Second Career Takes Off for Alpha Air Pilot : Teaching gave way to a love of flying for Anita Baroldi, despite difficulties in finding jobs and lingering prejudice.

When the president of Alpha Air called pilot Anita Baroldi to come in for a job interview, Baroldi recalls him saying: “I got your resume. In fact, I’ve got all of your resumes.”

Considering she had been sending in her resume every two months for two years, the executive for the Los Angeles-based commuter airline probably had a collection of 12 Baroldi resumes. Plus lots of phone calls. “It’s serendipity where people end up in aviation,” said Baroldi, a Mission Viejo resident. “If someone needs you, and your resume falls on their desk that day, you’ve hit it right.”

Her attitude illustrates how difficult it is to find a job as a pilot, even after the time and expense of training, licensing and logging thousands of miles in the air. And, for their trouble, beginning pilots can expect to earn an annual salary of about $12,000, according to Baroldi. Job security is minimal in an industry that has seen Eastern, Midway and Pan American Airlines fold and USAir and America West announce layoffs.

So, you figure, there must be something people love about the work.

“It’s peaceful,” said Baroldi. “When you’re above the Earth, you don’t see the bad things. Everything looks beautiful.”

Baroldi is a petite, cleareyed aviator who is the only female pilot for the 16-person crew of Alpha Air, which flies out of John Wayne Airport in Orange County to Mammoth Mountain and the Grand Canyon.

Baroldi said this is a good time for women to be getting into aviation. Two of the major, commercial airlines, United and American, are hiring women.

But there is lingering prejudice against female pilots too. “There are certain individuals who are not happy to see females come into the business,” Baroldi said. “They feel the females will get a break, whereas the business is tougher on the guys. That’s where the prejudice comes from.”

For Baroldi, aviation is a second career.

Raised in Tennessee, Baroldi studied education and psychology at Blue Mountain College in Mississippi. Bachelor’s degree in hand, with a desire to live in a warm climate, Baroldi came to Los Angeles in 1968 to teach at an intermediate school in East Los Angeles.

“It was culture shock,” she said. “I was not acquainted with the Hispanic culture. There were daily fights, proving identity and worthiness.”

But she came to admire the loyalty and warmth of Southland Latinos. Last Christmas, in fact, she had dinner with some of the teachers she knew during her four years in East Los Angeles. While she was there, she began taking flying lessons.

In 1972, she was transferred to a high school in Watts, where the environment was dangerous enough that teachers parked their cars in guarded, locked lots.

“It was a different kind of shock,” Baroldi said. “This time, I felt I understood the culture, but there was a lot of prejudice against me.”

Baroldi had worked in support of civil rights in college, she said, and was hurt to be judged unsympathetic to the cause of blacks.

One of her students pulled a knife on Baroldi for giving her a D. Baroldi pushed the girl out of the classroom door, which locked automatically, and a security guard came around the corner. The student slashed the guard’s arm, Baroldi said.

Baroldi took a year off from teaching after that incident and became a postal carrier. In 1976, she bought a house in Orange County, began studying for her Ph.D. in psychology, taught night school, met her future husband and took a job teaching at an intermediate school in Santa Ana. The students were more disciplined there.

“The first day,” she remembered, “there was a kid in my class with a sack of potato chips. I told him to put it away, and he did. I thought to myself: ‘No kidding. This is great.’ ”

She discovered she had a talent for working with handicapped students and those who had trouble learning. “These were good kids who hadn’t been turned on to learning,” Baroldi said.

She moved into administration for the Santa Ana Unified School District, eventually supervising 24 school psychologists. She resumed her flight training again in 1986, and soon found that it was pushing aside other things in her life--social activities, the work she brought home at night. Later that year she asked the school for a leave of absence, which has since become permanent.

“Once I began to fly again, it was surprising to me how for 15 years I could have disciplined myself to not think about aviation,” she said. “When I was back in, I realized this is what I really loved and what I missed.”