Delta Air Lines' oldest flight attendant shows no signs of preparing her 52-year career for a landing. And with no mandatory retirement age, the airline isn't pressuring her to quit as long as she can handle the annual emergency tests required by the Federal Aviation Administration. "I've been a little piece of Delta," Webb says modestly. "It's been my life."
With more seniority than any flight attendant in Delta history, she still logs up to 85 air-hours a month on international flights. In March, Webb flew from home base in Atlanta to Barcelona, Munich and Rio. "She does it because she likes it," says supervisor Jill Houk, 50. "There's an old graciousness about her." Adds Delta pilot David Hazen, 44: "She is amazing. I want her vitamins."
Over the years, the petite air hostess has honed her unflappable skills: to wake snoring passengers—"a little punch in the arm"; to get the smelly-footed to put on their shoes—"Sir, put on your shoes please." She has weathered an occasional pinch—"Please don't ever do that again"—with the same aplomb she displayed when a bolt of lightning sliced through the cabin. "I just smiled like it never happened," Webb says. "There's no need to be scared if you're not grounded."
Webb took to the skies in 1946 at 26 after a two-year stint as the American Red Cross program director in Bari, Italy. At first she dismissed a friend's suggestion that she become a stewardess. "Mostly, they hired beauty queens and Maids of Cotton," she says. But she applied anyway and was hired. Moving from Houston to Memphis to become a flight attendant, she left behind a flock of suitors and fell in love with flying. "It was a wonderful job," says Webb. "It still is. Flying is the fast living of life."
It wasn't so fast back then. Flying in DC-3s, with cruising speeds of 170 mph, roaring engines and no pressurization, "was like being in a steam kettle," Webb recalls. Stewardesses, as they were called then—"I don't care what they call me, as long as I get my paycheck"—labored to make the (nearly all-male) passengers comfortable, talking, playing cards and sometimes dining with them on layovers. To Webb's dismay, such old-fashioned service has gone the way of the Sunday chicken potpies Delta used to serve. "Now, there's no time," she says of the laptop generation. "They're busy working, or sleeping."
Webb, who at 40 was forced into a desk job for nine years by age restrictions—which have since been dropped, along with a ban on marriage—has seen her share of airborne celebrities: Elvis ("I had barely heard of him"), Dolly Parton ("We asked how she kept her figure") and Hugh Downs ("He sat up all night and talked to me"). But for her the true thrill of the job has been living out a childhood dream. The youngest of six children born to Houston produce broker George Webb and his wife, Nellie, "I'd sit on the front porch and watch the clouds go by and think, 'Wouldn't it be fun to travel and see other places?' " Webb recalls.
She credits an unmarried aunt, a schoolteacher with whom she was sent to live during the Depression, with providing her with a model of independence—and a passion for education. Webb, who worked as a state clerk and a lifeguard while at the University of Texas at Austin, began sending $10 a month in 1946 to help fund scholarships at what is now Rhodes College in Memphis. A frugal woman with no children (at 60, she married a butcher, who died seven years later), she has since helped dozens of students. Recently, after learning that her neighbor in La Grange, Texas, was struggling to put a daughter through nursing school, Webb put up $3,000. "Money comes and goes," she says. "When you leave this earth, what are you going to say that you did?"
Webb—whose house in La Grange is filled with complimentary bottles of shampoo and decks of Delta playing cards—did think about retiring, once, when her husband, Stanley, was alive. But when he died in 1986 she decided it was best to keep flying. "I like seeing people happy," she says. "Besides, I don't feel any different from when I was 35."
Bruce Frankel
Ellise Pierce in La Grange
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- Ellise Pierce.
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