It Ain't Over (24 page)

Then the former Miss Prim and Proper stepped up and flew through the sky.

Adria Drew, 48

Long Island, New York

A
dria Drew was not boarding that plane. Not a little puddle jumper with peeling paint and propellers that almost made it look like a toy. She had never seen a prop plane up close, let alone ridden on one.
No way,
she said to herself.
I am not getting on that thing.

Hysterical, she called her boyfriend, Larry, back in New York to tell him she was terrified of the plane and was going to rent a car and drive from Los Angeles to Palm Springs instead. He failed to calm her down. Less than an hour later, she called him again, this time telling him something so outrageous he hung up on her.

At the time, Adria was in her midtwenties and worked for MCI, a telecommunications company. She began her career there as a secretary, but a colleague who recognized her people skills suggested she go for a job in sales. So she approached the sales manager in Westchester County, New York, where she lived. He refused to hire her on the grounds that she had no track record.

For Adria, the word “no” fell on deaf ears.

“I always say, if anyone tells you that you can’t do something, don’t listen,” Adria says. Rather than retreating to her secretarial desk, she forged ahead and asked the sales manager in New York City, a vastly larger market, to give her a shot.

Bull’s-eye!

For the next 11 years, Adria had one goal in mind: Show the cynic in Westchester he’d made a mistake and that she had the right stuff. And she did—successfully convincing many companies, including the New York Times Company, to switch their long-distance service and rising to become one of MCI’s top sales representatives. Selling voice and data services to other large companies proved to be lucrative and she won awards, often—and most satisfyingly—presented in front of the manager who wouldn’t give her a chance.

Then she won a visit to Palm Springs, the trip that would change her life.

The flight from New York to Los Angeles’s LAX was on a large commercial jet, not a white-knuckle affair. At LAX, Adria boarded a bus that took her across the airfield for the short flight to Palm Springs. That’s when the panic set in.

“An older man saw how nervous I was,” she recalls. “He told me he took the flight all the time and that if I sat behind the pilots, I could see what they were doing and I’d probably feel more comfortable.” That lifted Adria’s anxiety, and she stepped onto the puddle jumper.

This was in the days before 9/11. The plane, a Beech 1900 twin-engine turbo prop, had no cockpit door, only a curtain separating the pilots from the passengers. The curtain was left open.

“The next thing I know we’re going down the runway and taking off,” says Adria. “I’m looking out the front window, which is completely different from looking out the side. The sky was gorgeous, with mountains all around us—it was so dramatic. I had never experienced such exhilaration before.”

Landing 45 minutes later, she called Larry and told him she was going to learn how to fly. That’s when he questioned her sanity and hung up on her.

Months went by, and Adria continued to muse about getting her pilot’s license. Then her beloved father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In six weeks, he was dead. He was only 65.

You never know how much time you’ve got
, she thought.
I’m really going to do it—I’m going to learn how to fly.

Adria was doing well enough at MCI to be able to afford two flight lessons per month. Studying for her certificate and haunting local airports consumed her weekends. Soon she married Larry, quit MCI, and began to work for her husband’s hair products business as a sales rep.

Then an old pilot friend pushed her to apply for a job at a major airline. By now she was the mother of two young boys and thought being a pilot for a charter airline would have more flexibility, so she was hired at a charter and took to the skies. Three years later the same pilot friend again urged her to try for a major airline. Her boys were older now and able to cope better with a sometimes-absent mother.

“If you don’t ask, you don’t even give yourself a chance,” she says. “I guess my sales background helped give me the confidence to just go for things.”

Adria asked, and two months later was in an intensive eight-week training course in Dallas, working in a simulator and rooming with a 23-year-old candidate.

“I became a commercial airline pilot when I was 44,” says Adria. A captain she worked with nicknamed her “Grandma.”

When she started flying commercially, it was “an out-of-body experience,” she marvels. “I can still remember when I got my first uniform—the stripes on the sleeves, the hat, the whole outfit.”

Not much rattles Adria, the sort of temperament one wants in a pilot. A
month or so into active training she was the copilot on a flight out of Charlotte, North Carolina, where there were maintenance issues. After a three-hour delay they took off for New York’s LaGuardia Airport, where they encountered bad weather and were ordered into a holding pattern. Finally, the pilots had to make a decision about landing at an alternate airport. They radioed air traffic controllers about trying for Kennedy, but that was a no-go, too.

“The captain was phenomenal and let me be part of the decision,” Adria says. “We concluded Boston was our best bet, far enough east to beat the bad weather. We made an announcement about the diversion. And all of a sudden, the flight attendant dings us. We had a medical emergency in back.”

A passenger, perhaps distressed by the scary weather, couldn’t breathe and had to be put on oxygen. To make matters worse, the Boston air traffic controllers informed the pilots they couldn’t handle any more incoming flights. Fuel was getting low. Finally, they landed at Bradley International Airport, near Hartford, Connecticut, in the middle of a blizzard. The passengers and crew ended up at a hotel, which soon lost power.

Characteristically, Adria rolled with it. “You can’t sit there saying, ‘Oh my God.’ There’s no room for that. You just have to stay focused and do what you have to do to get your job done. That’s something that’s either in your blood or it isn’t.”

Adria sees no difference between male and female pilots in this respect, and she’s experienced no institutional sexism at the companies she’s worked for, reporting that they’re well-schooled in protocol and the perils of sexual harassment.

