Karyl McMinn Viets
Feb. 25, 1930 – Aug. 14, 2015
Karyl McMinn Viets, who travelled much of the world as a stewardess and purser for Pan American World Airways, is dead.
She died of pancreatic cancer Aug. 14, 2015 in the Mill Valley/Almonte District home where she had lived for nearly 45 years.
The nurses and staff of the Marin County arm of Hospice by the Bay provided superb care, enabling her to remain in the home where she raised her family.
One of six children, she was a native of Superior, Wisconsin. She was 85 at the time of her death, barely five weeks after her cancer was diagnosed.
Karyl worked her way through the University of Iowa waiting on tables at the university commons. At Iowa she majored in Spanish and also studied Italian. Pan Am, noting her language abilities, hired her some months after she graduated.
She started flying in 1952. Her first flights were to Latin American and the Caribbean. All her flights were from Miami, in prop planes, and included numerous trips to Cuba.
Later she flew to cities along the East Coast of South America, and Brazil, Argentina and Venezuela.
New countries beckoned, and she transferred to New York to fly the Atlantic to London, Paris, Rome and other European cities served by Pan Am. She also flew to Lebanon and Iran in the Middle East.
Karyl also saw much of Africa. In South Africa, she made a clandestine personal visit to Soweto, where, under cover of darkness, she met with foes of Apartheid.
Europe and Africa finished, she moved to San Francisco to fly the Pacific on spacious double-decker Boeing Stratocruisers. She remembered tucking songwriter Irving Berlin in his berth, after getting an OK from his wife. Both laughed!
Karyl was fascinated by Japan, and studied conversational Japanese. She shopped frequently in Hong Kong, and marveled at the size of Australia and the beauty of New Zealand.
In the fall of 1959, Karyl married a newspaper reporter she met in Hawaii, and moved into his small, spartan Telegraph Place flat directly under Coit Tower.
On the ground floor, it was in one of the 3-story frame buildings built on Telegraph Hill after the 1906 earthquake and fire, and was complete with a pull-the-chain toilet that opened to the back stairs. The rent was $18.75 per month.
Karyl continued flying, by now in occasional fast Boeing 707 Intercontinental jets Pan Am was introducing in the Pacific.
But in the fall of 1960, she was grounded and forced to resign because she was pregnant with her daughter, Melissa, there was no Civil Rights Act in place then.
For Karyl’s last flight on Pan Am, she took her husband on a month-long trip around the world! She was six months pregnant, but tha didn’t slow her a bit!
The couple later lived briefly in Silicon Valley when her husband, captivated by the Space Age, took a job with a rocket company. Karyl attended lectures on early childhood development and played “Meg” in a stellar production of Brendan Behan’s play, “The Hostage”, at Stanford University.
Then it was back to San Francisco and a flat in the Marina.
But after the birth of a son, John Jeffrey, the couple moved to Marin in 1968.
In Marin, Karyl started a flourishing bonsai business in her backyard patio. She offered lessons in bonsai techniques and created hundreds of bonsais that were sold in Southern Marin and SF shops.
After numerous jobs, none of which equaled the international flying she loved, Karyl finally retired in 1989. Shortly after, she took a month-long tour of China, which was closed to Americans, when she was flying. She was in Beijing when Tiananmen Square erupted, and was quickly whisked away.
For the past 20 years, Karyl was been a very active member of the Aqua Exercise class at the College of Marin. She viewed the class as a pool of friends, and seldom missed a session.
Karyl was an avid reader and somehow found time to read huge numbers of books, especially on the histories of the countries she visited.
Karyl loved to meet people. She loved to laugh, and she was always the life of the party.
A celebration of her life will be held at the Almonte Clubhouse at 105 Wisteria Way, Mill Valley from 4:00 to 6:00pm on Saturday, September 19, 2015.
Karyl is survived by her husband Jack Viets, a former reporter for the old San Francisco Chronicle, her daughter, Melissa Viets Burrell (Kevin), and son, John Jeffrey Viets (Lynnet Senna), all of San Rafael, and three grandsons, Ben Lurie of Berkeley, Patrick Christopher Burrell and Jordan Viets both of San Rafael, and one granddaughter, Sarah Burrell of New York.