At a recent EAA Ford Tri-Motor tour stop at EAA Chapter 1116 in Thermal, California, a very special reunion occurred. 100-year-old Ruth Hunter considered the Tri-Motor her home at one point, having been a stewardess on the Tri-Motor in the early ‘50s, and getting to fly in it once again was “next to unbelievable.” Thanks to Ruth’s good friend, Bob Wilmeth, and chapter president Frank Brabec, I was able to get in touch and listen as Ruth reflected on her life. Here’s what she had to say.
The Early Days of Air Travel
I asked the obvious question, “What was it like being a stewardess on the Tri-Motor?” Ruth explained she didn’t realize she was making any kind of history when she was a 20-some-year-old American Airways stewardess, “I just was doing my job in another plane in another flight.”
“My trip was from Chicago, which I was based in, to New York, but they stopped at South Bend, Springfield… I can’t remember ‘em all, but we hopped from every little city. It took us the entire day. … Nowadays, you go to New York while batting your eyes 10 times.”
Ruth reminisced about these city-hopping flights in the early days of commercial travel, like when a nervous passenger kept their face buried in a thermos of air they captured from the ground for the entire flight. She also provided insight into the origins of modern safety briefings. “Of course, you’d have your cockpit announcement regarding your seat belts, or we would announce it from the cabin, and so many people didn’t know what to do with it. Do they go over your shoulder? Do you sit on ‘em? Do you hook a leg to ‘em?”
“At that time when flying was so new, well, new-ish at that time, you ran into all kinds of weirdos, and you ran into all kinds of frightened people, and you ran into all kinds of ‘I know how to do this’ type people. It was a new experience practically every trip.”
Aside from the air-sniffing weirdos, Ruth had Hollywood celebrities fly with her. “Jimmy Stewart was one of them, and Joan Crawford was the other that used those bunks when they were flying.” …Hold on, bunks? In a Tri-Motor? It was a detail that stumped me and even our managing editor, Hal Bryan, someone I thought knew everything about aviation (sorry, Hal).
Ruth described the interior a bit more. “I flew when they still had bunks on the plane in the rear of the cabin. You could pull down a bed… hanging loose from the fuselage.” After some digging, I discovered the De Luxe Club model. According to the source, only nine of these fully loaded luxury Tri-Motors are known to have been built. These models typically had overstuffed leather recliners, a kitchenette, a lavatory, silk-lined soundproof walls, and “two folding-berths” (AKA, bunks!).
Hostess, Not Stewardess
Before they were called flight attendants, they were known as stewardesses. Though Ruth doesn’t agree with that label either. “The word hostess fits the job more than the word stewardess. [Hostess] is what you were in your home, and these people were your guests.”
“It wasn’t just a plane. It was my home. It was my people. It was togetherness for a period of time. … We were pretty young, so we didn’t have a home of our own, outside of our homebase being a stewardess, but it surely did a lot of training as far as being a hostess for us. … I felt like a worker bee with the word steward more than hostess. … We treated them as guests, not as people who were going from here to there.”
Ruth explained how passengers would come with various backgrounds and different levels of anxiety, especially with air travel being a relatively new concept for many people, but she got quite good at soothing even the most fearful passengers. “I would pick up children that were flying with their parents who were naughty, meaning they were crying and scared. I’d pick up children and walk the aisle with them and tease them and play with them… they would sleep in my arms.”
Reflecting on Air Travel Today
Of course, I asked Ruth how it felt to fly on the Ford Tri-Motor in 2023. “It was next to unbelievable, but it was believable because I was doing it. … It didn’t seem possible, but there I was doing [the] impossible.”
I then naturally asked her if she still misses her time being a stewardess. “Gosh, no. I’m a hundred years old… I’ve had time to miss it, I’ve had 60 to 80 years to miss it.” Her answer surprised me at first, but she explained further. “It’s so changed… I’ve sat and looked up at the sky when I see a plane, and I realize there are so many changes nowadays, and I feel sorry for people who fly nowadays… It’s a get-in-line, stay-in-line.”
Ruth is right. Flying commercially does not hold the same magic it did in the days of the Ford Tri-Motor. Nowadays, between lines and rules and struggles with delays and customer service, I can see why she doesn’t miss it. It definitely doesn’t hold the same hostess-serving-guest spirit that Ruth’s passengers would have experienced. Good thing EAA’s Ford Tri-Motor is still flying and giving people a taste of the good ol’ days!
Beyond the Tri-Motor
Ruth’s time on the Tri-Motor was just a portion of her long life, she explained. “I wanted to teach, and I left [the airlines] in order to finish college so I could be an English teacher… and that was my life. I spent 30-some years as a teacher. … I ended up teaching university.” Ruth spent much of her teaching career at Wayne State University in Michigan until she got a surprise invite to California.
“When I came out here to California, one evening I picked up the phone and three men were on the other end, and they said… we are interested in having you come out and teach our English classes and also be our drama director. Man, did I say yes!” This unexpected phone call from these three strangers brought Ruth to the then newly formed Golden West College, where she eventually retired from.
I finished our conversation off by asking her what her secret is to living such a long life, and I’ll leave you with her wisdom: “I think my long life is mostly my personality. I love people. … I’m just open and I’m humorous. I will talk to anybody in any situation and openly; I can’t walk down a street without saying hi or hello… I’m just a big jabber box.”
“It’s been an interesting life. I got to do what I wanted to do the most. I got to do what I didn’t know I liked, and I got to do what I didn’t know I could do.”
