I had the pleasure of meeting Patti Smart this month. Patti flew as a stewardess for Aloha Airlines from January 1957, when it was TPA (Trans-Pacific Airways), until she retired in 2007, a few months before Aloha closed.

“I applied to Hawaiian Airlines, too, but they didn’t hire me. The interviewer told me it was because I had freckles,” Smart said. “Things were done differently back then. My classroom was the plane. They trained me right in the aircraft. It was a DC-3 flown by fighter pilots from the war. The DC-3s were very reliable.

“A few months after I was hired, and still on probation, I was in the cabin of a DC-3 serving pineapple juice. Joyce Fasi was the flight attendant with me and witnessed this.

“A woman’s elbow knocked the tray I was holding, and I quickly pulled it away from her and into my lap. I was completely soaked.

“Pineapple juice is sticky and smelly, so I had to wash the skirt right away. I didn’t have a replacement uniform, but did have a pair of striped capris. They were rainbow colored and didn’t look like our official wool skirts at all.

“I washed the skirt but had no way to dry it. The DC-3s flew at low altitudes and were not pressurized.

“The copilot opened one of the cockpit windows slightly — maybe half an inch — and I held the skirt up to it. It helped but not enough, so he lowered the window all the way.

“Quite a breeze came in, and I thought it would dry when all of a sudden it flew out of my hands and out the window! That was the last I saw of my skirt.

“A passenger saw it fly past the window and told Joyce, ‘I think that was her skirt!’

“I called Joyce on the intercom. ‘Joyce, I’m going to be fired! My skirt just went out the window!’

“Our pilot radioed dispatch to call my mom and asked her to bring me a replacement skirt to the airport. This is before the freeway, and it took a long time to drive there.

“All the planes in the Pacific used the same frequency, and all the crews now knew I had lost my skirt out the plane’s window!

“A plane flying behind us radioed us. It was piloted by Harry Saunders, whose son is the president of Castle & Cooke today. They had overheard the earlier call to dispatch.

“’Don’t worry,’ Saunders said. ‘We caught it. Tell Patti. It’s on our wing!’ they joked. Of course, that would be impossible.

“‘Harry,’ I told him, ‘land carefully.’

“The passengers took up a collection to buy me a new skirt. They knew I was a newbie and wasn’t paid a lot, so they paid for my skirt. It think it might have been $35.

“Mom was dismayed. ‘I dropped her off this morning fully clothed,’ she told the dispatcher. ‘Now she has no skirt!’ Mom was very angry. She had to stop cooking and drive to the airport.

“When she arrived, she gave me the new skirt. ‘What happened?’

‘Tell you tomorrow, Mom. Pick me up in the morning. I gotta go to Hilo.’ It was an overnighter.

“I was sure I would be terminated.

“A few days later the president, Rudy Tongg, called me into his office. He wasn’t going to fire me, he said. He just wanted to know the full story.

“Apparently, his Honolulu Rotary club heard about my flying skirt, and wanted to know the the full story at their next meeting.

“Bob Krauss wrote about it in his Honolulu Advertiser column, so everybody in town knew I lost my skirt out the airplane window.”

“On another occasion we were on Maui, coming back to Honolulu, and the agent had not closed the door to the plane completely.

“We took off on the DC-3, which fortunately was unpressurized. The agent was supposed to close the door.

“We were serving passengers and heard this ‘donk … donk.’ I told the other flight attendant to continue service and I’d check it out.

“As were were landing, I held the door, and Sally Abe, on her knees over the back seat, held me.

“We told Capt. Lucas after we had landed. He said, ‘You fools. You could have gone flying out onto the runway.’

“Today a plane probably could not even take off with the door ajar, but things were different back then.”

Patti Smart retired in 2007 at the age of 69 and was said to be one of the most senior flight attendants in the United States. She flew with Aloha Airlines for more than 50 years.

Bob Sigall, author of the Companies We Keep books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories each Friday of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@Yahoo.com.