A small miracle in Cleveland

For the strength we need now, our own stories can empower us. Here's one of mine.

The Silver Grille at Higbee’s Department Store in Cleveland, Ohio, in one of its finest hours. Not your usual setting for a small miracle? So much the better.

FOR FOUR YEARS—from February 4, 1979 to April 1, 1983—I was unable to fly without drugs. And with drugs, although I was able to fly—whoops, I was unable to function upon arrival.

On one occasion, about 1981, I’d been prescribed Ativan by my doctor so I would be able to fly from New York to California to attend some meetings and give a speech. I’m not so sure about the speech part. Or the meetings part. What I am sure about is that I arrived at my friend Sue’s house, and promptly went to sleep for 17 hours. I think I was there for a couple days. Then, I must have returned to New York, because a week or so later, I received many large boxes from Bullock’s/Pasadena. Over $800 worth of unfamiliar clothing in many different sizes, none of which I tried on.

“You were just grabbing things,” Sue said. “I didn’t know what to say.”

The root of this fear began sometime in very early 1979. The transfer from Los Angeles to New York was in full swing, and I was going on frequent cross-country trips to look at real estate in New York, and meet with the editorial staff in Manhattan. I was also doing field work for the magazine, interviewing data processing managers, writing up their stories.

In early January, I scheduled a two-city trip, beginning with a DP manager interview in Lansing, Michigan, and concluding with an IBM small systems conference in Rochester, Minnesota. I booked a flight on American Airlines for a trip to Detroit with connections to Lansing leaving out of LAX at 9 a.m. on Sunday, February 4, 1979.

Routine stuff.

And then, the woo-woo hit. I began to have premonitions about the trip. Cancel, cancel. A fear I had not experienced before, coming in waves, unexpected, clear in its message. Do not take that plane to Detroit.

Sure. I’ll just let my editor-in-chief know that I’ve got this, you know, weird vibe, and I won’t be going. That’s why they still won’t hire female sales reps. I’ll hear about it for the rest of my life: “Ask Wendy if her fairy godmother thinks it’s a good idea.”

Nevertheless, as the days and weeks went on, and February 4th loomed closer, I was beginning to have physical reactions: I would get such a feeling of fear I’d be light-headed and shaking. I confided in my friend, Sara. She’s a Scot, and she’s no-nonsense, no-woo-woo all the time.

“Of course, you’re scared,” she said. “You’re unprepared for the trip. You haven’t done the homework yet. Get your ducks in order.”

She was right. I hadn’t even contacted the interviewee with his get-ready list.

I rose at 5 a.m. that Sunday morning—it was a long drive to LAX from Pasadena—so four hours before take-off was a reasonable window of time. I went into my bathroom and collapsed.

I have to go, I said out loud. I can’t say, “You know, I had really, really bad feeling about this trip…” I have to go. I’m committed.

My son, not yet four, was asleep in the other room. I kissed him goodbye; he didn’t wake up.

Outside, it was a beautiful Southern California Sunday morning, I had just purchased what was to be the greatest car I’ve ever owned—a Lancia—and I drove it to the airport, way too fast, the way you used to be able to drive on LA freeways on Sunday mornings.

Everything at the American Airlines counter, all procedures were smooth, standard, routine. The DC-10 could hold up to 390 passengers, but this model, on this day, was nearly empty. Maybe 65 of us boarded.

The plane took off, and we passengers in the main seating area—I could only see one man from where I was seated on the far left right next to the engine—could watch the pilot and the co-pilot on a closed-circuit television. They appeared to be drinking coffee and joking around.

I had headsets on; I was listening to a Lily Tomlin routine and reading the menu. I had just decided to have Crepes Diane for breakfast, when I heard a loud “POP!” I looked to my left, out the window, and there were flames coming out from below the wing. Flames; and then, the engine fell off .

In front of us on the closed circuit tv, the pilot and co-pilot were all arms, they were pulling plugs out of and pulling levers down from a board that was ablaze with flashing red lights. Shutting off the closed-circuit tv was not a priority.

The stewardess—I think they were still called that, then—came running back, screaming (despite a commercial that had been running on television for months with a jingle singing, “We’re American Airlines/Doing what we do best…”).

“Extinguish all smoking material!” She screamed at us. “We’re turning back!”

I looked across at the man in the middle, who had been reading a newspaper with both hands; his face couldn’t be seen. There was a story about pro basketball on the page I could read from my seat.

I turned around in my seat; a man was seated behind me. I looked at him and he stared straight through me with no emotion, no words.

And then—I can’t say I “heard” a voice, but I was conscious of a clear internal message coming through. And it said, “The next time I tell you not to do something, don’t do it.”

The next time! There’s going to be a next time!

The plane circled for an hour, dumping a full load of fuel; the man with the newspaper did not put it down, and did not turn a page.

We returned to LAX; ambulances and fire trucks were on the tarmac.

As we disembarked, American Airlines employees told us there was another plane being prepared for us, and we would be delayed only about 90 minutes.

No thanks. I let my luggage go to Detroit and Lansing, and Rochester without me.

I called Sara; by now, it was close enough to noon to have an Irish coffee.

She agreed. I returned to her house in Pasadena; I think I had seven.