However, not
everyone
has gotten the memo about female pilots. At the Chicago airport, Adria, in full uniform, waited curbside with a group for a hotel van. A woman ran over her foot with her carry-on and then asked her to load it into the trunk, assuming she was the van driver. Another time,
Adria was at an airport shop when she was summoned by a woman alarmed by an unattended bag. She took for granted Adria was security.

Adria laughs off those moments, preferring to focus on the positive. “One time I was standing at the exit door of the plane, saying good-bye to passengers, when a woman in her late sixties asked, ‘You’re the pilot of this plane?’ ” Adria acknowledged that she was. “Did you do this flight?” the woman persisted. Adria said she had. “She gave me this huge smile, and said, ‘Good for you. It was wonderful.’ ”

Despite Larry’s initial shock when Adria said she wanted to be a pilot, he’s been supportive. She can give him two hours’ notice that she’ll be gone for four days and he’s happy to take the boys, now 11 and 15, wherever they need to go and be there when they come home.

Adria recently stopped commercial flying to take a job with the FAA as a safety inspector, but she’s still up in the air a lot. She reports that her boys have been exposed to her piloting so frequently, they think nothing of it—until they see their friends’ reactions:
Wow! Your mom’s an airline pilot?

“Based on outside feedback,” Adria says, “it made them realize their mom is kind of cool.”

Patty Merrill, 67

Portland, Oregon

P
atty Merrill was in the rut to end all ruts. And the worst part was, just six years earlier, she’d been doing what she loved best: surrounding herself with books.

“I have always been a passionate collector,” she says. “I started gathering things when I was just eight years old and found an abandoned teddy bear on the side of the street. But I was especially drawn to books. Just holding a book in your hand can feel remarkable.”

That passion had landed her the ideal job at Portland’s massive Powell’s bookstore.

“Because Powell’s is so well-respected,” she says, “brilliant authors were always coming in to sign their books. I had the thrill of rubbing elbows with writers like Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. It was great to be among creative types.”

But in 1996, Patty found herself in that classic business bind: Her aptitude
at her job had propelled her through the ranks at Powell’s, taking her further and further from the books she loved. She was now a middle manager, overseeing two satellite branches of the store in a different part of town. She spent most of her time managing personalities, schedules, and budgets. It was joyless work.

“I kept trying to adapt to this job, but it never worked,” she says. “I thought something was wrong with me, and that led to a lot of anger and depression.”

This was not the first time Patty had felt at odds with something in her life. She’d once owned her own bookshop in the small town of Albany, Oregon. “It was the seventies, and it was so exciting when new titles came through the door,” she recalls. “Those books weren’t just ahead of the curve, they were
setting
the curve.”

But as much as Patty had adored that shop, small-town life was too confining for a free-spirited feminist like herself. “Everything was male-dominated,” she remembers. “When I went to the bank to borrow money to open the store, the loan officer didn’t even look at me. He would only deal with my husband. I tried to make myself small to fit into the life I was living. I always felt unique there, but not in a good way. I kept thinking,
Why can’t I water myself down and just be happy?
”

But watering herself down wasn’t in Patty’s character, and her need for a more progressive culture drove her back to Portland—and the middle-management job at Powell’s in which she now found herself stuck. Finally, convinced that she was about to be fired anyway, she took a deep breath and turned in her resignation.

“I spent the next six months in the fetal position,” she says, “trying to figure out what to do next. Here I was in my forties; it was a great time for a midlife crisis anyway. Authenticity had always been so important to me, and
yet I had spent all these years trying to fit in where I didn’t belong. No wonder it had all gone downhill.”

Patty was determined to find an occupation that would feel genuine to her, and her mind kept returning to one of the most inspiring periods of her life.

“Just before I married my husband, who was working as an architect in Portland,” she says, “he won a traveling fellowship to study monasteries. So right after our wedding, when we were both in our midtwenties, we headed off to Europe and explored all of these wonderful, ancient places.”

Given her unquenchable curiosity, the trip was intoxicating to Patty, especially when she visited the Benaki Museum in Athens. The impact it had on her was seismic.

“The museum was simply a collection of folk art, textiles, tiles, and quirky everyday things, objects I had never seen collected before in such depth. It was fascinating.” The more Patty flashed back to that experience, the more she believed that it might hold the secret to her future. “Remembering it all made me feel like I had been held hostage in my own life.”

Excited and energized, Patty shared her thoughts with a friend, and in just a few days they were hatching a business plan. “We decided we would travel around the world, buy things that no one else had, and sell them wholesale and retail,” she says. Using Patty’s savings—the severance money she had gotten from Powell’s—and some funds that her partner had acquired through a divorce, they got started. First, they rented a space in a warehouse on a busy street in southeast Portland. Their store, they decided, would be called Cargo. Now all they needed were the goods.

Patty describes her first buying trip to Singapore as a “leap of faith.” A cousin of hers was a teacher there, so she had a guide, but she had no idea what kinds of products she would find (“I didn’t even know what I was
looking for!”). But she was excited to get started and to travel to exotic places again.

After arriving in Singapore, Patty first ventured out to big furniture factories where expats were buying sleek, perfectly finished rosewood dining sets. Patty quickly realized that this was definitely not what she had traveled all this way to discover. Instead, she asked her cousin to escort her to the sketchier part of town, where she bought beautiful baskets, old Chinese-style furniture, and Buddhist shrines.

But Patty had her heart set on objects that had even more of a special, even spiritual aura.