Ellen Church Was a Nurse, Flyer, First Stewardess, and War Hero

Ellen Church on her first trip as a nurse/hostess for Boeing Air Transport, 1930.

Sitting interminably in the crammed boarding lounge of a major airport for an overbooked flight mysteriously delayed, you can almost inevitably overhear a nostalgic conversation between older executives or retired men.  These frequent flyers will lament the passing of the days when stewardesses where hot babes in heels and tight skirts, who lavished them with pillows, cocktails, and TLC.  And if you knew just the right hotels and cocktail lounges you could hook up with the fun loving swingers and the wives need never know.  Those girls were virtually the Bunnies of the air.

This image, whether true or wishful thinking, was constantly reinforced in the ‘50s and 60’s by popular culture in books like Coffee, Tea, or Me and in innumerable films like Boeing, Boeing.

                                The old men's fantasy.

All of that ended, the geezers will lament, when the damn Federal Government made rules tossing out the traditional airline requirements—women only, single status, mandatory retirement in their early 30s, and weight restrictions.  Now, the old men complain, the cabins are staffed by squat, middle aged, homely women, and Gay men.  They work overcrowded planes and do not have time or patience to lavish individual attention, barely pausing to pour overpriced sodas or tiny bottles of hooch and a bag of exactly seven peanuts. 

Your heart practically breaks for the old duffers, doesn’t it?

Of course, even in the days they wax nostalgic about, stewardess also were portrayed as loyal and brave in air disaster films from No Highway in the Sky, the High and the Mighty, Doris Day in Julie, the Airport movies, to the spoof Airplane!

But female flight crew or flight attendants, to use the preferred terms of today, were much more than either stereotype in the beginning.  And we owe it to one woman—Ellen Church who led a quite remarkable life.

Church was born on September 22, 1904 in Cresco, Iowa in the northeastern part of the state, just south of the Minnesota border.  That was less than a year after the Wright Brothers first took flight at Kitty Hawk.  The Midwestern girl with an interest in science literally grew up along with aviation. 

                Church as a young nurse.

She wanted to be a doctor, but that seemed unattainable to a young woman and she was discouraged by skeptical parents.  Instead, she studied nursing after graduating from Cresco High School.  Then, like many restless and ambitious young women in the post World War I era, she escaped small town life and went to vibrant and exciting San Francisco where she worked as a registered nurse in a modern hospital. 

In her spare time, Church pursued another dream.  She took flying lessons and obtained a pilot license.  She quickly made a name for herself among west coast flyers and became one of the few women to qualify in multi-engine aircraft.  

Church as a pilot--she was one of the first women on the West Coast to be certified on multiple engine aircraft.

Then she dared ask Steve Stimpson, the manager of the San Francisco office of Boeing Air Transport (BAT)—the predecessor to United Air Lines—for a job as a pilot with the fledgling airline.  When Stimpson turned down the proposal as impossible and ludicrous, Church suggested that the airline put nurses on board their airplanes as a way of reassuring a nervous public that flying was safe.  She shrewdly pitched it as a public relations ploy.  BAT was struggling to attract passengers other than adventurers and they desperately needed the revenue to supplement their main income, carrying the mail.  But clumsy and lumbering early airliners were still falling out of the sky with some regularity and schedules were at the mercy of unpredictable weather. 

The airline decided it was worth a try and gave Church the go-ahead to recruit and train seven nurses to join her in a three month experiment.  Applicants, in addition to being registered nurses, were required to be “single, younger than 25 years old; weigh less than 115 pounds; and stand less than 5 feet, 4 inches tall.”

The women’s diminutive size was not just a whim or even the preference of company executives for lithe females, although general attractiveness was an unstated requirement.  The airline literally counted ounces.  Every additional pound on a cabin attendant had to be subtracted from a profitable payload of mail, passengers, luggage and freight.  They also had to be able to stand up and maneuver in the very limited space of airline passenger compartments.

Despite being small, the young women had to be strong.  As a bonus to the public relations benefits, Church promised that women could also relieve the co-pilot of many menial tasks that had previously been assigned to them.  That including loading and unloading luggage, fueling, and helping push the planes in and out of hangers.  In fact, taking over those duties helped smooth over the opposition of many pilots to having women crew members.  It elevated the status of co-pilots to be relieved of menial tasks.

Despite the hiring restrictions, the rigor of the short but intense training devised by Church, and the physical demands of the job, there was stiff completion for the jobs.  Not only did the positions seem to offer excitement and adventure, but the pay was $125 a month, a small fortune for a young woman in Depression ravaged America where a shop girl often made less than $10 a week.

