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PAST PRESENT FUTURE
In 45 years, one thing hasn’t changed: seemingly small acts of kindness that create lasting ripple effects. For two of THE ORIGINALS, it’s just another day on the job. \BY AUSTIN W. G. MORTON
few places exude the kind of kinetic energy that’s so palpable at an airport. Young and old, harried and placid, scurry about: the cacophony of life neatly contained. Vacations and work trips, weddings and funerals, beginnings and endings. For C.J. Bostic and Sandra Force, it’s merely another day at the office. On a warm afternoon in early April at Dallas Love Field, C.J. and Sandra stroll into work just as they have for the past 45 years. But to the swelling group of Southwest Employees watching them swan through the terminal, it’s anything but mundane. Some wave, some call out, others sneak in for a hug. A woman with shoulder-length blonde hair and a rather official looking badge pulls out her smartphone to take a photo. “Forty-five years,” she says to no one in particular. “I have to get out of here. I’m starting to tear up!” It was a summer day in 1971 when 26-year-old Sandra Force, a former Miss Tennessee with blonde hair and a lolling Memphis drawl, was home at her Dallas apartment after teaching summer school at Amelia Earhart Elementary. “I knew this guy I had a crush on would be coming home for lunch,” she says. “As planned, he walked by the pool, and there I was in my pink bikini.” He stopped to talk and told her about a new airline that had everyone downtown buzzing. The fledgling company needed 40 Flight Attendants to jump-start operations. A now-famous ad petitioning actress Raquel Welch to join their ranks had run
Sandra and C.J. at Love Field, where they’ve reported to work for 45 years.
in newspapers nationwide and would result in more than 1,200 applications. Word was spreading. Sandra slipped off her raft, dialed the listing, and went right down to interview. She walked out with a new job that afternoon. C.J. Bostic, an Air Force brat with cropped black hair and a megawatt smile, was 23 when she landed the job. After college, she modeled for Rothschild’s and Neiman Marcus. “You might say that
modeling was my runway into the hostess corp,” she told the Southwest Inflight magazine in 1973, when she was named “Hostess of the Month.” I first met C.J. and Sandra on that April day, about an hour before our plane to LaGuardia was scheduled to take off. We'd briefly exchanged pleasantries when, with great concern in her voice, C.J. suddenly asked our photographer and me if we'd eaten lunch. We hadn't.
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