Coffee Tea or Me? - Donald Bain

   1967; 311 pages.  Full Title:  Coffee, Tea or Me?: The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Aviation Novel; Women Biographies; Memoirs.  Overall Rating: 6*/10.

 

    Are you tired of being a poor midwestern girl, stuck in one place?  Do you yearn to travel all over the world, every day?  Would you like to meet suitors on a daily basis?  Could someone show you how to tell which ones are truly eligible and which are already married?  What if you could occasionally meet and talk to some celebrities where you work?

 

    Does nightly partying with your fellow workers sound like it would be fun?  Maybe even have a couple of them as roommates sharing an apartment in some big city.  Wouldn’t it be great if someone was willing to pay you for having such experiences?

 

    Trudy Baker would be happy to tell you how to accomplish this.  She’s already living such a dream.  It’s called being a stewardess.

 

    And of course, she'll also alert you to some of the downsides to this career.

 

What’s To Like...

    There’s no overarching storyline in Coffee Tea or Me?, instead it’s 23 vignettes about various aspects of a stewardess’s life.  The text is written in the first-person POV, Trudy’s.  Some are autobiographical, Trudy is born and raised in Amarillo, Texas, yearns to see the world, and enrolls in a “stewardess school” where she is taught the ways and means of flying the friendly skies.  She also meets Rachel there, who becomes her best friend.

 

    A lot of the chapters give tips and insights about being a happy, outgoing, successful stewardess.  Trudy shares ways to deal with lusty aircraft captains, drunks, womanizers, and hyperactive kids, both the prodigies and the brats.  You’ll learn how male passengers stack up by profession and nationality, and where's the best place to stay with fellow aircraft personnel when you have a layover in various cities.  You’ll even be taught “stewardess lingo”.

 

    Coffee Tea or Me? was written in 1967, the year before I took my first flight, and it was fun to see how things have changed since then.  Back then, there was a 2-drink limit for passengers, although in-flight smoking was allowed.  If you forgot to get a pack of cigarettes at the airport, you could buy a mini-pack from the stewardess.  In-flight meals were standard fare and there was no assigned seating, so you had to tell the stewardess your name during preflight, so she could ascertain that you didn’t sneak on board.  And here's a couple non-flight things that are mentioned which have since disappeared: stationery stores, cigarette commercials, and girdles.

 

    The two final chapters form a sort of ending for the book.  Trudy has developed into a topnotch stewardess, but has become burnt out in the process.  The airline she works for arranges for her to see a shrink, with whom Trudy gets into competition to determine who will be analyzed and who will be asking the questions.  The title of the last chapter is: ”We’ll Give It One More Year. Okay?”, which gives a hint as to things close out.  Wikipedia indicates there are three more sequels to this book, which I never knew, and a TV movie, which I vaguely recall.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Popliteal (adj.) : relating to the hollow at the back of the knee.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.1*/5, based on 252 ratings and 80 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.28*/5, based on 1,395 ratings and 167 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “Ladies and gentlemen, I am truly sorry.  Truly sorry.  In my haste to be . . . to be . . . to be gangrenous . . . Uh, gangre . . .  to give each and every one you gathered here today gift, I violated the sacrilege . . . a sacred by-laws of this wonderful airline, and these wonderful girls here present.  So. If you will be so kind and present, please put all those li’l bottles away and don’t drink not even a tiny weeny drop ‘til we come to our departure . . . ah, destination.”  (pg. 195)

 

    Gravely lacking any background, academic or practical, in the arts of humanities, engineers will try to make chit-chat about the aircraft’s performance characteristics or outer space or why the ball always comes down after it goes up.  It’s best to feign ignorance if you’re interested; engineers hate anyone to know anything about their sphere of knowledge.

    Occasionally, an engineer will have the brains to realize that a stewardess isn’t interested in all that mechanical routine.  This type of individual will say something like, “Have you read Moby Dick lately?”  You’ve got to give him credit for trying.  (pg. 255)

 

You can always recognize a captain from the calluses on his finger from pushing the call button for coffee.  (pg. 97)

    There is a moderate amount of cussing in Coffee Tea or Me?, mostly involving the word “damn”.  We’d yawn at this nowadays, yet I think it was pretty edgy for a lighthearted novel from the 1960s.  Each chapter opens with a sparse sketch, and some of those had nudity in them, but nothing that I’d label “erotic”.

 

    There are a fair number of typos, but keep in mind that this is long before we had computers with MS-Word and Spellchecker to catch such things.  At one point the “couch section” of the plane was mentioned.  At first I thought this was a typo for “coach section”, but now I’m thinking that some first-class sections of a plane back then were equipped with couches.

 

    Chapters 10 deals with homosexual passengers.  Trudy describes them as “fay”, “queer”, “faggy”, and “perverts”.  The term “gay” apparently had yet to be used, and it’s nice to see how far we’ve come since then.

 

    Coffee Tea Or Me? was a light-hearted, quick-&-easy read for me, bringing back memories of airline amenities and hospitality in an era that's long gone.  I have fond memories of flying back in those days, which were my college years and in which I was usually flying stand-by.  Alas, a lot of the experiences recounted in the book are probably make-believe.  See the next section for the aftermath.

 

    6 Stars.  Coffee Tea Or Me? readers received a shock in 2002 when a writer, Donald Bain, revealed that he actually wrote the book.  Bain worked in public relations for American Airlines at the time.  Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones were made-up names, and two Eastern Airlines stewardesses were hired to pose as them on book promotion tours.  Wikipedia says that one of them ended up legally changing her name to the one Don Bain used in the book.  The Wiki article is well worth reading.