Healdsburg travel enthusiast born with ‘adventure gene’

Longtime Healdsburg resident Penny Mabe Chambers isn't sure if she was 1 week old or 2 weeks old when she took her first trip on an airplane. But she does remember the first time she got sick while flying in the back of her parents' six-seater single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza.

She was 5 years old and her parents and two siblings were coming home to Long Beach after a trip to Palm Springs. The L.A. basin was socked in by fog and it was only when her mother started wondering out loud what they were going to do that Chambers got worried.

'My response as a little kid was to start throwing up,' she said. 'But I thought, 'This is ridiculous!' because I love to travel!'

Indeed, travel was a huge part of Chambers' life, even as a child. Her father, a former World War II aircraft mechanic and licensed pilot, and her mother, who loved to travel, would take Chambers and her two siblings on trips all over Southern California and vacations to places like Tahiti and Hawaii. Needless to say, Chambers was determined, even as a young girl, to conquer her air sickness.

At 18, after many years of safe landings and encouragement from her father, Chambers realized she didn't get sick when she was in the pilot's seat. Eventually, she got her own pilot's license and, when a foray into music school didn't pan out, she decided to make airplanes her career.

In 1972, Chambers moved to Hawaii to work for California-based Western Airlines. She became a flight attendant, despite her father's protests ('You are in the wrong end of the airplane!'). But, she explained, there were no opportunities back then for women to be pilots even though, ironically, her flight attendant training class was the first at Western to accept men.

Her job had many perks, however, like free travel for her entire family, and fodder for plenty of stories to tell her future grandchildren.

For example, there was the time the navigation instruments went out halfway through a flight to Anchorage. With the fear of veering off course into Russian territory hanging over them, the flight crew turned to the ancient method of celestial navigation, using the sun, stars and horizon to determine the plane's position. Luckily, the Boeing 707 still had its astronavigation unit installed and, even luckier, the captain knew how to use it.

Or the time she was flying her father, who had suffered from a series of strokes, back into Hawaii International Airport and had to speed up their small Cessna plane in order not to be trampled by a huge commercial 747 that was on their tail.

She also learned to skydive in 1979, went to countless free shows in Las Vegas where flight attendants merely had to flash their badges to sit in the front row and, while flying standby in first class, spent hours chatting with astronaut Buzz Aldrin about his adventures.

Also, she explained, layovers were typically 72 hours long, so airline workers could explore the places they traveled to. On her trips to Alaska, for example, Chambers would stay in luxury hotels like the Captain Cook Hotel in Anchorage or take the 'Moose-Gooser' train from Anchorage to Fairbanks and go camping or rafting.

By the time she 'retired' in 1985 at the ripe age of 33, when Western Airlines merged with Delta, Chambers said things started to change in the airline industry. Because of deregulation, she explained, airlines could fly to more places and serve more passengers. Airplane travel went from a 'special' experience, where passengers dressed up and could choose their meals, to crammed seats and bags of snack food.

'We started to have to say 'shirt and shoes required,'' she joked. 'Chaos reigned!'

In the late 1970s, in response to the times, anti-hijacking training was required and by the 1980s, the ratio of flight attendants to passengers had gone down considerably. Also, typical layovers were more like eight hours, starting from when the plane landed. So after landing, de-planing passengers, eating a meal and getting to the hotel, a flight attendant might not even get a full night's sleep.

'By the time I retired,' she said, 'everything was about being as cheap as possible.'

Despite these changes, however, Chambers would still choose to be a flight attendant now. 'Maybe just for two or three years,' she said.

Undoubtedly, Chambers has the 'adventure gene,' but she also believes traveling is essential to give people a 'broader view of possibilities.'

'The act of being in the air and looking down,' she said, 'you see the world in different perspectives, not just visual, but physical and emotional.'

It's a sentiment that has carried over into other aspects of her life. In the mid-1980s, she married Tom Chambers, moved to Healdsburg and studied accounting at Sonoma State University. She had three children — Nate, Evan and Beatrice — who are all now in their 20s, and instilled in them the importance of adventure and living life independent of any prescribed notions. She chose to homeschool her kids, for example, because of the freedom it allowed in their education. Up until junior high school, their days were filled with hiking, volunteer work, sports, trips to places like the Grand Canyon and even China. Chambers encouraged them to take chances and speak up for themselves. It was an infectious idea for parents; she started a homeschooling group of over 100 kids.

Now, at 64, she is still pursuing adventure. In addition to accounting and bookkeeping, Chambers works for KaiserAir, Santa Rosa Jet Center at the Sonoma County Airport, where she interacts with travelers and pilots and gets to 'talk travel.' She also volunteers as a chaplain with the Sonoma County Sheriff Department and, someday, plans to get back to private aviation. And, of course, she still continues to enjoy lifetime free travel with her family in first class, whenever possible.

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Editor's note: This story contains information from Brittany Albright, who proposed it to The Press Democrat and previously wrote about Chambers on her blog, goldiejames.com. Towns Correspondent Ariana Reguzzoni believed the story pitch was a press release and pulled information from it into her story.