Out of the Blue
When the handsome and jocular flight engineer asked the petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed novice flight attendant out to dinner, she immediately accepted. Although the two had been working together for three months, they knew little about each other. It was a situation they both hoped to rectify.
"Did you always want to be a stewardess?" Jerry Verlander asked, after the hostess at the Italian restaurant seated them at their table.
"No. In fact, at the start of my senior year of high school, I still had no idea what I wanted to do after graduation," Doreen Renay explained. "My choices were limited. I could become a teacher, a nurse, a beautician or a secretary. None of these options appealed to me. Then one day a representative from Patriot Airline came to my school's annual career day to talk about the glamorous and exciting opportunities open to airline stewardesses."
"And, no doubt, you thought it would be the ideal job. All very cosmopolitan. You could have breakfast in New York and then dinner in London or Paris."
"Something like that," she admitted with a look of embarrassment. "What about you? Why did you want to be a pilot?"
"I suppose it's in my blood. My father flew in the war," he replied. "I was so proud of him. He was my hero. Then he disappeared while flying on a mission over France, and we never saw him again."
"I'm sorry."
"It's funny. Sometimes when I'm up in the cockpit, I can almost feel him standing near me."
When Jerry saw the downcast look on Doreen's face, he quickly changed the subject. Hoping this would be but the first of many dates, the last thing he wanted to do was cast an air of gloom on the evening.
"Do you know what you'd like to order?" he asked.
"The veal parmigiana looks good, but I don't know if I should order it. The airline has strict weight requirements for us girls. We have to stay within one hundred and one hundred eighteen pounds."
"Go ahead and order it. If you eat too much, we'll walk around the airport a few times to burn off the calories."
After the waiter took their order, the couple's conversation shifted to motion pictures.
"There are two movies coming out soon that I'd like to see," Jerry said.
"Oh? What are they?"
"One is The Time Machine, based on the novel by H.G. Wells, and the other is Hitchcock's new thriller, Psycho."
"They both sound good."
"Maybe if you've got some free time next weekend, we can see one."
"I'd love to."
With the likelihood of a second date confirmed, both of them were able to relax and enjoy the evening. They discovered over dinner that they had much in common. They were both fans of the New York Yankees, especially Mickey Mantle; they both enjoyed the music of Elvis Presley; and they both planned on voting for John Kennedy in the November presidential election.
By the time JFK made his memorable inaugural address on January 20, 1961, Jerry and Doreen had fallen deeply in love. While most unmarried people would see this as a blessing, this couple was faced with a dilemma: according to Patriot Airline's regulations, stewardesses were not allowed to marry. Those that did were terminated.
"It's a stupid, discriminatory rule!" Jerry exclaimed with exasperation. "I don't see why a married woman can't pass out refreshments and see to the passengers' comfort just as well as a single one can."
"I can see about getting a job as a secretary or a salesgirl," Doreen offered.
"If you do, you'll probably have to work for less money. It's so damned unfair! The airlines don't require their pilots to be bachelors."
"That's because most men want to keep women in their place: at home in the kitchen. They want us all to be mothers and housewives, happily baking cookies in suburbia."
"Isn't that what you want, too?"
"Eventually, yes, but right now I'm only twenty-one years old, and I still haven't been to London or Paris yet. I don't want to quit work and raise a family until I've lived a little first."
"We can always wait to get married. There's nothing wrong with a long engagement."
"I don't want that either," Doreen said, seeking the comfort of the pilot's arms. "I want us to enjoy our youth together as man and wife. Then we'll buy a house, settle down and hopefully become parents."
"That's what I want, too. Unfortunately, the airline doesn't see it our way."
"Well, whatever Patriot doesn't know won't hurt it!"
Although both of them were honest, law-abiding citizens, normally not given to perfidy, they saw no harm in disregarding their employer's regulations in this case. In June of 1962, the couple married in secret. No one except immediate family members and closest friends were invited to the wedding. Afterward, they enjoyed a week-long honeymoon in the Pocono Mountains of Northeast Pennsylvania. To avoid any suspicion falling on them, Doreen accepted a transfer to Philadelphia International Airport while Jerry remained based at New York's Idlewild. They rented a small, inexpensive apartment in central New Jersey, roughly midway between the two airports, where they enjoyed domestic life whenever their schedules allowed.
