Brevard Engineering College's Pre-Stewardess Program — Melbourne, Florida

It was a six-week airline career course for young women that the Melbourne college planned for June 1968 and never ran. Florida Tech historian Gordon Patterson tells the story in a September 2023 Secret History article. By then Brevard Engineering College had become Florida Institute of Technology, and the course belonged to its new affiliate, the Aerospace Technical Institute, known as ATI, which was set up to train pilots, engineering technicians and mechanics at Cape Kennedy Regional Airport, today's Melbourne Orlando International Airport.

The pre-stewardess course was meant to solve a problem Keuper had worried about since 1958: the Melbourne campus had almost no women. A brochure printed in the spring of 1968 invited applicants to study beside future airline pilots and space engineers, live in Brownlie Hall and prepare for airline careers. According to Patterson, Florida Today reported that only two local high school graduates registered, and the Melbourne course was dropped before it began.

The numbers were stark from the first night of classes. The Secret History of Launching Florida Tech records that by early September 1958, 154 students had registered at the new Melbourne-area college, and that six women were among the first students. Those first classes met in borrowed rooms at Eau Gallie Junior High School, and the students were mostly working engineers and technicians from the Cape whose average age was 33.

The ratio did not improve with growth. Patterson reports that seven years after opening, Brevard Engineering College had only one full-time female student, a math major. In April 1966 Keuper boasted of a 1,000 percent improvement, claiming 10 full-time women in a student body of 1,100, though an oceanography student at the Melbourne school estimated the ratio in her classes at about 150 to one. Orlando Evening Star columnist George Tomlinson counted 42 female full- and part-time students around the same time, most of them math majors, with a few in space technology and physics.

Those women were not the audience the stewardess plan imagined. Patterson stresses that Countdown College, as the Melbourne school was nicknamed, had always drawn women aiming at science and engineering careers, and that the first woman to earn a Brevard Engineering College degree completed a master's in space technology in 1962. Tomlinson described the physics and space technology students as members of a rare but growing breed. The ATI course, by contrast, was pitched at young women seeking airline work, and the two applicants it drew in Brevard County were recent local high school graduates.

Keuper recruited Jerry Lauderbaugh, a retired U.S. Air Force pilot with degrees from the University of Illinois and the University of Chicago, to lead ATI. Keuper said its attention would be focused on commercial aviation and the air transportation industry. The institute was to operate from the airport on the west side of Melbourne, with classes starting in September 1968.

Patterson writes that Keuper and Lauderbaugh hatched the idea of using ATI to bring women to the Melbourne campus, and suggests that Coffee, Tea or Me?, a ghostwritten 1967 bestseller presented as the memoir of two airline stewardesses, may have been a catalyst. ATI outlived the stewardess plan. In 1971 the institute ceased to be an affiliate and became Florida Tech's School of Aeronautics. Its successor, the College of Aeronautics, starts aspiring pilots' flight training in the first semester at the Emil Buehler Center for Aviation Training and Research, and Florida Tech's Facts and Figures page places the campus about 2 miles from Melbourne Orlando International Airport.

The ATI brochure sold the course as glamour. It described the program as a concentrated course to acquaint and prepare young women for airline careers, pictured a constantly moving job, and promised tastefully appointed rooms in Brownlie Hall beside a refreshing swimming pool on the Melbourne campus. Students would join what the brochure called the exclusive club of jet-set career girls.

The price was itemized. Patterson lists a total of $405, made up of $150 tuition, a $95 flight lab fee and $160 for room and board. The physical requirements followed airline rules: a height between 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 9 inches and a weight between 95 and 140 pounds. In one respect the Melbourne program broke with the industry: ATI applicants were allowed to wear glasses.

The airline standard it departed from is preserved in a Museum of Flight account by a former United Airlines stewardess hired in 1968. United's list that year required applicants to be female, aged 21 to 27, the same 5 feet 2 to 5 feet 9 in height, no heavier than 135 pounds, unmarried with no children, and to have vision of 20/40 or better without glasses. Only 1 in 30 applicants was hired. Set against those rules, the Florida Tech course in Melbourne was slightly more permissive on weight and eyesight. United's own new hires then flew to Chicago for seven weeks of safety and service training.

With two registrants, the Melbourne course could not run. Patterson places the failure in its moment: in 1968 young women were joining the women's liberation movement, and in September of that year 400 feminists protested the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City. The industry itself was changing. Patterson notes that the term stewardess gave way to flight attendant by the end of the 1970s, and that the rule forcing stewardesses to retire at 32 had been part of the job the Melbourne brochure advertised.

What changed the gender balance at Florida Tech was curriculum and sport, not airline glamour. In 1969 the student newspaper The Crimson surveyed 100 students about the campus social problem, and an editorial urged a broader liberal arts curriculum. The 1970s brought a School of Psychology and more humanities and communication courses, and Title IX led the Melbourne university to add women's crew in 1972, volleyball in 1978, softball in 1980, cross country in 1982 and basketball in 1986.

Patterson's article closes with a figure the ATI planners could not have imagined: as of Aug. 1, 2023, women made up 32.5 percent of Florida Tech's incoming first-year class. The university's Facts and Figures page now lists among its alumni the first female four-star general in U.S. military history and a 1984 Olympic gold medalist in rowing.