Photograph by Jill Toyoshiba
Airport Answers: Esther Cooley, a longtime resident of Willow Glen, has been volunteering at San Francisco International Airport as an international information specialist on and off for the last 35 years.
Willow Glen resident uses travel experience in work at SF Airport
Cooley is the longest-serving volunteer with Travelers Aid at SFO
By Kate Carter
Willow Glen resident Esther Cooley knows all about traveling in unfamiliar lands and about how difficult it can be to reach a destination, especially after hours spent covering hundreds and thousands of miles.
She has covered lots of international ground, from her first trip to Europe as an employee with the U.S. Air Force in post-World War II Germany to her cruise to French Polynesia last December with her husband, Donald.
But she has also spent more than 35 years helping other international travelers arriving to and departing from San Francisco International Airport. As a volunteer with Travelers Aid, she tells them where to change their money, where to catch a cab, and where the best local night hot spots are.
"I've been out there that whole time, so I know all that stuff," she says. "There's a lot to learn."
Cooley, 79, is the senior volunteer at the airport, where she has volunteered, on and off, since 1957. She has seen the airport expand from one building to the growing multistructure complex it is now. She has spent most of her time at the international gates, and she says she looks forward to going back to work in the new international terminal when the new Travelers Aid information desk opens there.
For now, though, she and Donald take the train and spend four hours every Saturday night manning the main information desk at SFO.
"I think it's tremendous that she has lasted this long," Donald says, adding that the average volunteer lasts only about three or four years. "She's doing what she does best."
Cooley wasn't always this interested in international travel, however.
As one of six children of a Lutheran minister and his wife, Cooley (then Esther Hoemann) had a "good, but strict," childhood in a small town in Iowa with little experience of the rest of the world.
It was her friend and co-worker, Josephine, who encouraged the 30-year-old Cooley to join her in applying for a job as a civilian with U.S. Air Force in Germany.
Cooley wasn't very enthusiastic about the idea. But, she thought if she didn't apply she wouldn't hear the end of it from her friend. So she mailed in her application, just to say that she had, and figured that would be the end of it.
But it was Cooley who heard back from the Air Force first, and Cooley who hopped on a plane bound for Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, Germany, in 1951, and Cooley who didn't come back to the United States for two years.
Cooley learned to speak German as she traveled around Germany on the weekends with two American friends, Marian Cade and Lena Smeltz. They, especially Smeltz, helped her appreciate the fun and excitement of traveling in unknown places, she says.
"If there wasn't anything going on, [Lena] would see that something got going," Cooley laughs now.
She also traveled on longer trips to Italy and England, and other places throughout Europe. She made friends with American officers, met her German relatives and was able to visit East Berlin.
"I got to do things that a lot of people have never done," she says. "Berlin was all closed up, but I got to go in."
Cooley says she would fill pages of letters to home about her experiences, and her father would write back that it sounded as if she "certainly was wandering" around a lot.
Photograph courtesy of Esther Cooley
Globe-Trotters: Marian Cade, from left, and Lena Smeltz joined Esther Hoemann on many of her adventures, including this one in Bavaria in 1952, when she was living in Germany as a civilian employee for the U.S. Air Force for two years during the Allied occupation of Germany after World War II.
In 1953, though, she was happy to get on a boat back to the United States.
After she returned, she made her way to San Francisco, where she met Donald at a singles square dancing event. The two were married less than four months after they met, and their first child, June, was born in 1957.
But Cooley wasn't content to just stay home and take care of the baby.
"Women who had worked would say, 'I want to be my own woman,'" she says. "That was me."
She decided to get a job as a volunteer, and found a four-hour-a-week position with Travelers Aid at the airport near their home, just south of San Francisco. It was a perfect match for the experienced traveler.
"It was so close to the time that I'd come home," Cooley says. "I could picture myself if I saw someone in a peck of trouble. Maybe I'd been in a peck of trouble."
She continued to volunteer after the birth of their second daughter, Jean, in 1961. She says Donald would drive her to the airport and drop her off and care for the children until he went to pick her up again.
"It didn't bother me to babysit the children," Donald adds.
It wasn't until the family moved to Willow Glen in 1966, that Cooley stopped working at SFO. She hunted around the South Bay for another volunteer position that she would enjoy as much, and she worked as a volunteer in Valley Medical Center's emergency room for a couple of years. But she couldn't seem to find a job that suited her as well as her job with Travelers Aid.
So she called them back up and asked if they had any openings, which they did.
"I have never found another volunteer job like it," Cooley says.
A typical challenge of the job, she says, are international travelers who have lost their passports, or even all their money. Cooley will call their embassies, if they have one, and try to find them some help.
Sometimes, different languages can be a problem for her, but she manages to find a way to get people the information they need, such as gate information or where to change currency.
"You can sort of suspect what the question might be, at an airport," she says.
Cooley still speaks enough German to explain to a German woman who is trying to reach her son in San Francisco, what an answering machine is and how to leave a message.
Photograph by Jill Toyoshiba
Travel Tips: Working the information desk in the international terminal, Esther Cooley acts as a kind of concierge for international travelers who need help with a wide variety of things, from finding a hotel to exchanging currency to replacing a lost passport.
When it's slow at the information desk, Cooley does a little personal housekeeping.
"If I'm not busy, I read the Bible," she says. That could be understandable, coming from a minister's daughter, but she explains that "the Bible" is an exhaustive Rolodex of all the places people may need to get to, and organizations they may need to contact. She says it's important to stay on top of the many changes at the airport and in the Bay Area, in order to give people the information they need.
"It refreshes your memory and it's a good thing to do when you have time."
She will even provide entertainment for weary travelers, singing German songs with German tourists that she remembers from the time she spent in their country.
Cooley has been back to Germany since she returned from living there; she and Donald have been to six of the seven continents since they began traveling together in 1975.
"After we married, we realized that we both have 'itchy feet,'" Donald says. "We have traveled all over the world."
Their home is decorated with enlarged photographs from their trips to Italy and France and Budapest. The only place they haven't been, Cooley says, is Indonesia, where she has no desire to travel.
Donald also joined her at SFO in 1980, when he began volunteering for Traveler's Aid, "just to prove that I could," he says. "I tried it out; I didn't have much trouble catching on."
"He invaded my territory," Cooley jokes about her "junior volunteer."
The two of them are a team every Saturday night, because the other volunteers, whom Cooley says are mostly senior citizens, don't want to give up their Saturday nights.
"Most of the volunteers look like they come from the senior center, but they all act like they have these wild social lives and can't come on Saturday night," she says. "They're not like me."
Their Saturday night experiences become anecdotes that amuse the couple throughout the rest of the week, Donald says.
"It's a fun job; we never know what to expect," he says. "On the train home, we're talking about the crazy people that we've helped out. We do get a big charge out of these people."
Cooley says it's important to her to volunteer, "To give back to what you know and to do something with your time."
But she agrees she really does it because it's fun, and looks forward to more years as a friendly and helpful face to travelers at the airport.
"I want to volunteer so long as I can look all right and got my head on straight," she says.
Willow Glen, California Since 1992
