Every morning, commuters stream past the anonymous, five-story white building at the foot of the Dallas North Tollway, its cagelike balconies and generic “retirement living” banner attracting little attention.

There was a time, however, when this seemingly unremarkable building stopped traffic. Or at least its residents did. This was in the years after its opening in 1968, when it was still the Braniff Hostess College, a dormitory and training school where the Dallas-based airline would, as one tabloid put it, “turn the girl next door into a truly cosmopolitan beauty.” Between instruction on how to negotiate an unruly passenger or deliver a baby at high altitude, aspiring hostesses could catch a bikini break on the building’s shallow balconies, making it a living billboard of jet-age possibility.

“There were a whole lot of accidents out on the Tollway,” remembers Marcella Gleason, who trained at the college and is now a member of the Clipped B’s, the hostess alumni network. “It’d be honk, honk, honk.”

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Braniff’s Hostess College, built in 1968 and designed by Pierce, Lacey and Associates, was a training school where the airline would “turn the girl next door into a truly cosmopolitan beauty.”

The real action was inside, where lucky Dallas bachelors might spend an evening — until the 10 p.m. curfew, anyway — in the “Passion Pit,” a swanky, sunken conversation lounge with a round fireplace ringed by thick white carpet and a circular banquette. Colorful textiles and artworks from Mexico and South America, which were featured Braniff destinations, gave the space a decidedly mod vibe.

Even the walls were sexy, being made of a sprayed concrete, or gunnite, left in a deliberately rough state but with a slick plastic coating. Their curvy profiles were set off dramatically by black travertine floors.

“The shape, the colors, all of it; it’s definitely a feminine building,” architect Neal Lacey, of Dallas-based Pierce, Lacey and Associates, told the news media upon its unveiling. The swishy academy — think Mad Men meets The Facts of Life — was designed to accommodate up to 142 would-be hostesses for a five-week training course.

“I just thought it was splashy and fun,” said Fran Blanchard, another member of the Clipped B’s, during a nostalgic tour of the building. “It was still when flying was glamorous, and this was part of the glamour.”

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Hostesses gather for a class photo in the conversation pit of the Braniff Hostess College. Photo: Braniff International/Braniff Flying Colors Collection, Dallas, Texas

Future in doubt

Today, the future of the building, which has been the Park Gate retirement home since 1999, is in doubt. Greenway Investment Co., a real estate investment firm with holdings around Dallas, is buying the building, and the Park Gate will permanently shut its doors at the end of the month. What will come next for the aging landmark is unclear. “We’re still trying to determine what the best use of the building is,” said Greenway vice president Todd Petty.

For Braniff, the college was not only a training facility, but another opportunity to brand itself through modern design, a practice that companies like Apple and Target wouldn’t fully adopt until the 1990s. Braniff was already at it in 1965, the year executive Harding Lawrence took control of what was then a regional airline and transformed it into an international beacon of contemporary chic.

His partner in this effort was Mary Wells, a Madison Avenue advertising savant who would shortly become his partner in life. Declaring “The end of the plain plane,” she hired Alexander Girard, a multidimensional master of midcentury design, to fully modernize the company’s image. Flying Braniff would henceforth be a total design experience, one that would begin before passengers even reached the airport. The tone was set by a punchy new graphic identity with a stylized flying dove Girard called the “bluebird of happiness.” An enormous metal version went up on the side of the college facing the Tollway, with another in the lobby.

At Love Field, a monorail system, also designed by Pierce and Lacey, carried passengers from parking areas to Girard’s “Terminal of the Future.” From there, they boarded jets Girard painted in a kicky rainbow of colors: butterscotch, periwinkle, turquoise, lemon and ochre. In 1973, the airline debuted the Flying Colors, the first in a series of jets painted with abstract designs by artist Alexander Calder.

“They allowed us to do the design that we really wanted to do,” says architect Allen Pierce. “It was an exciting time in the history of Braniff.”

The hostesses, too, would be designed. “When a tired businessman gets on an airplane, we think he ought to be allowed to look at a pretty girl,” said Wells.

Emilio Pucci, the Florentine fashion designer whose sporty, geometric dresses were a favorite of celebrities, created a series of avant-garde collections for the hostesses, with layered separates and bubble-shaped plastic rain helmets. Thus was born the “Air Strip,” in which the hostess would progressively disrobe over the course of a flight, leaving her finally in a turtleneck and puffy culotte pants with matching flats. “To make our girls smoochy, we brought in Pucci,” a narrator intoned suggestively in a television commercial.

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A brochure touted the variety of colorful layers of Pucci’s “Air Strip” uniform

The art of innuendo was already a staple of the airline industry, which was engaged in what might be called a bare-arms race.

Southwest, the “Love Airline,” put its stewardesses in white boots and miniskirts. Coffee, Tea, or Me, the purported memoirs of a pair of Eastern stewardesses, promised an uninhibited window into mile-high sexual high jinks. (The 1967 fiction was actually written by a man, Donald Bain.) In comparison to tawdry campaigns for the likes of National (“Fly me”) and Continental (“We really move our tail for you”), Braniff’s come-on was fairly tame.

