#FlashbackFriday: Women Who Kept the Exchange Rolling

In the above photo, which appeared in the November 1955 Exchange Post, three female attendants provide service to an Airman at the August 1955 reopening of a remodeled gas station at Mather AFB, Calif. Note the line of cars waiting to get into the station.

Female service station attendants remained enough of a novelty in the ’50s that one was the subject of a May 1958 Exchange Post story, headlined “Keesler Gal Does Man-sized Job as Service Station Attendant.”

With a shortage of trained men, Lt. Col. Miles T. Barnett, Base Exchange Officer at Keesler AFB, “did the unprecedented by reluctantly hiring” Betty Ann Davis as a service-station attendant. Davis was not only trained, but had experience in the field, including a stint as an attendant at Pendleton Marine Base, Calif.

She was surprised to learn that the long lines at the Keesler station were there to see her, “the first female service station in the Air Training Command and possibly the entire Air Force,” the story said. But curiosity was soon replaced by compliments and commendations for Davis’ work.

Attendants of either gender are rare these days, as the Exchange service stations of the past have given way to gas pumps at Expresses and name-brand concessionaires operating car-care centers.

Davis’ story was packaged with a story about Lucille “Lu” Hill, at the time the Exchange’s only female truck driver. Hill drove a 35-foot mobile snack bar that served Airmen at Reese AFB in Lubbock, Texas.

Truck-driving is still a male-dominated profession, but during the modern era, at least two women in the Exchange system made their mark as long-haul truckers. In 2017, Dianna Williams became the Exchange’s first female driver to reach 1 million miles accident-free.

“To this day some say it is still a man’s job,” she said at the time. “Well I am here to tell you, it takes a very special person to do this job, regardless if you are a man or a woman.”

And in 2019, Heike Molter, a German national, became the Exchange’s first female long-haul trucker in Europe. “There is a lot of opportunity for women to start driving,” Molter said. “I hope someday everyone can see that women are as good—or better—than men at truck driving.”