When Sally Sells, now 100 and still going strong, informed her then-young son Billy that she’d flown the Atlantic with none other than Charles Lindbergh, the child greeted the claim with entirely plausible skepticism. 

Mrs. Sells jokes that she almost sent doubting Billy to bed without any dinner. As for flying with Lindbergh, “It happened,” Mrs. Sells tells IWF. She had been chosen by Pan Am, her employer, to go to Europe to train stewardesses and stewards for international flights, which was just then emerging as a popular market for the general public. 

“We had to ferry an empty plane to Germany,” Mrs. Sells recalls. “There was a pilot and a crew but only one passenger, Charles Lindbergh. He was a vice president of Pan Am. There was no one in this giant aircraft but Charles Lindbergh and me. I sat next to him, and we had dinner together, in this big, big old airplane. It was a wonderful moment. That was one of the most exciting things in my life, that I flew the Atlantic with Lindbergh.”

Flying with Lindbergh may have been a high point—so to speak—in Mrs. Sells’ career with Pan Am, but she loved the whole experience of serving as a Pan Am stewardess on international flights—a glam job for women of the era—which ultimately led to her founding Travel Anywhere, the Philadelphia agency, in 1963. Mrs. Sells was putting the finishing touches on a European tour for an opera company the day she spoke with IWF. “Three of their graduates will be singing in Europe in May,” Mrs. Sells explains. “One will be singing in Munich. Another in Hamburg, and a third in Hanover. We took these three facts and built a tour around them.”

When Mrs. Sells turned 100 on July 29th, there were nonstop celebrations.

Mrs. Sells is “a detail person,” who even at a hundred fusses to make sure the table set up—not one long table, for heaven’s sake, but several smaller ones conducive to sparkling conversation—is perfect. “We never sit at big tables—that’s not our style,” she says. Mrs. Sells, who is a mother of five, grandmother of 15, and great-grandmother of eight, clearly loves what she is doing. What’s the secret of staying involved after more than a half-century? she is asked.  

“I’m not here because somebody said ‘Get out of the house and get to work’,” Mrs. Sells says. “That isn’t me. From my first little airplane ride from Birmingham to Jacksonville or wherever it went, I decided that travel was going to be my career. And it has been in one form or another. Airlines, cruises, railroad tours, group tours, and this opera group, where we’re going to see three operas. We’ll do sightseeing during the day—for instance, in Munich, we’re going out to see a beautiful palace where I’ve been able to gain entrance. And we’re going to see the National Museum, we’re going to see a former residence of the Habsburgs. One night in Munich is for the opera, and this opera is a long one—so, we can’t schedule a dinner with the opera singer afterwards. We’re going to have him for lunch the next day, and then we’ll take a train to Hamburg.”

Mrs. Sells was born in 1924 and grew up in Buffalo, New York, but selected the University of Alabama for college, “because, as my father said, I picked the school with the best football team,” she explains. “And that was true. I had heard about University of Alabama football. The Crimson Tide it’s called.” Mrs. Sells’ father knew about football teams. He was Howard “Barney” Lepper, a well-known professional football player and a founder and coach of the Buffalo All-Americans, one of the nation’s pioneering professional teams.

“I applied to the University of Alabama, and I got in, so I went there and I loved it. Loved every minute of it. Roll Tide Roll,” recalls Mrs. Sells. “Every Saturday night we had a formal, and I mean really formal, dance. Formal for the women and formal for the men. And it was held in a really large gymnasium. When you entered, the person sitting at the door gave you a little dance card—like a bracelet that you put on your wrist, and then boys would come up to you and sign it. That meant he had reserved a dance with you. If you were lucky, you got all your dances filled up in the first ten minutes.” 

Despite all the dancing, Mrs. Sells completed work for a degree in three years. Already bitten by the romance of aviation, Mrs. Sells was determined to fly. She applied for a stewardess position with Pan American World Airways—Pan Am—but did not meet the minimum age requirement of 21 years old. She signed on with National Airlines for a year until she was eligible for Pan Am. 

“I’m not here because somebody said ‘Get out of the house and get to work’,” Mrs. Sells says. “That isn’t me. From my first little airplane ride from Birmingham to Jacksonville or wherever it went, I decided that travel was going to be my career.”

The lure of Pan Am was the opportunity to serve on international flights. Mrs. Sells flew domestic routes at first followed by international routes to Cuba, South America, and Europe for ten years. “With airline jobs of this type,” she says, “you bid on your runs. Oh, let’s see, in July I’d like to do Paris, or Istanbul, or Moscow. You didn’t always get what you wanted, but you’d have a better chance next time. If you were going to bid Europe, you had to go and live in New York and be part of the Atlantic Division. You also had to qualify as fluent in a European language—for Latin America, you had to speak Spanish or Portuguese. I started out in the Latin American division, and I flew there for three or four years. And then I qualified in French, and I transferred to New York, and I flew to Europe for the rest of my career.”

The experience of flying was different back then. People dressed up, and stewardesses, unlike flight attendants today, were all women. It was a coveted job with requirements that harken back to a more elegant time. “When I started at Pan Am and later when I became Chief Check stewardess and went all over the country recruiting college women for stewardess positions prior to graduation,” Mrs. Sells says, “you had to be between 5’2” and 5’6”, and you had to weigh between 110 and 130, and it had to be in proportion with your height. You had to have 20/20 vision, and with Pan Am, you had to have a second language, and that language depended on to which division you were applying.”

