This article is about Menlo Park Resident Rita Mundis, who at age 78 still works as a United Airlines flight attendant. Even if I were 35, I’m pretty sure I’d be in awe of Rita’s career longevity. But, as you’ve probably surmised, I’m well past 35, which has caused me to view Rita’s decision to continue working as nothing short of astonishing.
Rita Mundis was 10 years old and watching a movie about a glamorous airline stewardess flying to Rio De Janeiro, when Rita decided that she too was going to be a stewardess. Ten years later she signed on with United Airlines. Now, at age 78, she’s still flying.
A Menlo Park resident, Rita has the distinction of being number five out of four thousand in terms of seniority for United Airlines flight attendants based in San Francisco and number ten out of 25,000 for United flight attendants nationwide. She’s been a flight attendant on more than 3,000 flights and traveled to about 75 countries. As Rita sees it, being a flight attendant is “an addiction, a lifestyle, and an identity.”
There’s the addiction that comes from being a critical cog in the machine that magically transports hundreds of passengers to faraway places; there’s the lifestyle associated with knowing that, twice a month, she’ll return to her favorite haunts in whatever far-flung destination she finds herself, and there’s the sense of identity that comes from knowing that when friends ask, “Where are you off to next?” she’ll have a ready reply.
For Rita, much of the allure of her work also comes from the camaraderie that develops among fellow crew members. She may not know all the crew members when a flight takes off, but, after, say, a 12-hour flight to Beijing, the crew has become like family, with some family members a third her age. The crew spends time together during the layover and works together on the flight back. As a result, the relationships crew members develop are far deeper than the connections employees normally develop at work.
Early days
A native of Southern California, Rita signed on to be a stewardess in 1966, the same year that Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. (Her job title didn’t change to flight attendant until the early 1970s when men were allowed to enter the profession.)
Rita received her stewardess training at a training facility in Chicago. It was her first time away from home and her number one goal was not to make waves. When her classmates were partying, she stayed in her room, venturing out only on Sunday evenings when she’d take a bus to O’Hare Airport, go to a bar, order exactly one bloody mary, and ogle over the strapping young men.
Much of her training focused on grooming: the importance of polishing her shoes – Rita says that, as a kid growing up in Southern California, polishing her shoes was a foreign concept since she wore only sandals – and the necessity of using moisturizer. Today, Rita looks many years younger than her chronological age, something she attributes in part to applying moisturizer religiously.
When Rita was in training, a scale was located at the start of the cafeteria line and trainees weighed in daily. Once they started working, stewardesses were required to weigh in monthly although Rita was exempt since she weighed more than ten pounds less than the 132-pound weight limit.
As a stewardess, Rita adhered to the strict dress code mandated by United – three-inch heels on the concourse, two inch heels in the cabin (though Rita chose to also wear three-inch heels in the cabin to add an inch to her 5’2” stature), white gloves, a pillbox hat, and a girdle, which was a requirement even though, at the time, she weighed 105 lbs.
Bound by the rules of the day
The rules that governed the stewardess profession in 1966 were in keeping with the day’s mores: stewardesses were required to stop working at age 32, they couldn’t get married, and they couldn’t have kids—rules designed to ensure that they appeared youthful and captivating for the predominantly male passengers they served. (Mandatory retirement at age 32 also meant that airlines avoided paying women more as they gained seniority.)
Given her focus on her own career, these requirements were not of concern to Rita, at least not at first.
Initially Rita was based in Newark, New Jersey, where she lived in what she described as a stew zoo, a high-rise apartment populated by stewardesses, pilots and FBI agents. She met her future husband Tom soon after she moved in. He was 23, a former paratrooper, and a newly hired United pilot. Rita says, “He looked like a boy scout flying a DC-6.” They traveled around the globe for three glorious years, taking advantage of the myriad discounts that make travel “practically free” when you’re traveling as a stewardess with your pilot spouse.
In 1966, when Tom proposed, Rita knew that married stewardesses were immediately terminated. Her plan was not to reveal her marital status, a strategy which would have presented complications of its own. Fortunately, United’s ban on married stewardesses was lifted a few months before her wedding.
(As an employee with seniority, Rita was affected by the marriage ban in another way. In the 1977 Supreme Court case United Airlines vs. McDonald, United Airlines was required to pay nearly $33 million in back pay and reinstate 475 flight attendants who were forced to quit in the mid-1960s because of the no-marriage rule which later was declared illegal. As a result, United planes were flooded with stewardesses coming back to work after decades off. “The settlement created a little animosity on the airplane since all these people were coming back with seniority even though they hadn’t flown for ten years. We were nice to each other, but you still would hear people saying, ‘Well, you know, she’s McDonald’.”)