* * *
Doreen buttoned her sweater against the chilly November day. As much as she had grown to love it, the small apartment was drafty and the old heating system inadequate. Still, for the time being, it was their home.
With Thanksgiving—this year falling on the twenty-second of November—less than a week away, she thumbed through The Fannie Farmer Cookbook, looking for a recipe for sausage stuffing. Although both she and Jerry had to work Wednesday (the busiest day of the year for the airlines), Thursday and Friday, they had Saturday and Sunday off. Thus, Doreen was going to make their holiday meal on Saturday. It would be their first Thanksgiving as a married couple, and she wanted it to be a memorable one. Her menu would include the traditional roast turkey with sausage stuffing and gravy, candied yams, cranberry sauce, hot biscuits and for dessert both apple and pumpkin pies.
We'll undoubtedly be eating leftovers until Christmas! she thought with amusement.
Near the back of the book, she found the recipe she was looking for. She was just about to include thyme and sage on her shopping list, when the radio deejay played Elvis Presley's "Can't Help Falling in Love." She reached over the arm of the chair and turned up the volume. It was their song—hers and Jerry's. They had heard it for the first time on the car radio when they were on the way to the jeweler's to pick out their wedding rings. The couple liked it so much that they chose it as the song played during their wedding reception when they danced for the first time as man and wife.
Doreen closed her eyes and fondly remembered Jerry singing along with Elvis as he led her around the dance floor.
"Wise men say only fools rush in, but I can't help falling in love with you."
Since that day he had sung those same lyrics to her on many occasions. It was a song the young wife felt certain she would never tire of hearing. When the last note of Elvis's love song faded away, the deejay played the Four Seasons' "Big Girls Don't Cry," and Doreen went back to planning her holiday meal. As she wrote down the ingredients she would need to buy, her foot tapped and she hummed an accompaniment to Frankie Valli's falsetto voice.
However, before the last verse could reveal that big girls do cry, the song was interrupted by a special news bulletin: Patriot Airline Flight 570, en route from New York to Miami had gone down in the Florida Everglades.
Doreen dropped her pen, and put one hand to her mouth and the other to her chest. Jerry was on that plane!
* * *
Doreen Verlander stared through reddened, tear-stained eyes at her reflection in the full-length mirror, still on the back of the door of her childhood bedroom in her parents' Morris County, New Jersey, home. Wearing a modest, knee-length black dress and a Jackie Kennedy-inspired black pillbox hat, it was hard for her to believe that only five months earlier she had worn her white wedding gown in front of that same mirror.
We were so happy then, she thought through a fresh onslaught of tears, and now, out of the blue, Jerry is gone!
At the risk of losing her job, Doreen appeared at Jerry's funeral as his widow. Understandably, the airline did not censure her for breaking the rules, perhaps fearing a public relations nightmare if they fired the grieving widow of a young man who died so tragically while in their service. Three days after burying her husband, while still on a leave of absence from work, she returned to the small apartment to begin settling his affairs and to consider her own future. No sooner did she unlock the door and cross the threshold than the enormity of the recent events struck her.
"He's never coming home!" she cried, sinking to her knees.
Five months of memories haunted her as she walked through the three rooms she had shared with Jerry. The Fannie Farmer Cookbook was on the coffee table where she had left it, still open to the sausage stuffing recipe. The turkey dinner that was never cooked, their first Thanksgiving as Mr. and Mrs. Verlander, their first Christmas, the vacations they had planned, the children, grandchildren and golden years of their retirement were all swept away in one tragic accident.
I can't live here, she realized, trying not to imagine Jerry sitting on the living room sofa in front of the television or at the kitchen table reading the newspaper.
And since she was no longer secretly married, there was no further need to hide away. The landlord, taking pity on her, did not hold her to the terms of the lease, and she was packed up and out of the apartment by December 1. It was but the first of many changes she made to her life.
In March of 1963, she accepted an assignment at O'Hare Airport where she worked the Chicago to Dallas route. Although she still grieved the loss of her husband, the change in environment did her good. She quickly made friends in the Windy City and moved into an apartment with another stewardess. By the end of the summer, she was even able to accept an occasional invitation to dinner, but was careful not to encourage any romantic overtures from her dates.
