CARROLLTON — Many people envision a flight attendant’s job as glamorous — flying to exotic locales, meeting interesting people. But that’s just part of the job.
“It’s manual labor,” said Betty Ray of Carrollton, who has worked for Northwest Airlines, recently merged into Delta, for 12 years. “You’re on your feet, walking up and down the plane, airports, lifting bags up and down.”
Ray said she always liked to travel and still enjoys it, but the longer flights are very tiring. She has a 12-hour flight to Japan coming up in a couple of weeks as well as two flights to London. Often there isn’t much time for sightseeing in places such as Amsterdam or Paris.
“You may just have nine hours before a return flight, including sleeping. There are a lot of early morning flights,” she said. “You lose track of where you’re flying. Sometimes people ask what city we’re over. If you say the wrong one, they freak out.”
She laughs and admits to having made that faux pas, since schedules change often. In April she flew to Tampa, Hartford, Denver, San Jose, California, Calgary and Paris.
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Ray, who started her career at the age of 45, says airline attitudes about the age of flight attendants have changed. Management realized older employees were often more dependable, so now there’s not an age limit.
“The oldest one I know of is from Minnesota and is a man, almost 90,” she said.
Passenger attitudes have also changed,” she said. “September 11, 2001, changed everything. People realized were all in this together. The public got easier to deal with in general, although about 5 percent give you trouble. It seems like there are more weird ones these days.”
There also were changes in the training. “Before the terrorist attack, we were told to cooperate with a hijacker, not try to do anything,” Ray said. “Now we’re told to do whatever we can to extinguish the situation. The public is more aware. People are going to help.”
Her own awareness has been sharpened, she said: “I’m more aware of who’s on the plane and where everyone is sitting.”
Some people would wonder how Ray has the nerve to fly, considering where she was when the 2001 attack occurred. “We were flying into Reagan National at Washington, D.C., when we heard of the first attack. We were about two planes behind the one that was diverted to the Pentagon.
“One of the attendants came back and told us two planes had hit the World Trade Center,” she said. It was strange. I couldn’t believe it could be true. I thought even if someone had a gun to a pilot’s head, he would down the plane into the ocean or ground before he would fly it into a building.”
Then, someone came out of the airport and told them to get off the plane and come inside. A plane had just hit the Pentagon.
“We went in and watched TV and saw the buildings fall,” she recalled. “I just wanted to get away from the airport. My family didn’t know where I was, and my cell phone wouldn’t work.”
Miraculously, she feels, she finally got a call from a niece at Delta State Univeristy.
“I told her quickly to call Mother and Daddy and tell them where I was and that I was OK. Then we didn’t have any more service,” she said. “They sent us to a hotel in Virginia. It was total chaos. After three days we flew to Minneapolis, with only two airline employees as passengers. Someone had tried to go through security as a fake pilot.”
The whole thing was very unnerving, Ray said: “Everybody was on edge. I had another trip and didn’t get home for a couple of weeks. Dad kept asking if I wanted him to come and get me.”
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Ray settled in Carrollton from Natchez in September 2003.
“I had been looking for somewhere to live closer to Memphis, and when I came through here, thought what a really special place Carrollton is,” she said. “Since I grew up in Greenwood, I had friends nearby. I thought there was really no place to eat in Carrollton and an old-fashioned coffee house with food might be a good addition.”
She seized the opportunity to purchase a house — partly built in the 1840s and partly in the 1870s, by her great-great grandfather, Captain William Ray — and did some genealogical research to learn more about him. In 2006, she opened Miss Sippy’s, a restaurant and coffee house across the street from the Carroll County courthouse.
She said she hopes to make a living from it eventually, when she retires from flying. But that will be a while yet. Her parents, who are retired, and a brother have also moved to Carrollton.
Ray said she has a bit of “gypsy” in her, inherited from her mother.
“She moved around a lot as a child,” she said. “Then when we were growing up we always went to the Southern Baptist Convention wherever it was held. We went to California, Texas, Montana, all over. Those were our vacations.”
Later, her minister parents, Dr. Charles Ray, who served as pastor of North Greenwood Baptist Church, and his wife Elizabeth, became foreign missionaries and served in Japan, China, and Thailand. After college, Ray lived with them in Thailand for a year.
She almost became a flight attendant right after college, but after starting the process with a friend, who backed out, she also withdrew and didn’t go for an interview.
Some years later, after working in several different fields, including banking and insurance and as a hospital patient representative, she was looking for something new to do. A recently retired Delta pilot and his wife were visiting, and he told her the airline industry was hiring and suggested she apply for a flight attendant’s job.
She did, and 12 years later, she’s still flying.
And she has met a few celebrities along the way, including Danny Glover, Isaac Hayes, Bart Starr, Phil Donahue, Mary Ann Mobley and her husband and mother, Shepard Smith, and others. But the best perk of the job is getting to fly around the world for free, she says, so in her off time she has visited London, Rome, Beijing, and other places.
Though she enjoys visiting big cities, Ray says she likes small towns. “Traveling a lot makes me appreciate the South, and especially Mississippi. Carrollton is a neat place. It just feels like home.”
