60 years ago she put her boyfriend’s commitment to the test. Here’s what happened next
The other flight attendants told Jerilyn Young that her boyfriend Bob Pelikan was never going to settle down. It was 1964. Jerilyn, who worked for United Airlines, was sitting on the floor of her apartment in Newark, New Jersey, chatting with her three roommates. Their apartment building, which neighbored Newark Airport, was inhabited almost entirely by flight attendants. It was a vibrant, buzzy and fun place to live.
The flight attendants worked together, went out in New York City together and counseled each other on their personal lives. “The talk going around about Bob the bachelor was how independent he was, and that I shouldn’t date him, because he would break my heart,” Jerilyn tells CNN Travel today.
Bob Pelikan lived on the 10th floor, Jerilyn – who was 20 at the time – and her friends lived on the first floor. All the flight attendants knew Bob. He was 25, tall, confident and charming. He owned a convertible red Porsche which he parked in front of the building. He played the ukulele. But the first thing Jerilyn had noticed about Bob was his eyes.
“The kindest eyes that I had ever seen,” she says. “I would just call him a gentle giant. He was so in charge of his life, and yet gentle at the same time. I was just over the moon, immediately.” But Jerilyn’s friends were wary. “Some of the other women just thought he was the quintessential bachelor that would never have a real, serious relationship,” says Jerilyn. “They thought he was not ever going to go out with any young woman more than once or twice.” That day in 1964, Jerilyn was sitting in her apartment with her roommates discussing what she should do. On the one hand, she knew there was more to Bob than his bachelor image. In fact, she found other people’s perceptions of him almost funny, because they differed so much from her own experiences.
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