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In the beginning, when commercial airline travel felt like privilege (not a Catholic rite), when peanuts were a course (not a meal) and when hijack wasn't even a word — in those distant days, these ladies were called hostesses.

"Well, you know, we were taught to think of the plane as our living room," says Beverly Light, who started flying in the 1950s. First with Ozark Airlines and then with TWA when Ozark was purchased by the company.

She turns to Lorna Craig, a little woman who's in a sea-foam green dress suit with tasteful jewelry, just enough make-up and a thin, turtleshell headband with nothing to do. "Do you remember that?" Light asks her.

Craig nods placidly, her long auburn flip bobbing slightly. Craig, who won't reveal her age, is president of TWA Clipped Wings of Southwest Florida, a 12-year-old group that meets monthly ("except for June, July and August when we're doing other things") for a little charity work, a couple of drinks and lunch at a nice restaurant.

It's late on a Saturday morning, and the fashionable Naples Yacht Club is full. The TWA group is hosting the annual luncheon, the seventh, of hostesses-cum-stewardesses-cum-flight-attendants of many different airlines. From Braniff to Eastern to Mohawk to Pan Am to United to Air Canada to many others long forgotten by everyone but this room.

Almost 150 mill around the dining room and bar. Most are retired, some long ago, and have settled in the area. They're all women ("We ask the men," Light says, "but they never come").

"I know this woman," coos a craggy redhead on approach. She leans into an airy embrace with Craig, who stands with Light at the front of the crowded room. Then Red returns to the cocktail party burble of jingling jewelry, ice in highball glasses and women's laughter.

Craig surveys the room. "There's just a bond here."

Light nods. "It's like a sorority almost."

The rules

The first commercial airlines moved mail, not people. As late as 1926, passengers were largely on their own.

But as larger aircraft could better accommodate the growing yearning for air travel, some airlines hired stewards, who checked luggage, ticketed passengers and provided Spartan in-flight services.

Then Ellen Church changed everything. In 1930, the nurse and pilot approached Boeing Air Transport for a position — preferably as a pilot. She was hired along with seven others as something wholly new — a stewardess-nurse — and an industry was born.

The public liked the change, although some pilots objected to having to deal with "helpless women" on their flights and some pilot's wives generated a letter-writing campaign to have them removed.

The trend continued despite the protests, and with it, a culture steeped in military strictures, nouveau glamour and a kind of iron-maiden preservation of feminine virtue. And all of it was encoded, quite neatly, in a litany of rules that the stewardess lived by — if she wanted to keep her job.

The rules, in fact, is the first subject Craig and Light — maybe any flight attendant from the early days — warms to.

Light starts: You always had to wear a girdle under your uniform.

"And there were check hostesses to check and make sure you had them on," Light says, nodding to support the point.

Craig slides her eyes Light's way. "I was a check hostess," she says.

They smile.

You always wore gloves: white with your summer uniform and black kid with your winter uniform.

And you always worked in high-heels, not the kitten heels that are so popular now, but shoes with a good 2 1/2-inch heel. Always. No exceptions, even when you're serving uphill on the DC-3, which, when parked, sat with the nose higher than the tail.

"I walked across the ocean in high heels," Craig says, smiling.

Stockings were required, the lines checked often to maintain a smooth, straight line. Two pairs, in case the first pair ran. You couldn't weigh more than 120 pounds, they say, depending on your height, which was limited to about 5 feet to 5 feet 6 inches. "Later, when the planes got bigger, they allowed the taller girls," explains Craig, who started flying in 1947 with Robinson Airlines.

You couldn't drink in uniform, during a layover or within 24 hours of your next shift.

The names on every manifest had to be memorized before each stop. When a passenger de-planed, the flight attendants always used the passenger's names — then had to memorize a new manifest for the next leg of the flight.

"They even told us to read Time magazine," says Light, "so that we might keep up with things and carry on conversations with the passengers."

She laughs.

"I think most of the ladies got into it for the travel — and the eliteness," says Craig, who for much of her early career flew a Newark-Pittsburgh-St.-Louis route.

"You walked through the airports and the little girls would look up at you," Light says.

Anyone who remembers the commercials ("Fly me," a sexy blonde advised the viewer), the saucy books or the Playboy cartoons knows that there were certainly men in the mix.

"Back in the early days, most of the pilots were young and single." she says, "and many of them married the stewardesses. They clipped their wings in an instant."

That was one of the biggest rules of all: Until the mid-60s, you couldn't fly married.

In 1968, Craig crossed the other line: She was fired for getting pregnant.

A decision by a federal court in 1982 brought Craig and others — including 1,800 female flight attendants with United Airlines who had lost their jobs when they married, and TWA flight attendants who were fired before 1971 because of pregnancy — back to the fold.

Craig worked for TWA six months and retired in 1983.

"I wanted that flight pass," she says.

Looking back

Joy Sperry stands near the front doors of the Naples Yacht Club to welcome the few that straggle in as the 12:30 p.m. lunch approaches.

In the main room, a water class clangs and Craig begins to speak, too softly to hear up front.

Sperry is 86 and has seen a lot in the air. A lot she won't talk about, not to a reporter anyway.

"You can't print that," she says, shaking her head as if the thought of a curse word was too much for the fourth estate to bear.

Craig has talked about flying with Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, who were on the way to a honeymoon in London. And Frank Sinatra.

It's the kind of thing that's captured in a memory book the TWA chapter has put together. "They're all movie star crazy," says Sperry, who was a TWA supervisor from 1946-1970. Her eyes roam the room: She supervised many of the women there.

If pressed, she will talk about meeting Howard Hughes.

"A couple bounded up the steps," she says, telling a story she's probably told 100 times before. "I recognized Ava Gardner right away. Then I recognized who he was with the white shirt and the dirty tennis shoes. He said, ‘Take care of her,' and puts a $10 bill in my hand.

"I said, ‘I'm so so sorry, sir, but we are not allowed to accept gratuities. We are here to serve,'" Sperry says.

Hughes responded, quite colorfully, that she should take it because he owned the airline. Sperry had that $10 until she lost it in a robbery a number of years ago.

She shrugs, as she breaks away to meet the opening door. "You can't look back. When its time, you adios."