Bette Nash, Longest-Serving Flight Attendant in the World, Dies at 88

Bette Nash, whose nearly seven decades of serving airline passengers aboard the Washington-to-Boston shuttle earned the route the nickname the Nash Dash and won her a spot in Guinness World Records as the longest-serving flight attendant in history, died on May 17. She was 88.

Ms. Nash never officially retired, and her death, from breast cancer, was announced on Saturday by her employer, American Airlines. It did not say where she died. She lived in Manassas, Va.

Ms. Nash entered service with Eastern Air Lines in November 1957, at the dawn of the jet age. Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, “I Love Lucy” was on TV and even short domestic flights were still a glamorous adventure.

Wearing white gloves, heels and a pillbox hat, Ms. Nash served lobster and champagne, carved roast beef by request and passed out after-dinner cigarettes.

Things have changed a lot since then — the smoking is gone, and so is the carved meat — but Ms. Nash remained largely the same.

After a brief stint in Miami, she began flying out of Washington in 1961, usually shuttle hops to New York and Boston — an assignment she preferred, even when seniority gave her the choice of routes, because she could return to her home in Northern Virginia every evening to care for her son, who had Down syndrome.