6

The subject of Mel's thoughts-Captain Vernon Demerest of Trans America-was, at the moment, some three miles from the airport. He was driving his Mercedes 230 SL Roadster and, compared with the journey he had made to the airport earlier from home, was having little trouble negotiating local streets, which had been recently plowed. Snow was still falling heavily, abetted by a strong wind, but the fresh covering on the ground was not yet deep enough to make conditions difficult.
Demerest's destination was a group of three-story apartment blocks, close to the airport, known colloquially to [lying crews as Stewardess Row. It was here that many of the stewardesses based at Lincoln International-from all airlines-maintained apartments. Each apartment was usually shared by two or three girls, and the initiated also had a name for the individual m6nages. They were known as stewardess nests.
The nests were often the scene of lively, off-duty parties, and sometimes headquarters for the amorous affairs which occurred, with predictable regularity, between stewardesses and male flying crews.

Taken as a whole, the stewardess nests were neither more nor less freewheeling than other apartments occupied by single girls elsewhere. The difference was that most of what transpired in the way of swinging, amoral activities, involved airline personnel.
There was good reason for this. Both the stewardesses and male crew members whom they met-captains, and first and second officers-were, without ex- ception, high-caliber people. All had reached their jobs, which many others coveted, through a tough, exacting process of elimination in which those less talented were totally eclipsed. The comparative few who remained were the brightest and best. The result was a broth of sharp, enlightened personalities with a zest for life and the perceptiveness to appreciate one another.
Vernon Demerest, in his time, had appreciated many stewardesses, as they had appreciated him. He had, in fact, had a succession of affairs with beautiful and intelligent young women whom a monarch or a male movie idol might well have desired without attaining. The stewardesses whom Dernerest and