Kathryn West’s early career took her around the world, putting her in the middle of some rough situations — a coup in Liberia, for example, or a seedy marketplace in Saudi Arabia.
Her path around the globe — more than 50 countries, before she gets tired of trying to count — came from a fairly simple career choice. Young West wanted international travel, so she became a flight attendant.
West, now the executive director of the Connecticut Women’s Council, passed up other job prospects in favor of a job that would allow her to spend her early 20s traveling to exotic places.
It was the early 1980s, when international flights were less frequent. That meant as much as a 10-day lag between flights in and out of destinations like Africa, and when they weren’t working, flight attendants could roam around the country as they pleased.
Which was great, mostly, save for a few notable exceptions. After one landing in Liberia, rebels staged a coup in the country and shut down the airport. West and the other Americans and Europeans in the group were bunkered in a beach hotel outside the city, sequestered until their chance to fly out of the country.
It was tense, West said. They were unable to go outside, and had to sleep four people to a room — with at least one gun per group, just in case. When the word came that a plane could carry them out, they all had to pack up in and leave in a matter of minutes. West remembers the plane taking off almost immediately after the door was shut, as passengers hurried to buckle up.
Outward Bound
But speed was necessary, West said. If it became known that European and American civilians were in the area, the rebels would probably have tried to use them as hostages, or worse.
The Liberia experience may have been the most dramatic, but West may have come closer to harm on other occasions.
Then in her early 20’s, West had pretty much had someone to look out for her for her entire life. That was the moment that she first realized she was on her own.
“It was sort of an enlightenment,” she said. That experience, and all the travels that followed, helped West learn how to look out for herself.
As a girl growing up in Minnesota, West’s first job hadn’t exactly shoved her out onto the big, bad world. At 14, she was working for her grandparents, de-tasseling corn.
That job was vastly different from her world-wide adventuring. De-tasseling corn was hot and tedious, but “it provided a pretty good income for being 14.”
