Wilbur Wright carried the first airplane passenger 2000 feet across a North Carolina beach in 1908, but paying passengers were still a novelty nearly two decades later. The first documented passenger had flown over Pittsburgh sometime in 1911. By 1928 the Pittsburgh Press was publishing articles like “How to Enjoy Your First Airplane Ride” – an experience so novel that readers needed advice about what to expect. The top tip was this: “Don’t worry. Relax, settle back and enjoy life. If there’s any worrying to be done let the pilot do it.”
But relaxing wasn’t easy! Not only were the heart-stopping, ear-popping, stomach-dropping sensations of first flight experiences uncomfortable, Pittsburgh's first passengers didn’t even have seats! Perched precariously atop stacks of mail bags in small, open-cockpit biplanes, those who dared could pay to fly to Ohio. But by 1928 travelers could purchase one of four seats in the enclosed cockpit of a high-wing Fairchild monoplane, or join 8 to 17 other passengers in a noisy Ford Tri-Motor cabin.
Pittsburghers could travel to Cleveland or Washington or New York, but they would have counted themselves lucky to be offered a cup of coffee before taking off from West Mifflin’s Bettis Field, the first local field to offer commercial flights. Nationally, the rapidly growing airline industry was scrambling to meet passenger expectations for comfort, and facing tough competition for long distance travel from the railroads. Industry leaders recognized that amenities such as beverages and meals would enhance flying experiences and even entice passengers into the airports and skies above. Meals would also have the secondary effect of distracting passengers from the discomforts of flying. But since there were no industry-guided initiatives to guide in-flight dining, a local woman took it upon herself to inaugurate in-flight dining over Pittsburgh skies.
From chorus line to tea room
Katherine “Kitty” Baker was born in Ottumwa, Iowa in 1878 to farmer William M. King and wife Sarah Jane “Jennie” Ball, followed by siblings Frederick and Minnie. She would later tell a Pittsburgh Press interviewer that by age 17 she had married in her hometown and was acting in New Orleans stock theater a year later in 1896. Those earliest stories cannot be confirmed, although census data does confirm that the King family moved to New Orleans around 1895.
Kitty claimed to have then studied ballet in New York, where she “got a job in a chorus – pony ballet – and worked at that for a long time.” Pony ballet was an early 1900s fad popularized by a traveling British dance troupe of petite young women, each younger than 19 years, less than 5 feet tall, and weighing under 130 pounds. Their performances, enhanced by whimsical costumes and props, were characterized by synchronized, precision chorus-line movements (some of which seemed to mimic how ponies moved). Pony Ballet-style choreography was all the rage for a few years in comedies and vaudeville.
A coy Kitty would later chide her Press interviewer:
“Never mind in what shows!” she held up a stern finger. “You know we women in business have to cheat on our ages, anyway, I don’t intend to have people saying ‘Oh, if she was in that show, she must be - well, let’s see- ’ and then the years pile up.”
Although Kitty obfuscated aspects of her early life, public records confirm her marriage to David F. Baker on 16 April 1904 in Manhattan. Mr. Baker worked as a brokerage office telegraph operator and the couple lived in Jersey City through at least 1910. After her husband died, Kitty took a “nurses training course” and worked at that profession during World War I “…. but I was never sent overseas because I was underweight. Couldn’t seem to put on another ounce. After the war I stuck at nursing for two years, and got sick of that. I got interested, then, in dietetics, and took some courses.”
By 1920 Kitty was operating a tea room in Greenwich Village, which she described as “….quite a Bohemian place in the days before Bohemian became ‘arty’.” Recalling that this was “before the village got ‘phoney’,” her clientele included luminaries of the day like Sinclair Lewis, journalists, and theater celebrities Kitty knew from her chorus girl era. After legal Prohibition took effect in 1920, such tea rooms became enormously popular as people sought alternative gathering spaces to replace bars. Long associated with the temperance movement, and often owned and operated by women, tea rooms had reputations for serving nourishing home-cooked meals and snacks. These alcohol-free establishments were considered decorous places for unaccompanied women to gather – although Village tea rooms were famous (and perhaps notorious) as meeting hubs for intellectuals and artists – and in some, alcohol was often consumed secretly.
Eventually "Bohemian" life wore thin and Kitty, “pretty sick of that literary and theatrical crowd”, relocated to Pittsburgh by 1924, following her siblings and mother to its southern suburbs. She operated the Green Teapot Inn at 5201 Fifth Avenue in Shadyside and managed another tea room restaurant at the stylish Ruskin Apartment Hotel in Oakland's prestigious Schenley Farms district (now the Ruskin Hall residence of the University of Pittsburgh).
These establishments brought her into contact with Pittsburgh's East End high society. Moving about the wealthier neighborhoods also brought her unwelcome attention when she was named in a story about a drunken city police officer who verbally abused and physically assaulted several women shoppers. On Christmas day 1924, while Kitty's car waited outside a Shadyside "chain store" on Filbert and Walnut streets as she shopped, her "negro chauffeur" was targeted with racist epithets by the officer. Kitty took no guff from racist, abusive drunks with badges: the papers noted that "Mrs. Baker reprimanded the officer" on the street, and she later agreed to testify against him.
The Ruskin properties underwent bankruptcy reorganization in 1934, which may have prompted Kitty to seek employment elsewhere. A September 1934 Pittsburgh Press want-ad, though not identified as having been placed by Kitty, highlights the lengths to which a well-trained and experienced hostess would go to seek work during the lean years of the Depression:
Kitty found her next position out of the city in the South Hills, opening another tea room that same year at the historic Pleasant Hills Inn.
