1) Teenage Job: Waitress at Nickerson Farms Restaurant, a Midwest chain that specialized in homemade bread with honey butter, in her hometown of Oran, Mo.
2) College Aspirations: Studied German to become a CIA interpreter. Her favorite phrase? “Kuck mal!” Translation: “Look at that!”
3) First Flight: Spring break of freshman year, from St. Louis to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. “My roommates laughed so hard at me, because they couldn’t believe I had never flown. I wanted the window, so I could see everything; now I only like the aisle.”
4) Favorite Airplane-Related Movie: No Highway in the Sky, a 1951 flick starring Jimmy Stewart and Marlene Dietrich
5) Stranger on a Plane: 1981. Frankfurt, Germany. A girl was traveling back to the U.S. after visiting grandparents, and she and Hamm-Niebruegge ended up spending nearly a week together searching for a return flight and sleeping in New York’s JFK International Airport because of a major strike. “I was 20 and a bit nervous, and here was a 13-year-old girl who never even blinked at what was going on!”