Church and her first seven Sky Girls.

Church and her Sky Girls, as BAT advertising called them, first flew on May 12, 1930.  They were divided into two groups.  The first worked flights from San Francisco to Cheyenne, Wyoming and the rest from there to Chicago.  Church, however, in a tri-motor Boeing 80A airliner piloted by aviation legend Elrey Jeppesen, worked both legs of the grueling 20 hour flight serving 14 passengers.  The plane made 13 scheduled stops along the way.

In Chicago Church was greeted by newspaper photographers and newsreel cameras.  She was an instant celebrity and the Sky Girls did boost passenger traffic as predicted.  The experiment was declared a success and all eight women were hired permanently with Church as their chief.  Scores more were hired on other routes as quickly as the newly reorganized United Airlines could add them.  Competing airlines were quick to follow suit.

                                    By1933 Hollywood was romanticizing stewardesses with popcorn fare like Air Hostess.

In just three years the first movie featuring a romance between a pilot and an attendant, Air Hostess starring Evalyn Knapp and James Murray hit the screen.  It was a B-movie but set the pattern form many more.

By that time Church’s career as a stewardess, as the job became known, was already over.  After just 18 months in the air she was grounded by injuries incurred in an automobile accident.

Church returned to school and earned a B.A. in nursing—a level of training only a small minority of working R.N.s then had—from the University of Minnesota.  By 1936 she was supervisor of pediatrics at Milwaukee County Hospital.

Ellen Church was the Chief Nurse for the 52nd Troop Carrier Command  and oversaw the activities of the Medical Air Evacuation Squadrons.  Seen here being decorated for her service.

With America’s entrance into World War II, the flying nurses of the airlines were called to duty by the armed forces.  They were replaced by women without the medical training.  Church volunteered and with her experience flying, as nurse, and as an administrator, she became a Captain in the Army Nurse Corps.  She worked as an air evacuation nurse in the North African and Italian campaigns and then trained the many evacuation nurses that would be needed for the D-Day invasion and subsequent campaigns.  For her service she was awarded the Air Medal, the European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal with seven bronze service stars, the American Theatre Campaign Medal, and the Victory Medal.

After the war, Church became the Director of Nursing and later administrator of Union Hospital in Terre Haute, Indiana.  She continued flying as a private pilot and led a full, active, and athletic life.  At the age of 60 in 1964 she married for the first and only time to Leonard Briggs Marshall, President of the Terre Haute First National Bank.  

                                    A plaque at the small Cresco, Iowa airport memorializes the town's home grown heroine.

On August 22, 1965, less than a year later, Ellen Church died of injuries in a horseback riding fall.

She left no children but is the spiritual mother of flight attendants everywhere.

American Nurse Icon Clara Barton and the Founding of the American Red Cross

Note—Last week we looked at English nursing hero Florence Nightingale with a brief comparison to American Clara Barton.  Now Barton and her creation the American Red Cross take center stage.

On May 21, 1881 Clara Barton, already famed for her tireless work as a Civil War nurse, organized the founding meeting of the Association of the American Red Cross (later the American Red Cross) in the parlor her Washington, DC apartment.  By August, she had organized the first three local chapters in her summer country home of Danville, New York in the upstate Finger Lakes region and in near-by Rochester, and Syracuse. 

Within a month the fledgling chapters were mobilized to aid the victims of a massive forest fire in eastern Michigan.  It was living example of Barton’s aim to not only provide aid in time of war, but during domestic disasters as well.  It might have quelled opposition in the Senate to ratifying the Treaty of the Geneva Convention which among other things allowed the establishment of an American Chapter of the International Red Cross. 

The Senate finally approved the treaty in March of 1882 and chartered the American Red Cross.  Barton, who had campaigned to establish the organization for years, was naturally elected the first President, a position she held for the next 23 years. 

Barton was born on Christmas Day 1821 to an ardent Universalist family in Oxford, one of the western Massachusetts towns that had been a cradle of the denomination.  Her beloved father was a Revolutionary War veteran and her high-strung mother was subject to fits of abusive rage.  The youngest of five children, small for her age and suffering from a lisp, she was teased and tormented by her siblings. 

Yet at an early age she had to learn to take care of an older sister who suffered a mental break down and was confined to an upper room of the house and a brother who was severely injured in a fall. She changed his bandages, administered pain killing medicine, and tended his needs for two years then suffered her own deep depression when he recovered sufficiently no longer needed her. 