"Maybe someday I'll remarry," she told Jeannie Martens, her roommate who worked the same Chicago-Dallas run, "but I don't imagine I'll ever find a man as wonderful as Jerry was. Besides, I want to fulfill my dream of seeing London and Paris before I settle down."
However, as the November 17 anniversary of the crash of Flight 570 neared, Doreen became more withdrawn.
"Thanksgiving is going to be late this year," Jeannie noted as the two women headed toward the airport. "The fourth Thursday falls on the twenty-eighth this year. Are you going back to New Jersey for the holiday?"
"Probably. I haven't seen my parents in eight months," Doreen replied, her eyes filling with tears. "And I want to visit Jerry's grave."
In an attempt to maneuver the conversation to a more cheerful subject, Jeannie announced, "I read in the newspaper that President Kennedy is going to be in Dallas on the twenty-second. Maybe we'll get to see him."
"He'll be flying Air Force Once, not Patriot Airline."
"True, but it will land at Love Field. I don't know about you, but I'd certainly hang around the airport for a glimpse of JFK. I voted for him."
"Me, too," Doreen said, thinking so did Jerry but not saying it aloud.
"And I'll vote for him again in '64."
"So will I."
But Jerry won't be able to.
* * *
Still despondent after the one-year mark of her husband's death, Doreen felt neither a sense of excitement nor a prescient foreboding as the Patriot Airline plane landed at Dallas's Love Field on the morning of November 22. She and the rest of the world were blissfully ignorant of the momentous events that were soon to occur in that Texas city.
Jeannie persuaded her to stay at the airport until Air Force Once landed. Shortly after 11:30, the two stewardesses joined the roughly two thousand spectators hoping to get a glimpse of the president. Jackie Kennedy, wearing the now iconic pink suit, was the first to emerge from the plane, followed by her husband. Dressed in their Patriot Airline uniforms, which consisted of a fitted navy blue skirt suit, matching hat and white gloves, the stewardesses were able to skillfully navigate their way through the crowd and shake hands with the president and first lady.
"Isn't she beautiful!" Doreen's friend and coworker exclaimed as Mrs. Kennedy, carrying a bouquet of red roses, got into the back seat of the presidential limousine.
The two women waited until the motorcade left the airport and then departed themselves. They were in a nearby diner eating lunch when, roughly an hour after his plane touched down in Dallas, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dealey Plaza.
"Oh, my God! I can't believe it," Jeannie cried when the news was announced. "We just saw him."
That's the way life is, Doreen thought. One moment you're alive and the next ....
In the aftermath of the shooting, the country went into mourning for its slain leader, and his death and funeral were foremost in the news. Doreen sympathized with the grieving first lady. Although she had not been present when her own husband died, she knew what it was like to lose the man you loved. The image of Jackie in her blood-stained pink suit reminded her of all she had lost herself.
For close to a week, she existed as though in a daze. She was polite to the passengers and smiled mechanically as she saw to their needs, but she felt dead inside, as though someone had given her a shot of Novocain in her brain. It was not until she was on a flight to Newark Airport to visit her family that she emerged from her stupor.
Traveling as a passenger, she was seated next to an elderly woman who was napping beside her. As Doreen gazed through the airplane window at the billowy clouds, a sudden, unexpected feeling of peace came over her. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. She got a whiff of men's cologne. It was Canoe, Jerry's favorite. Normally, it would have been seen as another painful reminder of her loss, but strangely enough it gave her comfort. It was as though he, rather than the snoring octogenarian, were sitting next to her.
For the first time since the president had been shot, the widow managed a genuine smile.
* * *
When Doreen returned to Chicago, her roommate immediately observed the change in her.
"You must have had a good Thanksgiving," Jeannie said, noticing her cheerful expression.
"I did. What about you?"
"It was okay despite the usual mayhem that erupts whenever my family gets together. My brother-in-law had way too much to drink and got into an argument with my uncle over some stupid football game."
"Sounds like fun."
"It was, but I'm glad it's over—although Christmas is less than a month away, and I'll have to endure it all over again."
