A Page 3 article wouldn’t pass muster today.
Consider the headline: El Al’s Blonde Instructress Could Make Any Man Fly, with a kicker of Tania, the Trainer.
And how about a lead paragraph that reads: “El Al Israel has many distinctions, some of which have been chronicled on these pages previously. But, the distinction that the pilots, crew and promotion men of Israel’s busy international airline like to contemplate most is a thirtyish blonde dish named Tania Glezer.”
“A thirtyish blonde dish”? Sounds like copy written by the fictional Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce from Mad Men. At another point in the article, Glezer — who is referred to by her first name throughout — is called a “slip of a blonde.”
As sexist is the article is, it’s actually complimentary toward Glezer, noting that she had trained every El Al pilot who flew a Boeing 707-A jet. It also reported that she spoke seven languages, had served in the Israeli Air Force and that she fled her native Yugoslavia in advance of the Nazis.
Near the end of the article, the author, who went by the initials CSS, engaged in a Q&A with Glezer, whose answers to his mundane questions were a bit curt. He concluded with, “Sometimes, I’m glad I married a brunette who is scared to death of airplanes.”
