On the first airplane flight she remembers, then 5-year-old Jo-Ann Marks was invited to check out the cockpit and was immediately “mesmerized by all the buttons.” Afterward, she pinned on her Pan Am pilot wings, and she was hooked.

Marks saw a career as a flight attendant in her future, but she grew up to be a petite 5 feet, 4 inches tall, on the short side for the job, and didn’t meet the restrictive weight requirements at that time.

“I just thought it was a dream that was never going to happen to me,” she said. Instead, she pursued a successful career as a New York City public school teacher and administrator.

Marks, 55, a native of Trinidad, began teaching 1st through 3rd grade at PS 48 in Washington Heights in 1993. She was an interim principal for a year, a testing coordinator and also a co-teacher during her 28-year tenure in the city public school system. She officially retired in February 2022 but used several months of leave before that date to head in October to a Florida condo she purchased in 2016.

But Marks didn’t want to sit home every day after retiring. Her daughter, 31-year-old Brittany, asked her if she still wanted to be a flight attendant. The answer was yes.

Height and weight restrictions for flight attendants have eased over the years. Flight attendants were one of the first organized groups to sue alleging sex discrimination after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, according to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Airlines were found to have discriminatory policies based on weight, gender, race, age, pregnancy and marital status. Current guidelines, including height, vary among airlines.

Marks applied to different airlines and got a job offer at Frontier Airlines contingent on her success in an intense four-week training program in Wyoming. She learned about customer safety, water evacuations, how to extinguish fires, CPR and other topics.

Marks graduated from the training program in March and began regularly “flying the friendly skies” in April, she said from a Chicago hotel during a layover in July. She flies out of Miami and Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood international airports.

“I am enjoying myself,” she said. “I’m enjoying my crew. I’m enjoying the passengers.” She and her co-workers, she added, recently went out to eat and walk around Cancun during a 20-hour layover in that Mexican resort.

Her friends and family think it’s awesome she became a flight attendant. “They’re proud of me,” Marks said. “I’m proud of me.”