The two women spent a quiet, restful evening at home and headed to O'Hare for an early flight the following morning. When they arrived at the airport, they boarded a brand new Boeing 707. While they were busy in the galley, preparing for the upcoming flight, Doreen momentarily glimpsed a reflection of a face in the oven door.
Jerry! she thought, her heart pounding at seeing her late husband's likeness.
Unaware of her friend's disquieting experience, Jeannie joked, "This plane must have just rolled off the assembly line. It still has that 'new car' smell."
"I'll bet the captain hangs one of those pine-scented Christmas tree air fresheners in the cockpit," another stewardess added.
Still upset by what she had seen, Doreen announced, "I'll be right back. I have to go to the ladies' room."
Once in the cramped airplane bathroom, she began to tremble.
It couldn't have been Jerry!
After several minutes, she managed to convince herself that either her eyes or her mind was playing tricks on her. In an attempt to regain her composure, she wet a paper towel and applied it to her forehead.
There was a knock on the door.
"Are you all right in there?" Jeannie asked.
"Yes," she quickly assured her roommate. "I'll be out in a second."
A few minutes later she was walking down the aisle toward the galley. Suddenly, that feeling of peace she had experienced on her flight to Newark returned.
"It was all in my mind," she told herself.
"Wise men say only fools rush in, but I can't help falling in love with you."
This was no figment of her imagination. She distinctly heard her husband's voice.
"Jerry!" she cried aloud. "Where are you?"
Her fellow stewardesses, not knowing what to do, watched in disbelief as Doreen searched the empty seats for her dead husband.
"Where are you, darling?" she called.
"Your husband's not here," Jeannie said, trying to bring her roommate to her senses.
"Yes, he is. I heard him singing to me."
"That's impossible. You must have heard a radio."
"No, it was Jerry. I know his voice, and he was singing our song."
"What's going on here?" Garret Van Der Cuyl, the co-pilot, demanded to know when he overheard the commotion coming from the coach section.
Jeannie quickly explained the situation to him. The co-pilot, who had once flown with Jerry Verlander, took pity on the man's widow. He personally escorted her off the plane and, once she sufficiently recovered from her outburst, sent her home in a taxi.
"You get some rest. Okay?" he advised her.
"But the flight crew will be short-handed," Doreen objected.
"Don't worry about them. They'll be fine. You just go home and take it easy."
* * *
"Are you sure you're up to returning to work?" Jeannie asked as Doreen secured her hat to her beehive hairdo with several bobby pins.
"The doctor said I'm fine and that I won't need to be fitted for a straitjacket."
"Nobody thought you were crazy."
"I was beginning to. Even though I knew it was impossible, I honestly thought Jerry was on that plane."
"We better get going," her roommate said, putting her winter coat on over her uniform. "The airport traffic is always bad on a Monday morning."
"Is she okay?" Garret whispered to Jeannie when he saw the two stewardesses arrive at the airport.
"I think so. In case she has a relapse, her doctor prescribed a mild tranquilizer."
"Let's hope it works. I'd hate for her to have a nervous breakdown thirty-five thousand feet up in the air."
Despite the co-pilot's apprehension, Doreen appeared in good spirits. There were no faces in the oven door and no voices singing Elvis Presley songs in the coach section. When they were flying over Missouri, the captain asked for a cup of coffee.
"I'll bring it to him," Doreen offered.
"Excuse me, stewardess. Could I please have a pillow?" one of the passengers asked her as she was carrying a tray with three cups of coffee, one for each of the pilots, toward the front of the plane.
"Certainly. I'll be right with you."
When her attention went back to the cockpit door, Doreen saw what she first assumed was the flight's co-pilot. The smile on her face died when she realized the man in the Patriot Airline pilot's uniform was not Garret Van Der Cuyl; it was Jerry Verlander.
The breakdown Jeannie and Garret feared happened at that moment. Doreen dropped the tray of coffee and screamed, upsetting the people in the crowded plane. The co-pilot quickly whisked her out of the first class section, and the other stewardesses rushed in to calm the passengers.
"You don't understand!" Doreen cried as Garret led her back to the galley. "I saw him. He was standing right outside the cockpit door."
"I don't want to have to restrain her," the co-pilot told Jeannie. "Do you know where her tranquilizers are?"
