recruited 17 British girls including an ex-model, an actress and a member of the exotic Bluebell Girls dance troupe. We all shared a dormitory watched over by our eagle-eyed ‘house mother’ Dottie Bohanna.

“Pan Am isn’t all about glamour or serving fancy drinks to handsome men,” she warned us. “It’s about darn hard work.”

She was right. Over the next six weeks we were taught deportment, geography, safety, how to apply our make-up and charm passengers by greeting them with their names.

We also learned how to deliver a baby using a doll and a chair but thankfully I never had to do that for real!

We were warned not to drink the water outside the United States and to brush our teeth with Coca-Cola.

But it was the onboard food that really made Pan Am stand out from other airlines.

It was like eating at a five-star hotel at 37,000ft. We were expected to learn silver service and prepare seven courses of French cuisine from scratch.

There were hors d’oeuvres including lobster, prawns and ­beluga caviar, main courses like lobster thermidor and a 2ft-long fillet of beef, which we had to cook to a first-class passenger’s specification.

Preparing gourmet food for hundreds of people was no mean feat. Imagine trying to scramble 280 eggs for breakfast in severe turbulence!

We served everything on china plates with silver cutlery and linen napkins, and poured fine wines into crystal glasses.

After dinner we would hand out liqueurs and free Camel or Marlboro cigarettes and there was always a thick fug of smoke on board the planes.

Every stewardess adhered to the airline’s dress code of collar-length hair, blue eye shadow and Revlon’s Persian Melon lipstick.

It made some girls look like corpses but they had to have written permission if they wanted to wear another shade.

We were taught to cross our legs at the ankles rather than the knees, which was deemed too masculine, and perfect the art of the ‘clipper dip’ – a signature Pan Am move where the stewardess bends her knees to pour a drink rather than leaning over the passenger, this was ‘uncouth’.

There were weigh-ins every month and if you ever went over your maximum weight, you were suspended from flying duties and weren’t paid until you had lost a few pounds.

We always had to wear a girdle, which was checked with a bottom pinch from a supervisor before every flight.

The passengers were largely men and they wanted young, single, attractive women to serve them in the cabin.

Flying back then was a real occasion. Gents wore suits and women wore heels, hats, gloves and even fur coats.

Air travel was still expensive so it was mostly the rich and famous that flew. I served Cary Grant, the Mamas & The Papas and President John F Kennedy’s children.

I even read English actor Robert Morley’s palm and taught a Saudi Prince the Mashed Potato dance so he could strut his stuff in the nightclubs of LA.

We were taught to acknowledge VIPs but not treat them differently to other passengers. As a Pan Am stewardess, you always got a lot of male attention.

We were warned about married passengers who would remove their wedding ring before flights and try and cover up the tell-tale white mark with ‘Man Tan’.

On a flight from Japan to Honolulu, a drunk businessman took his trousers off and kept propositioning us stewardesses.

The captain dropped him off at a remote island in the middle of the Pacific to dry out until another flight came past three days later to pick him up!

I had seven marriage proposals during my years flying with Pan Am, including one from a smitten passenger after a single flight and a man who was so desperate for me to go out with him, he followed me around the world for a month.

I also briefly dated Masaaki Hirao, Japan’s equivalent of Elvis.

In 1968, I married lawyer Kent Riegel, and left the airline when I had my sons, John Kent, now 43, and Geoffrey, now 40. I now live in Wilmington, Delaware.

All these years later, I still have to pinch myself because I can’t believe it really happened to a girl like me.

Working for Pan Am catapulted me into a lifestyle far beyond my wildest dreams.

I’m very proud to have been one of the first generations of women to have had a career and be financially independent.

I worked hard but I had the time of my life. It really was the best job in the world.