This was a former stagecoach tavern situated at the prominent intersection of Saw Mill Run Boulevard and Clairton Road. Dusty liquor licenses and bills dating to 1830 that Kitty found in an attic trunk prompted another Press story – ironic but welcome publicity for her liquor-free establishment.
From tea rooms to cockpits and cabins
Within a year Kitty was capitalizing on the inn’s proximity to two other important landmarks: the regional airports in West Mifflin. Established in 1925, Bettis Field occupied the high, flat land at the intersection of Lebanon Church Road and Pittsburgh McKeesport Blvd. It served as Pittsburgh’s main airfield until Allegheny County Airport opened a mile away in 1931. Both airports operated simultaneously for another 18 years until the Bettis site was purchased for an atomic research facility in 1949 (which still operates today). In their heyday, both airfields teemed with hungry pilots, workers, and travelers – which suited Kitty Baker just fine.
With her restaurant situated just west of the two airfields, Kitty was soon catering meals to both sites and feeding those workers who showed up at her door calling her either “Ma” or “Lady” Baker. “Now I seem bound by the sky,” she told the Press in a May 1935 article, and described herself as thoroughly immersed in aviation:
“I know all the pilots, am used to their shop talk, and am just as fussy about weather conditions as they are. I have to be, you know. If the weather is bad, and they’re staying over, I’ll have to prepare lots more food. I know every ship that flies over the field…You can tell them by the noise the motors make when you get to know them as well as I do.”
When Central Airline launched five “luxury service” round trips per day in July 1935 between Washington and Detroit, with stops in Pittsburgh and Cleveland, it was Kitty who supplied the luxuries aboard the new Stinson plane. She provided a full course, white-tablecloth luncheon on the christening flight, which was piloted by noted Pittsburgh pilot Trow Sebree and famed McKeesport aviatrix Helen Richey. As the first woman hired as a pilot on a commercial airliner. Richey partook of this “luncheon in the clouds” photo op, but her career with Central was brief. She quit a month later, realizing that she’d been hired for a job that was more of a stunt hire than industry commitment to equal opportunities. Squab on toast couldn’t compensate for Richey only getting scheduled for 11 flights in eight months.
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But Kitty kept on cooking, providing more than 60 high quality boxed lunches each day for coast-to-coast passengers. Studies have since shown that altitude and pressurization have impacts on taste and smell, but Kitty discovered the effects on food breakdown and flavor perception via trial and error. She shared some of her in-flight cuisine go-tos and avoidances with the Press in 1937:
Fowl – chicken, squab, duck – are ideal foods, but fish is absolutely “out.” Most fruit juices and prepared fresh fruit add taste to the lunch, but bananas are ruled against – unless you want the entire lunch box to have a banana flavor...
Salads, coleslaw especially, are seldom used, because of souring when packed with other foods. Pickles and olives may be used if correctly packed in individual containers.
The cheese list is also limited, Mrs. Baker says. A mild cream cheese has proved a favorite. On the ground man may like a pungent bite with their favorite lager, but in the air they prefer a more dainty morsel.
Kitty even sent homemade ice cream aloft for short flights. Steady business from locals and those in the aviation community kept her tea room solvent, and in June 1936 Kitty even assumed management of the restaurant at Allegheny County Airport, a move which gave her “far famed corn fritters, spiced fruit and pecan pie a new locale.” But this was a short-lived experiment for Kitty. The world was fundamentally accelerating in this aviation age, and convenience and profit were becoming priorities. Because airports were expensive to run, income from high turnover/low overhead concessions like casual restaurants and coffee shops provided important revenue. Concession contacts were hotly contested as lucrative business opportunities, and Kitty was soon pushed out as restaurant manager at the County Airport.
The Pleasant Hills Inn was sold in 1937, but Kitty continued to provide meals to the aviation crowd at the smaller Bettis Airfield into the 1940s, first at the terminal’s original equipment building and then at the former Nason mansion across the road when Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics took over that home for a dormitory. But as airplanes got bigger and flights became more numerous, Kitty's in-flight catering business of home-cooked boxed meals was unable to keep pace with demand. In 1940 TWA announced the installation of a $5000 “passenger kitchen” to prepare special airline foods in the Fliers’ Club building opposite AGC, which was renovated to house flight crews during stopovers. The club facilities provided more than 300 hot meals for passengers per day that could be reheated in small convection ovens aboard plane galleys.
High volume and impersonal service were not Kitty’s style. By the early 1940s, Kitty had moved to Canonsburg in Washington County to open a new tea room she called Baker Farm. The Pittsburgh aviation crowd followed the charismatic, petite woman they called “Ma Baker” or “Lady Baker” and she provided luncheons, dinners and parties until she passed away at the age of 71 in 1950. This busy little woman, who went from Iowa farm fields to Broadway chorus lines, served as a wartime nurse, and spent much of her adult life managing multiple successful catering and restaurant careers, claimed that she couldn't "stand monotony." Her love of variety and her joy at trying new things inspired her to set standards for in-flight dining that today's highly salted and preservative-laden prepackaged airline meals fall far short of.
Addendum
The Pleasant Hills Inn (or Tavern) stood on 376 acres of land granted to John Reed in 1796. He sold it to his brother-in-law William Walker, who built the house in 1799. The Walker family operated it as a stagecoach shop until 1849. Before Kitty Baker took over, the YWCA used the land for weekend retreats during World War I. The Walker estate was sold in 1937, but Kitty had expanded her catering operations to the two local airports. The house and remaining farmland were used during WWII as a fresh air retreat for working women. The house was finally demolished in 1959. Today the site near a busy suburban cloverleaf is the location of a U-Haul business.
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