In her late teens she was put to work, initially against her will, as a school teacher in an effort to overcome her paralyzing shyness.  Much to her own and everyone else’s amazement she excelled managing a class of 40 including rambunctious young men near her own age. 

29-year-old school teacher Clara Barton.

When her school won a prize for being “most disciplined” she explained to astonished officials that no discipline was ever needed because, “When they [the boys] found that I was as agile and as strong as themselves, that my throw was as sure and as straight as theirs, their respect knew no bounds.” 

After that she was a sought-after teacher and commanded the same pay as veteran male pedagogues.  She taught for more than 10 years before enrolling in the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York State for formal training. 

After graduation Barton moved to Bordentown to establish her own school which was soon so successful that a large new building was constructed and additional instructors hired.  But when the trustees brought in a man to run it and paid him $600 a year more then she had received, she angrily resigned and moved to Washington where using some political influence she became the first woman appointed as a clerk in the Patent Office and made a man’s salary. 

But she was harassed by her male co-workers and the subject of rumors of sexual indiscretion as a single woman living alone in the city.  When the election of Democrat James Buchanan as President ended her Whig patronage position she was not unhappy. 

Returning to Massachusetts she found herself drifting without purpose and unable to find regular employment for four years.  She studied French and art and battled bouts of immobilizing depression. 

Clara Barton bitterly resented being paid less than a male teacher at the school she founded and later loosing her job as a full Patent Clerk only to return to the Department as a lowly copyist.  In her later work as a leading Suffragist she made equal pay for women her own personal demand.

With the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln and the patronage of her friend Senator Henry Wilson she was able to get a temporary appointment as a copyist at the Patent Office making far less than she had as a full clerk in what was regarded as “an experiment” in employing women.  She eagerly took up the task of “being a pioneer.” 

In April of l861 the men of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, some of them Barton’s former students, arrived in Washington after being attacked by mobs in Baltimore.  She and her sister Sally Vassall greeted the men at the train station and took seriously injured men to Vassall’s home to nurse their wounds.  And when she discovered that the men’s baggage had been stolen in Baltimore she rounded up donations of food, clothing, and supplies for the regiment from local merchants. 

She soon was tending New York and New Jersey troops as well, including more former students.  When the grateful men wrote home about her efforts, supplies began being sent to her.  After tending the casualties from the first big battle, the disastrous engagement at Manassas, she began to systematically appeal for aid to groups like the Worcester Ladies’ Relief Committee back home, providing them with detailed lists of what was needed and how to pack it. 

She returned home to attend her father’s last illness, but was soon back in Washington and somehow wrangled a Quartermaster’s Pass to get to the front line.  She arrived with six wagon loads of supplies shortly after the Battle of Culpepper in Virginia and spent non-stop days tending the wounded, including captive Confederates. 

Soon she considered herself, and was considered by grateful troops, a member of the Army of the Potomac, arriving with her wagons on battlefields including Second Manassas, Antietam and Fredericksburg.  The Twenty-first Massachusetts held a dress parade in her honor and made her an honorary member.  She often wore a short-waisted soldier’s jacket over her long skirts and kepi on her head.  She suffered a life threatening bout of typhoid fever but yearned to return to the front. 

Barton's Civil War bane and rival Dorothea Dix was already a famed reformer, mental health pioneer, and early Suffragist when she was appointed official head of the Army nursing corps.  Dix disdained Barton's individual approach and tried to freeze her out of service whenever she could.

But when Unitarian minister Henry Whitney Bellows organized the Sanitary Commission to serve the Army and Dorthea Dix, a Unitarian laywoman organized a formal nursing corps, Barton found her individual volunteer efforts were officially discouraged and that female nurses were to be limited to duty in rear echelon hospitals.  Barton preferred to work independently and bristled at the restrictions Dix placed on her nurses. 

She got special permission to accompany her brother David, the boy she had once nursed who was now Quartermaster of the Eighteenth Army Corps which was dispatched in April 1862 to lay siege to Charleston, South Carolina.  At Hilton Head she found the siege and bombardment of the port and its harbor forts to be dull compared to the Virginia and she toyed with leaving but was persuaded to stay by handsome Col. John H. Elwell, a married officer with whom she none-the-less fell in love—a first time experience for the forty year old spinster. 

Nursing the Civil War wounded.

Some biographers have described Barton as “plain,” but contemporary photographs show a trim, attractive woman.  She was also spirited and intellectually challenging.  An affair, or at least an intense romance, was inevitable. 

