Jewel Van Valin is a flight attendant for Delta Airlines. A few months after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, she began handing out crayons to passengers so they could draw on the newly replaced paper table tray covers. Who could have imagined that eight years and 3,500 drawings later, many of those drawings would be hanging in a museum.
The exhibit Plane Art – Connecting People is currently on display at the Palm Springs Air Museum until January 25, 2010. The collection contains dozens of drawings while many others have been placed into scrapbooks for visitors to peruse.
It all started one day when Van Valin said a passenger who noticed the change "threw his head back and rolled his eyes, and I could tell he was thinking, ‘What’s next?’ That look clinched it for me." The flight attendant had a box of crayons in her bag and started to hand them out. "The passengers started laughing and drawing," she recalled. "It was a way to reconnect after 9/11."