A flight attendant battled through “Barbie Doll hell”—and won. She speaks about it at Blue Ridge Community College this month.

by Jess McCuan

Who has the gall to tell a beauty queen she’s tubby? American Airlines did. In fact, they started telling Tenita Deal, a former Miss Hickory and contender for the Miss North Carolina title, that she needed to lose weight when she first signed up to be a stewardess in 1961. At the time, Deal, a dancer, weighed 118 pounds. That was eight pounds too many, Deal recalls, when she applied for a job with American in Charlotte. Six months later, she was still too heavy, and supervisors informed her that she had two weeks to lose six pounds. So she stopped eating and lost 12, and thus began 30 years of what one commentator called “Barbie Doll hell.”

Deal, now 70, lives in Hendersonville and likes to keep a low profile. She retired from American Airlines in 2000 and says her days as a rabble-rouser and controversial industry figure are over. But she still seems to thrill a bit at recounting what now seem like outlandish on-the-job requirements. As a stewardess in the early ‘60s, you couldn’t be married. Of course, it wasn’t a stated rule, but through hiring (and firing) practices, Deal says, stewardesses were almost all single. They were also mainly 32 or younger, and kept that way, again, through employment decisions. Deal had to keep her fingernails painted to match trends, and supervisors disciplined her for wearing the wrong undergarments (a light blue bra or a paisley slip, for example). In the early ‘60s, she wore minimal makeup. “You were supposed to look like the girl next door,” she says. But by the late ‘60s and ‘70s, styles were bolder, and her supervisors asked her to glam herself up by bleaching her hair blonde and wearing false eyelashes.

By 1990, Deal was nearing 50, and she’d had enough. She loved the flight attendant’s life, hopping from place to place, training other stewardesses and making enough money to raise her son. But the yo-yo dieting had taken its toll on her body. Her friends were entering mid-life and struggling with their weight, too. According to Deal, American was still firing her colleagues fot weight issues, even though a series of lawsuits before the EEOC in the late 1980s ruled that it was illegal for American to discriminate against stewardesses for their weight or appearance.

Worried about a looming weigh-in herself, Deal stopped eating again in early 1990, and found herself in a San Francisco emergency room. Doctors said her electrolytes were dangerously low. “I decided I had to stop,” she says. “I didn’t want my son to grow up in a world where I wasn’t allowed to speak up about something I believe in.”

She called a friend in New York City who passed her to Barbara Baylor, a producer for the TV show 48 Hours. Baylor worked for months on a segment about Deal and weight discrimination, interviewing airline passengers, flight attendants and American Airlines executives. When the story aired, in May of 1990, other TV shows picked it up. Deal did interviews with everyone from small California newspapers to Entertainment Tonight.

Within weeks, just as Deal was expecting to be fired, American Airlines management called her with a plea: “If you stop the media blitz, we’ll talk,” she recalls. After negotiations, Deal kept her job and was never weighed again. For years after the publicity, she says, flight attendants approached her in airports to thank her for speaking out.

Baylor and Deal now live together in Hendersonville, and they will both appear at a talk and screening of the 48 Hours segment at Blue Ridge Community College later this month.

Did protesting the airline’s weigh-ins make her life harder? In some ways, yes, Deal says. She went for a year with little pay during the negotiations, and there was some personal backlash. But she seems altogether pleased with her accomplishments when she recalls that Bob Crandall, a legendary former head of American Airlines and the president during the scandal, said that American would never have a 200-pound flight attendant. “They have lots of them now,” she says.

Tenita Deal and Barbara Baylor speak on April 27 at Blue Ridge Community College’s Center for Lifelong Learning as part of its 20th anniversary festivities. For details, call 828-694-1740 or check out www.brcll.com.