When the siege of Ft. Wagner turned into an intense battle, Barton moved to the front with fellow Universalist nurse Mary Gage.  She saw Elwell wounded and brought him to safety before returning to tend others.  But local commanders were not as sympathetic to her as were those of the Army of the Potomac and despite her long hours of service they made her life difficult until she collapsed of exhaustion and was evacuated back to Hilton Head where the recovering Elwell nursed her. 

When she tried to return to the front, she was told that only Dix’s nurses would be allowed. 

Bitter and disillusioned, she turned to work with Mary Gage’s mother, the Suffragist Frances Dana Gage among freed slaves in the area.  Gage expanded her horizons turning her more explicitly to a Feminist social consciousness.  They formed a bond that lasted until Gage’s death in 1884. 

She returned to Washington in December 1863 and went into one of her periodic depressions that accompanied times of enforced inactivity. 

When General Ulysses Grant’s bloody spring offensive in 1864 began to overwhelm the Sanitary Commission, Barton received permission to work in the hospitals at Fredericksburg.  Her friend, Massachusetts General Benjamin Butler, finally gave her permission to join a forward field hospital. 

At war’s end Barton found herself the most famous woman in America. 

The original door sign of Barton's Missing Soldiers Bureau..

In one of his final acts, President Lincoln assigned her the daunting task of locating missing prisoners of war and informing families of their fate.  She read and answered thousands of letters from families while pouring over shoddy and incomplete Confederate records. 

In 1867 she undertook a nationwide speaking tour presenting her lecture Work and Incidents of Army Life.  The tour provided her first personal income since leaving the Patent Office at the outset of the war.  She also began collaborating with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in advocating for women’s suffrage.  She was especially valued for her ability to reach veterans and enlisting their support with the appeal, “Soldiers! I have worked for you and I ask you, now, one and all, that you consider the wants of my people. . . . God only knows women were your friends in time of peril and you should be [theirs] now.”

She split with the most militant feminists in support of her friend Fredrick Douglas when she endorsed the Fifteenth Amendment which gave Black men but not women the right to vote. 

Financially secure for the first time in her adult life, Barton was traveling in Europe when the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870.  She offered her services to the new International Red Cross.  She set up aid centers behind the lines of each combatant, but especially in Strasbourg, Germany and later in Paris. 

Barton  (standing) organized aid centers behind the lines of both combatants in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.

After the war she was decorated by both governments for her impartial service and her work with prisoners of war.  She helped introduce the family reunion methods she had developed after the Civil War to the International Red Cross.

Returning to the U.S. in 1873 with her health broken, Barton spent three years recuperating in the family home at Worcester and in Danville.  She corresponded with the President of the International Red Cross to ask how she could form an American section.  Dr. Louis Appia replied that she first needed to win public support, get the approval of the President, and finally, get Congress to approve the Geneva Convention.  She set to work with her pen placing articles in women’s magazines, veteran’s publications and national newspapers. 

But President Rutherford B. Hayes and many Senators were hostile.  In 1877 she felt well enough to travel twice to Washington to personally lobby, however fruitlessly.  Finally with the election of James Garfield in 1880 she had an ally in the Presidency.  Within months of his inauguration, she held her organizing meeting. 

Barton rushed relief to victims of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania flood in 1888, one of the Red Cross's earliest forays into disaster relief.  Widespread praise for the efforts helped overcome Senate opposition to ratifying the Geneva Convention and chartering the American Red Cross.

Her long stewardship of the Red Cross was not without its difficulties.  Although the organization responded to such disasters as the Johnstown Flood and Galveston Hurricane standards of local chapters were uneven, and fundraising a chronic problem. Barton’s go-it-alone style of administration was often ineffective.

In fact like many visionary founders, she was not a good administrator.  Her failings and the failings of the organization were often criticized in the press.  Disgruntled former associates challenged her for leadership and set up rival organizations.  Despite continuing to recognized and decorated abroad, Barton felt besieged at home.

By 1904 the Red Cross had undergone reorganization, not entirely to her approval, and Barton was carefully eased out as President.

She flirted with a rival organization, The National First Aid Association of America, but it and its functions of training local volunteers were soon absorbed back into the Red Cross.

Barton's house and Red Cross Headquarters in Glen Echo, Maryland is now the Clara Barton National Historic Site, the first such site dedicated to the accomplishments of an American woman.

Responding to requests from children Barton wrote a juvenile book, The Story of My Childhood, which was published in 1907.  She enjoyed attending and being honored at Suffrage conventions and Grand Army of the Republic encampments.

Clara Barton died of pneumonia at the home on the grounds of the Red Cross Headquarters she built at Glen Echo, Maryland on April 12, 1912 at the age of 90. 

Pretty good for a “frail waif.”