"They're in her bag. I'll get them."
Once Doreen was resting peacefully, Garret returned to the cockpit. Thankfully, the remainder of the flight was uneventful.
* * *
Captain Raul Guerera, carrying a bouquet of carnations he had purchased at a florist on the way from the airport, braced himself before he entered Doreen Verlander's hospital room. The stewardess, looking frail and helpless, lay in bed sleeping. She stirred when he sat down in the visitor's chair.
"Captain Guerera?" she asked with surprise, wondering if he was a product of her diseased mind. "Is it really you?"
"Yes, it's me. How are you feeling?"
"Honestly? I don't know. I'm not sure of anything anymore."
Although she tried to hold them back, the tears came.
"Don't cry. You're going to be fine."
"How can you say that? I'm insane. I'll probably be put away in an asylum."
As Doreen and Jerry had defied Patriot Airline when they married against company regulations, Captain Guerera spoke when he should have held his tongue. A loving father with a daughter Doreen's age, he let his heart win out over his loyalty to his employer.
"I shouldn't be telling you this," he began. "And if anyone finds out, I may very well lose my job."
Doreen listened politely but, preoccupied with fears for her sanity, had little interest in what he was about to reveal.
"About a month ago, I began hearing rumors about the survivors of Flight 570. Several of the crew members have supposedly seen what they believe were the ghosts of the pilot and copilot while working on other airplanes."
"You mean ...?"
Doreen was so stunned by what she had heard that she could not finish her sentence.
"You're not alone in seeing the victims of that crash. Admittedly, at first, I didn't give the story much credence. After all, I'm a sensible man who never believed in ghosts."
"And now?"
"I did some investigating into the matter. In each case, there is a somewhat plausible reason for the sightings. Once the investigation into the cause of the crash was completed, the wreckage of the plane was salvaged. Parts were used in the construction of new planes. In the case of each sighting, including the one where you claim to have seen your late husband, the plane was a 707 manufactured with parts from Flight 570."
"Then what I saw ...?"
"Could very well have been your husband."
Doreen was overcome by the idea that she was not insane after all, that she instead had a profound paranormal experience. And she was not the only one.
The following day Doreen was released from the hospital. When she boarded the same 707 in Dallas to return to Chicago, she had no idea it would be the last time she would fly in an airplane. Although no longer employing her as a stewardess, Patriot Airline had agreed to fly her back to her home base, unwilling to leave her stranded in Texas. The flight crew was alerted of her presence and told to keep a close eye on her. To their relief, she presented no problem, remaining in her seat, reading a paperback book for the duration of the trip.
After the plane landed in O'Hare, she walked down the airstairs. Halfway to the terminal, she turned and looked back at the plane. Jerry's spirit was at the top of the stairs looking down at her. With a bittersweet smile on his handsome face, he raised his hand and waved goodbye.
* * *
Not long after returning to New Jersey (via a Greyhound bus) Doreen Verlander took a job as a secretary at an insurance company—about as unglamorous a job as was available to young women. At the age of twenty-six, she married a grocery store manager and settled down in Morris County, a little over a mile from her parents' home, where she and the grocer raised three children and lived well into their eighties.
Despite her youthful dreams, Doreen no longer craved a peripatetic existence and never travelled to London or Paris. She preferred spending family vacations in places they could travel to by way of the family car. Her second husband, a kind and gentle man, never questioned his wife's apparent fear of flying. Furthermore, he pretended not to notice when she longingly gazed into the sky whenever she heard an airplane fly overhead, wondering if a phantom of Flight 570 could be on board.
This story was inspired by accounts concerning the crash of Eastern Airlines Flight 401. On December 19, 1972, the Lockheed L-1011 traveling from JFK Airport in New York to Miami, crashed in the Florida Everglades. The three pilots, as well as two of the flight attendants and ninety-six passengers were killed. The wreckage was later salvaged and parts used in other planes. Survivors of the crash later reported seeing the ghosts of the pilot and co-pilots on those planes.
"Can't Help Falling in Love" words and music by George Weiss, Hugo Peretti and Luigi Creatore.
You've heard of the movie Snakes on a Plane? It isn't half as frightening as Salem on a plane.