Another victory for stewardesses occurred when the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission declared age restrictions on stewardesses’ employment to be illegal sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Today the average flight attendant’s age is 46 and flight attendants have no mandatory retirement age.
When Rita was pregnant with her first daughter the “stewardesses can’t be Moms” rule had not yet been relaxed. As a result, when she told her supervisor that she was pregnant with her first daughter in 1966 and then with her second daughter in 1967, Rita was grounded immediately both times. (Those restrictions were later lifted; airlines now provide flight attendants with maternity uniforms.)
Rita and Tom managed to successfully navigate their careers while parenting young children, arranging their schedules so that, when Tom was flying, Rita was home with the kids and when Rita was flying, Tom was home with the kids. Rita also was a commercial pilot in her own right. After they were married, Tom taught Rita to fly a private plane, and she earned her commercial pilot’s license. A few years later, instrument rating in hand, she decided to apply to be a United commercial airlines pilot. United Airlines had only hired its first female pilot five years before, so Rita’s was stepping into uncharted waters. Unfortunately, United mysteriously lost Rita’s application. She applied again. This time she was accepted but, a week later, United, due to a shifting economic climate, began furloughing pilots and ceased offering pilot training. Rita was devastated. Her one solace was flying the small private plane that she and her husband owned for several years.
For the first twenty years of her career, Rita flew round trip from San Francisco to New York six times a month. She preferred to fly to Newark rather than to JFK because, given United’s flight schedules, she could fly to Newark in the late afternoon and still make it to a Broadway play that evening, something that wasn’t an option when she flew to JFK. New York still is Rita’s favorite city in the world.
In 1986 Rita started flying internationally, mostly to Asia, and continues to fly there today.
Ironically, once the airlines began accepting male flight attendants into the profession, airlines began discriminating in male flight attendants’ favor. In 2000, a federal appeals court ruled that between 1980 and 1994, United Airlines illegally discriminated against women due to weight restrictions that for women were “far more stringent” than those for men, resulting in unfair treatment. Employees who could not meet the weight requirement were suspended without pay or fired. Rita won a small settlement as part of that class action suit.
Whether it’s prohibition of marriage, mandatory retirement or setting weight limits, Rita says, “The airlines have always pushed the envelope as far as they could. But until we sued them, no one did anything about it, and they got away with it.”
That’s not to say that some flight attendants didn’t try to take advantage of changes that were implemented to protect them. Once the union got involved in enforcing weight requirements, for example, flight attendants weighing more than the maximum weight allowed were given time off work with pay while they shed extra pounds. In response, prior to getting on the scale, some flight attendants put quarters in their bras to increase their weight so they could get paid time off. “I was out there flying, working, and they’re home eating cookies to keep the pounds on,” Rita recalls.
Turning 80
Rita moved to Menlo Park from San Francisco about a year ago because, she says, she preferred to age here than in San Francisco. She’s an avid gardener and a member of Avenidas Village and regularly participates at Little House. And, as you can imagine, she has no trouble making friends wherever she goes.
Rita is in no hurry to retire. She still relishes the connections, new and renewed, she makes with crew members and nurturing the friendships she’s made over many years in Asia. (When her flight lands in Beijing or Shanghai, a chartered bus picks up the crew at the airport and drops them off at their hotel. There a coterie of masseuses, facialists, tailors, manicurists and others is waiting to offer their services. Rita has been receiving services from some of these women for the past 25 years. According to Rita, they too are like family.)
Rita says that, while her job is physically taxing, it’s not any more taxing than it was when she was younger. She attributes her resilience to staying in shape – She’s been doing the Aging Backwards Program with Miranda Esmond-White for as long as she can remember – takes a Tai Chi class and pays close attention to what she eats. In terms of not falling or slipping she says, she’s “very careful.”
Her current plan is to continue flying till March 2026 when she turns 80, which is when she’ll be due for the next required flight attendant training session, a physically intensive program that requires activities like lifting airplane doors and evacuating the cabin.
Still, Rita says, even when she’s no longer on United’s payroll, she has no intention of curtailing her adventures. “Once you’ve spent 60 traveling the world, you can’t just stop,” she says.