Meanwhile, I called the DP manager in Lansing, who was intending to meet my plane, and told him the trip was cancelled. The next day, he called me back, and said, “Good thing you didn’t come. We had one hell of an ice storm yesterday, and when I went to go to work this morning, I discovered my brakes were shot. If I’d have tried to pick you up at the airport, we might not have made it.” So that was it, I thought.

After that episode, I had some nervousness, but it was diminishing. You know, these things happen, you can’t travel tens of thousands of airmiles a year and not have some incidents, I’m a pro at this, get over it.

I was getting over it. And then, on May 25, 1979—three months later—a DC 10 American Airlines Flight #191 to Los Angeles took off from O’Hare in Chicago with a full load of passengers and the left engine fell off on takeoff. The plane crashed and everyone aboard was killed —273 people, still the worst airline fatalities in a single accident in U.S. aviation history.

Struts, the NTSB declared. From Wikipedia: “Engine number one (the left engine) separated from the left wing, flipping over the top of the wing and landing on the runway. As the engine separated from the aircraft, it severed hydraulic lines that lock the wing's leading-edge slats in place and damaged a 3-foot (1 m) section of the left wing's leading edge.”

In other words, the things that held the engine to the wings were crappy.

“Why didn’t we die?” I asked a million-air-miles IBMer.

“Hydraulics,” he said. “Your plane was a few minutes in the air, the pilot had control. In Chicago, it was seconds, the hydraulics were pulled out, he had no control.”

Two takeaways: One—of global importance—I never understood why our February 4,1979, ”incident” wasn’t reported and investigated; it wasn’t random, it was a preventable human error. Two—a personal consequence—I developed an instant fear of flying so severe that for four years, I indulged in alternative, and clumsy, forms of business travel—trains, cabs, driving. My avoidance increased the fear; it metastasized until I was either avoiding all work travel or catatonic with fear at the thought of it.

By April 1, 1983, the phobia had affected my work and my life. But I had committed to giving a speech on that Friday, in Cleveland, at noon. Frozen with fear and without any form of nerve-numbing, I boarded a plane at La Guardia, said a prayer I’d developed for those unavoidable jobs, something like, “Here I am. Do what you want.”

THE ROOM AT HIGBEE’S DEPARTMENT STORE was large and lavishly decorated with bouquets of flowers on the tables. The room was off a hallway from the clothing departments; it was intended for public events. In the ‘80s, women’s organizations were courted for by department stores for business gatherings. I had been to Kaufman’s in Pittsburgh several times in the past year.

About 200 women were in attendance, all in business suits and jacketed dresses, many carrying the leather Filofaxes—life organizers with an astonishing array of customized options. I was seated at a long table with women from several different organizations who were co-sponsoring the event.

We visited briefly; I remember it as pleasant. And then, lunch was served. The plan—as many of the women had limited time away from work to attend an event—was to have me speak during lunch. I was getting my notes together, and not eating—I never ate before a speech—when I noticed a change in the mood at the table.

The woman seated next to me was talking tensely with another woman; several attendees had risen from tables around the room and were gathering in small groups, some headed for the door.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“The food,” the woman next to me said. “Chicken in a cheese sauce. Today is the fifth day of Passover, and even if we’re not Orthodox, we keep kosher on Passover. This is an inexcusable insult to many of us here. People aren’t going to stay.”

And indeed, a few were already out the door. I put my notes down, stood up, and walked over to the woman in charge—a Higbee’s special events employee—and I said, “Start the program now.” She started to disagree, and I said, “Now.”

I went to the podium—one of those short ones that fits on top of a regular table—tested the mic, and spoke into it.

“Welcome,” I said¹, without waiting for a committee chair to introduce me. “Welcome to an auspicious day for the women of Cleveland, a day that by our good fortune, the calendar has chosen to be both Good Friday and the fifth Day of Passover—a day in which our mutual faiths coincide and one in which we can all celebrate together as women of faith and courage. We are women who are setting an international example not only of our professional equality but of our ecumenical cooperation and mutual respect…

“I thought I’d never been to Cleveland before, but when I said that to my mother last night on the phone, she said, ‘Yes, you have. You were conceived in Cleveland.’

“So, here I am, among my own people at last. It’s good to be back.”

I don’t know what else I said; but the Jewish women whose traditions had been ignored or dismissed came back into the room and sat down, and I told the women who were unaware there had been that lack of consideration what had happened—and I added that perhaps as it was Good Friday, for some, fish would have been a better choice, and there were nods—and somehow, it all worked into a fabric of mutual understanding and affection. I went on with the regular message of how wonderful we all were and how much we deserved our moment in the sun and everyone laughed and cried and when the speech was over, they all stood up and clapped.

I took a cab to the airport, and got on a 5 p.m. flight back to La Guardia. As we were coming in for the landing and I was looking out over the lights of the city—still in the glow of what had been a beautiful day—I realized I hadn’t thought once about flying-and-dying. Not once.

Four years of debilitating fear, gone. Never to return.

1. None of this is verbatim. I hadn’t had time to write anything down. This is a 42-year-old stab at the theme, expressed in the language of the speeches I used to give (most of which I have copies of). One element I recall with certainty: my first few sentences directly referenced the coincidence of the convergence of both religious holidays during the same ten-day period.