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date ##, 2009 january 10, 2013
Volume 30, Number # VOLUME 33, NUMBER 46
Dakota County Tribune Since 1884
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Flying into retirement
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inside biz news
Burnsville flight attendant logs nearly 46 years
tom bakk
forum
by John Gessner
DAKOTA COUNTY TRIBUNE
When Kassie Rients became a flight attendant in 1967, her supervisors did pre-flight “girdle checks,” attendants signed contracts to keep their weight down, and job applicants had to show more than initiative. “We had to lift our skirts and walk across the room so the interviewer could see our legs,” said Rients, of Burnsville. “All the airlines did that.” Her nearly 46-year career encompassed a lifetime of social change, from the end of discriminatory work practices to the introduction of emergency biohazard suits on airliners. Rients also learned a nifty trick for cleaning up after sick passengers. But as she completed her last flight for Delta Air Lines – a Dec. 17 roundtripper between Minneapolis and Los Angeles – Rients focused on good friends and family members, about 30 of whom marked her final arrival with a festive sendoff at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. “I’m going to miss it terribly, because I love interacting with people,” said Rients, 66, who was greeted with balloons, signs, a pink sash and an honorary wheelchair for disembarking. “I have no regrets,” she said. “It’s just been a wonderful career. I’ve always loved it.” Rients took advantage of a buyout offer from Delta (formerly Northwest), something she’d spurned in the past. Now she wants to relax and travel with her husband, Jerry, 76, who worked as a barber for 56
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news Photo by Rick Orndorf
Flight attendant Kassie Rients of Burnsville flew her last flight for Delta Airlines on Dec. 17. She joined the former Northwest Airlines in 1967.
Submitted photo
After completing flight attendant training in 1967, Kassie Rients, far right, and some fellow trainees visited with Santa Claus at Southdale Center in Edina. years. The couple, who have a blended family of six children, also teach confirmation classes at St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Savage. “I wanted to make it to 50 years,” she said, “but the buyout was really a nice offer, and a couple funerals changed my mind – two fight attendant friends that died that never really got to (enjoy) their pensions.”
Another era
Raised in Philadelphia, Pa., Rients tried engineering school for a while and was working in a bank when a female colleague told her about her experience as a
flight attendant for Northwest Airlines, also known as Northwest Orient. “She had to retire because she got married,” Rients said. “You couldn’t be married, you couldn’t be engaged and you couldn’t have children.” Rients was flown to Minneapolis on a 707 – her first plane ride – to interview with Northwest. She began work two weeks after a new contract with attendants ended the airline’s practice of forced retirement at age 32, Rients said. “That was the norm” in the industry, she said. At 5 foot 9, Rients signed a contract that lim-
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ited her weight to 138 pounds. ecm “Girls ate baby food to make their weight editorial checks,” she recalled. “You had two weeks to lose it, whatever the amount was. ... We got weight checks twice a year when we had uniform changeovers, or whenever they felt like it. But never for the men.” dakota arts The onboard “pursers” – the equivalent of today’s flight leaders – were men with little more training than the flight attendants but much bigFolk singer ger paychecks, Rients said. Michael Monroe She credits much of the change in airline is one of the many workplace practices to the employment discrimithis artists week newswho are nation case of Mary Pat Laffey vs. Northwest performing as Code Type: UPC Version A Stats: 0 Airlines. The case, initiated in 1968, involvedCustomer: 3242-ECM Publishers part ofMAG:the Order #: P34915-017 1.00 Frozen a Northwest flight attendant who was turned P.O. #: BWA: 0.0020 Apple series. Ordered By: Symbol Width: 1.4690 down for a purser’s job, Rients said. michael Polarity: Positive Up Symbol Height: 1.0200 Date Run: 05/29/2002 Flexo Width: 0.0000 Back Page The case wound through the courts until monroe 1984, and change began arriving in the 1970s, Rients said. “They kind of eased up on the weight checks,” she said.
Tricks of the trade
Rients said she’s been “thrown up on more times than I can count” and is unfazed by vomit. Premeasured coffee bags have proved invaluable. “If you took the coffee bag and broke it and threw it onto the vomit, then it killed the odor immediately,” she said. “And you kind of felt you were just scraping up chunks of coffee.” She recalled one instance of “chain reaction” air sickness when lightning struck a 707 she was flying to Chicago. It sounded like an explosion. One man’s shirt was so badly soiled she washed it herself, Rients said. “That was before rubber gloves,” she noted, See Retirement, Page 5A
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