You’ve probably always been told that flight attendants hate being referred to as stewardesses, that to do so is a faux pas on the order of asking for a Turkish coffee in a Greek café. But this isn’t entirely so. Many flight attendants are proud of having been stewardesses, and well they should be. They were the best-dressed, best-groomed runaways the world has ever seen.

Readers who grew up in the 1970s or later may need to be reminded that stewardesses are what flight attendants were called once upon a time when they were uniformly young, single, slim, attractive, and female. A good smile (all teeth, no gums) and some ability as a conversationalist were further prerequisites. Sonnie Morrow Sims, for one, fit the bill in all particulars. In the early 1960s she might have been described as a leggy blonde; then, as now, it was a skill set that could open many doors. As a 20-year-old college dropout, she began flying for American Airlines in 1962, a time when air travel in general was a far more rarefied experience than it is today: even on routine flights she would pass out roses to women passengers and serve seven-course meals on fine china and linen tablecloths. She also flew on special charters such as the plane that took the Beatles from city to city in 1966 on their last U.S. tour and the government-contracted flights that ferried soldiers to Vietnam and, if they were fortunate, back home again. Flying with the Beatles was fun: she saved the utensils and everything else they touched in airsickness bags and sent it to her kid sister back home in Minnesota. The Vietnam flights were fun, too, in their way, though when the young soldiers she had just spent hours getting to know deplaned in Saigon or Da Nang, she would lock herself in the bathroom and sob, unable to say good-bye.

Not every stewardess at every airline had the opportunity to knock a bowl of cereal into John Lennon’s lap (he refused to laugh it off) or get shot at during takeoff by the Vietcong (they missed), but, for most, flying was an adventure in and of itself at a time when the average woman got married at the age of 20 and when opportunities outside the home were limited to teaching, nursing, and the secretarial pool. “None of that appealed to me,” says Sims. “I just really wanted to travel.” Well, sure. And for tens of thousands of young women like her, women who were spirited and daring, who may have wanted to meet Mr. Right, but not before a bit of larking about (“This morning, sight-seeing in New York—and in about five hours, I’ll meet my date for dinner in San Francisco,” read a 1961 recruiting ad for American Airlines), the draw was obvious. “Marriage is fine! But shouldn’t you see the world first?” asked a 1967 United Airlines ad. Yes, most stewardesses would have answered, endorsing both sides of the equation.

“These women almost to a person were kind of the black sheep of their families,” says Laurie Power, who flew for TWA for 29 years, beginning in 1963. “They left”—home, college, other jobs—“because they couldn’t stand the drudgery of everyday life, which was marriage or teaching, and washing on Monday and ironing on Tuesday. So life as a stewardess took on a more dramatic, rather more interesting scale.” In Power’s case, that would translate into invitations to parties thrown by big-shot Hollywood producers, to countless hotel and restaurant openings, and, once, to a cruise on a yacht owned by John Theodoracopulos, one of the richest men in Greece. “A bevy of flight attendants in any gathering was always a good thing,” she says. “A bunch of pretty girls sitting around a pool—people were always inviting us here and there and everywhere, because we were sort of like icing, I suppose.”