After Mike and I graduated from South Gate High School, we actually applied for "airplane washer" jobs at LAX for the summer of '67 before beginning Junior College in the Fall. I am not exactly sure what we would have been doing. But I think we believed we would clean out aircraft in between flights at the gate. Unfortunately, we were not hired because the minimum age requirement was that we had to be 18. Both Mike and I were still 17. So he got a job in a downtown sock warehouse through our high school friend, Richard Meyers. And I got my first full-time job at A.U. Morse and Company wallpaper warehouse on Hunter St. though my dad. Who you know.
But things were changing in the Summer of 1972. A significant change for any number of gay men (or straight) was that the airlines were finally mandated to hire men to be "flight attendants" rather than simply continuing the discrimination of only hiring women as "stewardesses" that at one phase earlier required termination if they aged and/or got married. Primarily, at LAX, TWA and Continental Airlines were accepting applications and, if getting beyond that stage, holding in-person interviews. Our friend Dennis Madura and I applied to both airlines. I believe that neither of us even got an interview with Continental, but both of us got interviews with TWA.
My interview was with a woman who appeared to be in her late 20's or early 30's. I did admit that I had been at Marine OCS that Spring but decided that the Marines were not for me. She said her husband was a Marine. Maybe this seemingly harmless exchanged tanked my interview. Maybe she did not like the way I looked. Maybe she did not care for my Hispanic last name (Dennis was also not hired). Who knows? But my love of flying and the airlines was not enough to get me hired. So it was wallpaper warehouse work for me for the foreseeable future.
Not surprising, a friend to whom I confessed my attraction in college--which was a huge step for me, though I was nervous as hell when I told him in his apartment in Torrance--said he also applied to TWA. Patrick Harlan Byrne was straight but did not mind that I was gay, so he became a significant friend during this time period. Pat had returned from Europe that summer. After graduation in December of 1971, he had saved up enough money from working part time for the Post Office to fly to Europe, buy a VW van, and tour the continent for a few months. Somewhere along the way, he got hired by the Ice Capades to work the lighting on their shows as they toured Europe, which allowed him to stay for a few months longer than he had expected. But by the summer, he had returned, trying to figure out what he intended to do for the rest of his immediate future.
Pat was handsome, in great physical shape, lean and subtly muscular, was personable, had been in the Marines in Vietnam. He told me that same August when the hiring began that he had also gotten an interview with TWA. And, unlike Dennis and me, he got hired. A few years later, his girlfriend told me that she used to overhear snide comments about him from pilots (I am sure he wasn't the only male flight attendant to whom such comments were directed). They assumed he was gay, blah, blah, blah. Male pilots are macho and male flight attendants and are not--and were likely gay--seemed to be the refrain in those days when male flight attendants were a new sight on domestic flights especially. (Foreign carries had had male flight attendants before this.)
I can easily see why Pat was hired. He went through flight attendant training in St. Louis; and because he was so sharp and did so well in the program, they kept him on as an instructor for several months before he got his first assignment. He snagged the NYC base so he could fly to Europe during the peak summer months. That's where he met Sandra, who was also a TWA flight attendant. But that was all in the future.
(This was a photo of Pat from when the two of us drove up to San Leandro in my '66 Mustang GT, stayed at my Uncle Lloyd and Aunt Jean's home there, and used their place as a base for heading to San Francisco to explore the city on a Thanksgiving weekend, possibly 1971. [Now, of course, beauty is always in the eye of the beholder, and your tastes may differ; but Pat was always totally handsome to me and a really nice guy. In fact while walking through the city, we passed what must have been a gay bar. His walking by got the attention of several of the denizens inside.])
Somewhere along the way, and I cannot remember exactly when, but surely it was after the failed attempt to get hired by the airlines, I had applied to be considered for Air Force OTS as a navigator candidate. I got called into the recruiting office in Huntington Park sometime that fall and took the required tests. Unfortunately, when the results came back, my scores were not high enough to be accepted as a navigator candidate. So, like flight attendant before, I set aside the Air Force as a potential career choice and determined to focus on being accepted to the Coast Guard's Officer's Candidate School in Connecticut. (I must have read about its existence in the newspaper at some point and that they were accepting applications.) My future was not to be in the air but on the sea I envisioned.
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