There was another qualification: You had to be single. When Mrs. Sells became reacquainted with Naval Academy graduate William Sells, who would go on to have a successful career in international and U.S. real estate development, a courtship began. “Maybe I’d go to London twice a week, and sometimes I’d catch Bill over there. And it was kind of a challenge, but a fun way to see Bill when he was on duty with his company and me with Pan Am,” Mrs. Sells remembers. Their engagement kept being stretched so that she could fly to just one more destination. When William Sells died in 2005, they had been married for nearly fifty years.  

We can’t ask Mrs. Sells to give young women career advice after her amazing career—because it’s still during her remarkable career. But we can solicit advice.

When they were at last wed, and Sally’s wings were “clipped,” the couple moved to Columbus, Ohio, for Bill’s work, where Sally used the knowledge she had acquired as a stewardess to land a job with a local travel agency. “I had never been in the sales end of it at all,” she recalls, “but I certainly knew destinations and knew why people should fly instead of cruise, or take a train, or whatever it might be. And that’s what started me being a travel advisor.”  Bill’s work then took the couple to Atlanta, Sally got a job as a substitute teacher, which she didn’t like very much. One day, she came home from school to find two strange men waiting for her in the living room. She wondered momentarily if she’d done something wrong—maybe gotten a parking ticket and not known it—and they had come in response. “It turned out that they were businessmen who wanted to know if I would be interested in becoming a partner in their newly established travel agency in Atlanta.” They said they needed someone with airline experience, and her name had been mentioned at a party in Buckhead. 

Sally agreed to become their business partner and hit the ground running, planning the logistics of an international tour for 700 members of the League of Women Voters. “After this group, we specialized in group travel. The challenge of planning group travel abroad was very rewarding and allowed me to leverage my knowledge of the international destinations I had visited as a stewardess. Nowadays, you say, well, everybody knows about London, and Paris, and Rome, and Istanbul, but not then—in those days, everybody didn’t know about these destinations.”

“It was such an eye-opener for me to be at the other end of the spectrum. Instead of receiving passengers on the airplane that I had to make comfortable, now I was selling those destinations, selling those people on why they should go to Frankfurt,  Rome, Lisbon, or wherever it was. It was a challenge, but it was such a fun challenge. When we moved from Atlanta, I said I’m going to stay in the travel business.”

When Mr. Sells was transferred to Philadelphia, she established Travel Anywhere. Travel Anywhere, which has expanded three times, specializes in custom itineraries.

The Sells family moved to the Society Hill neighborhood of Philadelphia, a once flourishing residential and commercial district that had declined and was described by many as a slum by the 1950s. Philadelphia’s Redevelopment Authority, working with the newly established Historical Commission, acquired dilapidated houses and sold them to people who would restore them. The legendary architect I. M. Pei contributed to the project by designing houses and an apartment building. The Sells family bought an I.M. Pei house, which they lived in for 32 years, and became pioneers in the redevelopment of Society Hill. 

One aspect of life in the neighborhood underwhelmed Mrs. Sells: the quality of education for her young daughters. She set out to make a change and, in the process, convinced St. Peter’s Choir School for Boys, founded in 1834, to admit her two daughters. Susan and Sally Ann Sells were the first girls admitted to the school in 1964. Mrs. Sells raised funds to add a girls’ restroom after the disgruntled headmaster complained that the only one available to them was his private one. Today, St. Peter’s is co-ed.

When she retires, she plans to volunteer for the food cupboard at her church. But we have a feeling that, as she still works a 60-hour week, that just might have to wait a while.

We can’t ask Mrs. Sells to give young women career advice after her amazing career—because it’s still during her remarkable career. But we can solicit advice. “I can tell you that I do believe that young women, when they finish their education, they should get a job that they really like in a career that they really want to pursue instead of just saying, ‘I got a job, I go in from 9 to 5, and I get Saturdays and Sundays off.’  We hear a lot about women with big jobs—oh, the president of this big organization is a woman, whatever it might be—but I’m talking about stuff from the very beginning. Instead of just saying ‘I want to get a job,’ I think they should try very hard in college to select what they think would be a career they would like. I think that it’s important to start young, with whatever career you think you want to do, even if you’re starting at the bottom of the rung at that particular company or that profession. You should have a goal the minute you get out of school.”

When Mrs. Sells turned 100 on July 29th, there were nonstop celebrations. She got off the elevator in her condo that day and the staff burst into applause and sang “Happy Birthday.” There were several parties and even a cruise to Bermuda. She was surprised at one soiree by young women wearing the elegant old Pan Am stewardess uniforms, including the white gloves. “I thought I was going to pass out on that one,” Mrs. Sells admits. “I was never so surprised. I hadn’t a clue, not a clue.” 

Although Mrs. Sells is the consummate career woman, she loves to talk professional sports, politics, and current affairs (and of course offer her best travel ideas). On Sundays during football season, you can find Mrs. Sells sitting at the bar in her favorite neighborhood restaurant cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles. She still swings a golf club. She reads the Philadelphia Inquirer every day and a novel every week. She is the oldest and longest-standing parishioner at her church, enjoys a lemon drop martini every night, is an active member of her book club, takes no medications, and lives alone. And yes, she has an iPhone and knows how to text! As of this writing, Sally has no plans to retire.