November is Aviation History Month, and here in the History Center, we’re always looking for stories from World War II. But if “aviation history” and World War II invokes images of fighter planes, bombers and their pilots, here is another image to add: Domestic planes being used in the war effort, with women as part of their crews.
In 1943, Daisy Dell Sutherlin (later Jones), a young woman from Haughton, became an early “stewardess,” now known as flight attendant, for the North Louisiana-grown Delta Airlines. It was a brand-new career opening up for women in an industry just on the cusp of major growth. And for Daisy Dell, it was a starting point for big-city life and careers.
Delta, as Huff Daland Dusters, began in 1925 as a crop-dusting service, first in Macon, Georgia, then Monroe, Louisiana. It was bought by C.E. Woolman, who changed its name in 1928 to Delta Air Service for the Mississippi River Delta region it served. In 1929, Delta operated its first passenger flight from Dallas, Texas, to Jackson, Mississippi, with stops in Shreveport and Monroe. By 1940, it added Douglas DC-2 and DC-3 propellor planes that could hold 14 and 21 passengers respectively, and added Delta’s first flight attendants, then known as stewardesses. In 1941, the HQ moved from Monroe to Atlanta.
Delta’s addition of stewardesses to its flight crews came 10 years after the Boeing Air Transport company pioneered this position in 1930. A nurse from Iowa, Ellen Church, wanted to become an airline pilot but realized that wasn’t a career path open for a woman. So, she approached Boeing with the idea of placing nurses aboard airliners. She convinced the powers that be that the presence of women nurses would help relieve the traveling public’s fear of this new way to travel, flying.
Thus, women nurses as stewardesses replaced non-medical male stewards, and at Delta in 1940, flight attendants were required to be single women (never married) between 21 and 26 years old who were registered nurses. They also had to pass particular height, weight and appearance standards, and for over another decade, they had to be white. In 1952, Ruth Carol Taylor was the first African-American flight attendant in the United States, with Mohawk Airlines.
Fortunately for Dell Sutherlin Jones, who after her Haughton High School graduation, attended the two-year business secretary course at Louisiana Polytechnic Institute (Now Louisiana Tech), the registered nurse requirement was dropped during World War II due to the military’s demand for nurses. She left her job as a bookkeeper in Shreveport to head to Georgia to become a stewardess, and was on the job and in the air by January 1944, when the airline was still flying for the Air Transport Command, carrying materials and personnel for military purposes across domestic routes. The Air Transport Command, which was formed in June 1942, controlled most of the airliners (commercial passenger and cargo planes) that were drafted for the war effort, like Delta’s DC-3’s.
By the middle of 1944, the ASC was able to return planes to the airline that had been used for training. A July 7, 1944, article in the Shreveport Times, when Delta airlines came to Shreveport to recruit young women to be stewardesses, said, “The recent return to Delta by the government of three DC-3 planes has made possible the openings and M.E. Beard, local traffic manager for the line, said he was anxious that Shreveport be represented among the stewardess(es) who serve the line.” Miss Daisy Mae Sutherlin was named as the area’s current representative.
A jumbo-sized postcard featuring a Delta DC-3 in flight that Daisy Dell sent from Atlanta to her little sister Elyane in Haughton in November 1944, chastised “Layne” in fun about why she hasn’t written , since by then she’d have started elementary school, and she must be able to write a little. Daisy Dell inquired, “do you make any A’s?” She signed the letter, “Dell,” though local papers continued to call her the name she was known for from childhood, Daisy Mae.
Elayne, in an interview with her and her childhood friend, Dell Steadman, remembered they were practically giddy over Dell and her glamourous career, an image promoted by the airline and their fashionable summer and winter wool suits and matching jaunty hats. It was a special event when Dell’s flight stopped in Shreveport, where it was reported in the Bossier Banner-Progress on June 8, 1944, how Elayne and her mother and aunt drove to Shreveport to spend a few hours with “Miss Daisy Sutherlin, who is an airplane hostess on the Delta Line.”
Daisy was even featured in a magazine, pictured in her crisp uniform smiling between two pilots with the DC-3 towering behind them. Though the magazine was “Outdoors Georgia,” and the article promoted an appreciation of Georgia’s landscape and natural resources from the air, the writer emphasized the absolute comforts of air travel and stewardess Daisy Dell Sutherlin of Shreveport’s role in that. Though Daisy Dell had admitted to the article’s writer that she could count her trips thus far on one hand and had only recently completed her training, “she went about her business like a veteran. She tilted the easy chairs for passengers, answered a million questions, and served orange juice, delicious coffee and sweet buns in a tray. Just like breakfast in bed,” and enthused that when Daisy puts a pillow beneath your head, “you're at peace in a troubled world.”
When Dell left stewardess life, she studied at Johns Hopkins, and enjoyed big city life, working in Chicago and in 1951, New York City. The Planters Press Bossier City newspaper reported on Sept 11, 1952, that Dell, who by then worked for the pharmaceutical company Squibb in New York, “is flying here by plane on the 19th to visit with her family.” This visit was perhaps explained when news of her marriage license, filed along with Wesley J. A. Jones of Gary, Indiana, appeared in the Shreveport Journal on September 24th. Wesley Jones had been an aerial instructor in the Navy Air Corps. After their wedding later that month in Haughton, the couple first moved to Stamford, CT and continued to travel widely.
If you have World War II homefront family photos or stories to share (we will scan and return originals if that is your preference), please visit or contact us at the History Center. Also, don’t forget about our World War II’s Day coffee and discussion group on the second Tuesday of each month from 10:30 – noon. The next meeting is on November 12, with Rev. Sig Kunz speaking on his childhood experiences during World War II in Eastern Europe. The History Center (and World War Tuesday) is now located in the new Central Library building at 850 City Hall Drive, Bossier City, LA, across Beckett Street from the original History Center and the “old” Central Library. We are open M-Th 9-8, Fri 9-6, and Sat 9-5. Our phone number is (318) 746-7717 and our email is history-center@bossierlibrary.org
For other fun facts, photos, and videos, be sure to follow us @BPLHistoryCenter on FB, @bplhistorycenter on TikTok, and check out our blog http://bpl-hc.blogspot.com/.
Images:
- Photo of Dell Sutherlin, Delta flight attendant, between two pilots, with a Delta Douglas DC-3 plane behind them. From “Outdoors Georgia,” January, 1944.
- Front of a Delta Airlines DC-3 jumbo postcard C. 1940. Courtesy of the Delta Flight Museum. Gift of Cara Finger in honor of Dell Jones and Elayne Cornett.
- Back of postcard of Delta Airlines DC-3 jumbo postcard, from Dell Sutherlin to Elayne Sutherlin, November, 1944. Courtesy of the Delta Flight Museum. Gift of Cara Finger in honor of Dell Jones and Elayne Cornett.
- Elayne Sutherlin (Cornett) and her mother, Lucille McAnn Sutherlin C.1950. History Center photo courtesy of Elayne Cornett.
No comments:
Post a Comment