I was hired as a steward to replace Bobby Johnston, who was injured in the Ford TriMotor crash on the St. Paul bluffs just across the river from the St. Paul airport in June 1929. I was interested in airplanes since I was nine or ten years old and had built a lot of models. In 1928 I won an award in a model airplane contest and we enthusiasts formed a club. One of our members knew a Northwest pilot named Walter Bullock. So Walter became our advisor. That’s how I met him. Walter had built a Ford TriMotor model airplane. He had written a story and it was published in “Popular Mechanics”. He was also building model airplane kits and he needed some help and support in his kit building and he hired me on. It was the best situation in the world for a 17-year-old kid who was nuts about planes. Walter was very good to me. He sort of took me under his wing. He was sort of like a father to me. Of course, I didn’t really know anything about airline pilots, airline pilots were sort of nebulous characters, most of the pilots you heard about were barnstorming pilots, you heard very little about airlines.

            I had told Walter about my interest in getting a job; I kept bugging him, “Are there any jobs out there flying?” One night he told me that if I could get my parents permission I could go with him to Chicago tomorrow on the TriMotor. I went home and said, “Mom, can I fly to Chicago tomorrow with Walter Bullock?” She said ask your Father. So I went to dad. Dad said to go ask your ma. So I knew I had them. So I went to the hospital that evening and got Bobby Johnston’s uniform. I cleaned it up a little and wore it on my very first flight. I became a steward overnight. It was that simple. But I wasn’t much help to Walter that first day.

            The job was rather interesting and from the standpoint of my observation the Steward did all the work. If a passenger showed up without a ticket, we sold them one. We signed for the registered mail and loaded it. We refueled the plane. We loaded the baggage in the baggage bins located in the wing section. We’d carry the luggage through the door, up the cabin aisle and hoist it overhead. After all this was done we were ready to leave. The Captain, who was generally sitting around, would say something like, “Well let’s go, come on people we are on our way!”

            I did this for a few months and then I thought I just might have the wrong job. It seemed to me the pilots were getting all the money and were having all the fun. He was sitting around or in the cockpit while I was doing all these things. I didn’t really object but that’s the guy I’d really want to be. In spite of all this I hadn’t really decided if I wanted to make a career out of flying. My main objective was to earn enough money to go to college and learn to be an aeronautical engineer. I was making $78 a month. I flew about 15 days a month. A Chicago round trip is the TriMotor usually took between 7 hours and 45 minutes to 8 hours. I averaged about 125 hours flying time a month. Contrast this to the 80 to 85 hours today.

            This flying was done with no radio communications and without the benefit of instrumentation outside of a turn-and-bank indicator and a very inefficient artificial horizon that tumbled if you went over 45 degrees. Nobody knew anything about instrument flying. Everything was done contact.

            As a reward for all your work you were permitted to sit up front in what became the co-pilot’s seat, after you had the passengers settled down. There were dual controls and the pilots were very nice about it. They’d sort of let us get our hands on it a little bit when we were in the air. This would whet your appetite quite a bit. Being 17 and flying for the first time was exciting but I had a little difficulty in relating to where I was. For a couple or three months I was in a state of euphoria but I managed to come down to earth and get on with it. It was pretty heady stuff considering how little experience and knowledge I had about it.

            But there were still the cabin duties. Flying as low as we did, and we always flew quite low because of winds and the fact that we couldn’t fly above the weather, it was pretty rough. The average trip was usually about 500 feet above the ground. Passengers generally got sick. We had nothing at this time to handle that situation, the other Stewards, Bobby Hohag, Bobby Johnston, who came back to work after he recovered from his injuries, and me. Three of us. We talked about the problem and it really was a problem with the passengers urping all over the sidewalls and onto the floor. Something had to be done about it so we devised a method to handle this. We made trips to the local grocery stores to get supplies of brown bags. This was really the beginning of the burp bag era. But brown paper bags were only efficient for a very few seconds. We learned this because we had the job of cleaning up if we missed. We learned very quickly that if we stood there with a bunch of brown bags looking over our passengers, and if we saw someone in trouble, we’d whip one out, you know, like the used to do in grocery stores, snap it open and put it in the passenger’s face. As soon as they used it we’d whip another one out and madly run with the first one to the back door, and we’d kick it open and throw the bag out. If we were fast enough the bottom wouldn’t come open before we got there. This sounds like a bunch of malarkey but it’s true.