“Wow!” my friend Michiko said when I handed her the second book that I got published titled How to Pick Up Foreign Men. “I can’t take this to my house.”
“My original title,” I explained to her, “was How to Associate with People Around the World. It was based on a monthly magazine series that I wrote for two years. It was actually a serious and cultural look at the people of various countries. Sometimes I did include what stewardesses thought about the various men they dated or met as passengers, but that was not the main emphasis of my articles. Eventually another publisher saw my articles and invited me to make a book out of them.”
“So why does it have this title?”
“The publisher thought that it would sell more copies if the title was How to Associate with Foreign Men. Then he changed it to How to Pick up Foreign Men.”
“Was he some young guy trying to make his mark in publishing?”
“No. In fact, he was in his mid-sixties and about to retire.”
“He was probably trying to make his final big mark in publishing. Didn’t you tell him the title was too strong?”
“Unfortunately, I just let the publisher handle it. I didn’t have any power to change his mind.”
“Well, I don’t want my husband to see this, so if I’ll take off the book cover and hide it when I get home.”
Michiko’s response was echoed at the book store as well. The title was attention-getting for sure. Unfortunately, most people read the book standing at the bookstore shelf because they were too shy to take it to the checkout stand and buy it with that strong title.
But now with the privacy of Kindle, buying and sending a book into one’s Kindle or iPad, there is no eyebrow raising clerk to contend with anymore, no matter what the title of the book you buy.
As stated, the title of my book was How to Associate with People Around the World, but I’m sure you’d rather know what stewardesses were saying about foreign men. So what follows are some of those opinions.
These opinions of stewardesses, or even those by me, might seem politically incorrect now in 2012, but those were the times back then and the generalizations that some of us stewardesses had at the time. So I hope, dear reader, that you will read them with that in mind.
******* In my book, 'I was a Pan Am Princess of the Sky' I wrote chapters on:
British Men, French Men, Italian Men, German Men, Spanish Men, Scandinavian Men, Brazilian Men, Chinese Men, Filipino Men, Arabian Men, Australian Men, Japanese Men and The Best Man in the World.
That's only a small part of the 77 chapters, but I'm sure you'll find the experiences and opinions of the stewardesses of the '70's entertaining and revealing, if not of historical interest.
View the samples to see my Pan Am photos.
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How my book title got changed.