Bette Nash, the world’s longest-serving flight attendant, has died at the age of 88

Bette Nash, who served passengers aboard the Washington-Boston shuttle for nearly seven decades, earning the route the nickname “Nash Dash” and securing her a place in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-serving flight attendant of all time, died on May 17. She was 88.

Ms. Nash never officially retired and her death from breast cancer was announced Saturday by her employer, American Airlines. It was not said where she died. She lived in Manassas, Virginia.

Ms. Nash started working for Eastern Air Lines in November 1957, at the dawn of the jet age. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, “I Love Lucy” was on television, and even short domestic flights were still a glamorous adventure.

Wearing white gloves, heels and a pillbox hat, Mrs. Nash served lobster and champagne, carved roast beef on request and handed out cigarettes after the meal.

A lot has changed since then – the smoking is gone, as is the sliced ​​meat – but Mrs Nash has remained largely the same.

After a brief stint in Miami, she began flying out of Washington in 1961, usually commuting to New York and Boston—a job she preferred, even when her schedule gave her choice of route, because it allowed her to return to her home in Northern Virginia each evening to care for her son, who had Down syndrome.

To that end, she set her alarm for 2:10 a.m. every morning to catch the first flight at 6 a.m. and cheerfully greet passengers, many of them regulars. Each year, she passed a safety and performance check required by the Federal Aviation Administration.

In 2021, she was first entered into the Guinness World Records as the flight attendant with the longest career, having served for 67 years. A year later, she re-entered the records as the oldest active flight attendant.

By this time, she had become something of a celebrity among the passengers who regularly travelled in these friendly skies, giving her route its nickname. Passengers and passersby in airport terminals would call out, “Are you Bette Nash?!” and insist on an autograph or a selfie.

At a ceremony at Reagan National Airport to mark her 60th birthday in 2017, American Airlines presented her with a pair of diamond earrings and a $10,000 donation to the food bank where she volunteered.

Then she went to work loading passengers for the next shuttle to Boston. As the plane taxied to the runway, two fire trucks sprayed the plane with a water cannon salute, an honor usually reserved for pilots retiring.

Mary Elizabeth Burke was born on December 31, 1935, to Frances (Eilers) and Martin Burke, a military engineer. She grew up in Pleasantville, New Jersey, a suburb of Atlantic City.

She had dreamed of becoming a flight attendant since she first took to the skies, traveling with her mother from New Jersey to Dayton, Ohio, with a stopover in Washington. She remembered watching the flight attendants march through the terminal with their heads held high and their uniforms perfectly pressed.

“In some ways, it was like being on stage back then,” she told the Boston Globe in 2007. “It just looked so elegant. And romantic. It was the romance of heaven. You could take off and almost be in another world.”

She studied business at Sacred Heart College in Belmont, North Carolina, then returned to New Jersey and worked as a paralegal while studying for her flight attendant exam.

When the time came for her interview with Eastern, she took a bus from Atlantic City to Midtown Manhattan in a dress borrowed from one of her sisters.

She got the job, but still had to attend what was known as charm school – airline-mandated classes in etiquette and dress code, as well as safety and flight protocols.

At that time, airlines – including Eastern – had very specific ideas about their all-female flight attendant corps.

“You would gain a few pounds and then have to constantly weigh yourself,” she said in a 2017 interview with Washington television station WJLA. “And if it continued that way, you would be taken off the payroll.”

Eastern eventually sold its East Coast routes to Donald J. Trump’s short-lived Trump Shuttle airline. After it closed in 1992, the routes passed to US Airways, which was acquired by American in 2015. Ms. Nash remained in office throughout.

She married James Nash in 1973. She leaves behind her son Christian.

Ms. Nash continued flying, she said, because of the people – even if she missed the glamour of her early career.

“You used to see a lot of mink coats,” she said at her reception in 2017. “Now you see a lot of flip-flops.”