‘What do you want?’

The training of hostesses in the finer points of the Air Strip, and in the other practicalities of life in the clouds, required a building of some idiosyncrasy. To help the architects design it, Braniff assigned them a consultant: Jean Duncan, a University of Texas graduate of considerable charm who had worked as a schoolteacher before joining the airline as a hostess in 1953. Nine years later, she became director of the airline’s hostess training program.

“They grilled me about everything: What do you want? What is it for? What are we going to do?” Duncan recalled. “I was busy with that for a year.” That time included a trip with architects Pierce and Lacey to the Hollywood, Fla., office of Chuck Ax, an interior designer charged with applying Girard’s design principles.

At the grand opening, after a night spent tacking up molas, South American tapestries favored by Girard, Duncan stood beside Lawrence and Dallas Mayor Erik Jonsson, who handed her a golden key. His presence marked the building as yet another sign of the city’s burgeoning sense of itself as a hub of metropolitan style.

Braniff executives took to calling the $2 million building “Duncan’s Palace,” and with good reason. Each of its 36 dormitory rooms was unique, done up by Ax in Girard’s signature palette, with plenty of closet space and fabric-covered panels on which the aspiring hostesses could tack up photos, schedules and other personal items.

The doors and windows to those rooms were fitted with an electronic alarm system connected to the front desk, lest any hostess try to break curfew or import one of the city’s eligible bachelors. Monitoring of the trainees was strict. Although the airline traded on their sexual appeal and presumed availability, it did not, in fact, want its hostesses to be available. The company’s insistent use of the term “college” denoted a vision of ladylike sophistication, as if its training center should be considered alongside Bryn Mawr and Wellesley.

Indeed, hostesses were required to be of “good character,” “pleasant disposition” and “easy temperament,” with at least two years of college education, according to a contemporary brochure. Graduates could expect long hours sitting by the telephone, waiting for calls not from suitors, but unforgiving Braniff flight dispatchers. It was typical for hostesses to wear wigs, as they were afraid to miss a call while in the shower.

But they were also objects, and being attractive, young and single was part of the equation. “When you got married or turned 32 you had to quit,” said Aggie Clark, a Clipped B. “We just assumed we turned too ugly or too dumb.” The physical requirements were stringent: height between 5 feet 2 inches and 5 feet 9 inches; no more than 135 pounds.

Weight was monitored with special attentiveness. At the college cafeteria, a special table with a shaming ceramic pig was set aside for hostesses who had become a bit too indulgent for the company’s tastes. “When you went on line to go into the cafeteria they watched what you put on your tray,” says Gleason. “You were watched a lot. That was the hardest part.”

Trainees put on warning could streamline in a second-floor gym euphemistically called the “Silhouette Room.” The facility also had a professional beauty parlor, the “Powder Puff Room,” and a fashion boutique run by a Pucci saleswoman imported from Italy.

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Hostess trainees at the Braniff Hostess College used models’ catwalks to practice navigating the narrow aisles of airliners.

Classrooms were similarly tailored to the needs of the modern hostess. (The first flight attendants were nurses, recruited in the days when air travel could be physically testing.) A 75-seat auditorium was fronted with a model airline interior with four rows of seats, a galley and light-controlled windows to simulate day and night service. Trainees could learn the Air Strip in a classroom equipped with a model’s catwalk, the better for negotiating a plane’s narrow aisles.

Outgrown

As is often the case with quirky buildings, Braniff soon found that its bespoke school no longer suited its needs. The business of travel was changing, as was the makeup of the hostess program. The first male hosts arrived at the college in 1973 (the first black hostess was hired in 1967), just a year before the airline abandoned the facility, consolidating all of its corporate training at Love Field.

Dresser Industries, an oil services company, purchased the college as a “leadership center” in 1975 — the petite beds were too short for the company’s oilmen — and it was later sold to a company planning to convert it into a drug rehabilitation center.

In 1999, it became the Park Gate. That meant guardrails around the Passion Pit and a calming beige color scheme. But for all those changes, the building still betrayed something of its modish past.

“I just feel warm and cuddly about it,” said Linda Griffin, 86, who lived at the facility for 10 years. “I love everything about this place.” But Griffin, like the other residents of the Park Gate, is moving out.

A new life as apartments targeted to the young professionals who have made its Oak Lawn environs so popular, and who might appreciate its history and design, would seem logical.

In the meantime, it stands as a repository of collective memories from a time of civic aspiration and style.

“Those were the happiest days of my life,” said Blanchard, the Clipped B. “Don’t tell my husband.”

They were there

Remembrances of the Braniff Hostess College from the hostesses themselves

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of The Dallas Morning News and a professor at the UT-Arlington School of Architecture. Follow him on Twitter at @marklamster.


Photos: The Braniff Collection, History of Aviation Collection, Special Collections Department, Eugene McDermott Library, The University of Texas at Dallas