The 150 Tupperware saleswomen have gathered this Monday evening at the company`s headquarters in suburban Roseville, Minn., for a lesson in motivation. Not motivation to sell plastic containers but something much more uplifting: the motivation to survive against all odds.
First, the women hear a recording of Perry Como singing ”The Lord`s Prayer.” Then comes the keynote address by Jackie Nink Pflug of Excelsior, Minn., who nearly died after being shot in the head during an airline hijacking in November, 1985.
Near the end of Pflug`s inspiring and heart-wrenching story about her recovery, the women cheer this extraordinary statement: Pflug says she`s glad that her life was changed when an Egyptian terrorist shot her execution-style.
”I`m glad tragedy happened to me,” she says in an intense stage whisper. ”I`m glad because of all the wonderful things I`ve learned about myself and about life. I`m glad it happened.”
Today, almost three years after surviving the Egyptair jet hijacking on Nov. 23, 1985, that ended in the deaths of 59 people on a runway in Malta, Pflug (pronounced ”floog”) is launching a full-time career as a
”motivational and inspirational” lecturer.
She recently appeared on the Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey TV talk shows. And her message, which blends religious fervor with can-do optimism, has been honed into a dramatic presentation, which is enormously popular with businesses and corporations.
”She shows us that anything is possible,” says Darleen Forbragd, who hired Pflug to ”further inspire” an already motivated group of Tupperware saleswomen and managers. The Tupperware talk was the first of four speeches Pflug would give that week to audiences around the country.
In show-business parlance, Pflug ”delivers the goods.” There was a time when this elementary school teacher suffered from nervous butterflies at the prospect of standing before a classroom of children on the first day of school. Now she performs like a skilled evangelist at a revival: She pumps her listeners, using pauses, whispers and dramatic sighs for emotional effect, pushing toward an epiphany.
Her story is unique for two reasons.
First, it is a personal account of a horrifying episode in an unprecedented year of terror that also included the hijacking of a TWA jet on an Athens-to-Rome flight on June 14, the hijacking of the Achille Lauro luxury liner near Port Said, Egypt, on Oct. 7, and attacks by Palestinian terrorists at the Rome and Vienna airports on Dec. 27.
Second, Pflug`s ability to tell the story is something of a miracle in itself: a victory of will and a gift from God, she believes.
Doctors once predicted that Pflug would never be able to read or drive because of brain injuries that affected her vision. Diagnosed as having almost total short-term memory loss, she once was unable to manage casual conversations because she couldn`t keep track of what people were saying to her. Further, she was told that a cure couldn`t be found for a peculiar numbing of her left side that occurred whenever she bent her head forward.
And she became an epileptic. Powerful drugs taken to control seizures plunged her into a severe depression, which bordered on the suicidal.
Today, however, Pflug is taking a minimum one-year leave of absence from her job as an elementary teacher with the schools in Wayzata, Minn., to pursue a career in public speaking. She claims to have conquered some of the disabilities that had once been considered irreversible. And she is working on ways to compensate for physical problems that didn`t go away.
Pflug offers to make coffee during an interview at her duplex. A small white poodle with a Mohawk haircut-Jackie`s husband, Scott Pflug, named the dog Spike in a moment of perverse humor-scurries between her feet as she gets out the coffeemaker.
”It takes five cups of water, and you`ll have to count them because I can`t keep track,” she explains. After she pours each cup into the machine, she immediately asks, ”How many is that?”
When alone, Pflug keeps track of her cups of water by recording the number on a note pad. However, the bullet that lodged in the right side of her skull and blew pieces of shattered bone into her brain did not affect her long-term memory. Without being specific, Pflug explains that she has learned ways to ”load” the information she needs to remember into her long-term memory files, mostly by writing things down. It`s the equivalent of tying a string around your finger.
But, at 34, she has many years of long-term memories. She remembers her childhood in a suburb of Houston, the teaching techniques she learned in college and graduate school, the years spent as a specialist in educating children with learning disabilities.
”Oh, the irony!” she exclaims when mentioning her teaching experience with learning-disabled kids. ”Here I am today, in the body of a learning-disabled person.”
Pflug also remembers every detail of the hijacking, including the surprisingly soundless experience of being shot in the head. And she remembers the sensation of dying. Today she has no fear of death, for she believes she already knows what it is.
Until 1984, Jackie Nink, the second of three daughters born to a working- class family in Texas, had never lived more than a few miles from home. For years, however, she had nurtured the dream of working in a foreign country, and at age 29 she decided to do it.
After attending an international job fair for teachers in New York, Jackie Nink accepted a teaching position in Stavangar, Norway.
”I wanted to live somewhere where it snows, because I had never seen snow before,” she now tells audiences. Among Minnesotans, that explanation always gets a laugh.
In Norway, Jackie Nink met and eventually married Scott Pflug, a 26-year- old physical education teacher from Minnetonka, Minn. The newlyweds then accepted two-year contracts to teach at an American school in Cairo. The two had been in Egypt only a few weeks when they traveled with Scott`s school volleyball team to Athens to attend a tournament.
On the evening of Nov. 23, 1985, Jackie Pflug was returning to Cairo from Athens on Egyptair Flight 648. Her husband planned to join her by taking a flight the next day.
Minutes into the flight, however, the plane was taken over by five armed men who identified themselves as members of the ”Egyptian Revolution.” The plane was diverted to the Mediterranean island of Malta, where the hijackers demanded and were refused fuel for a trip to an unknown destination.
In response, the terrorists began a systematic execution of passengers who carried Israeli or American passports.
Five people were shot, their bodies pushed down a stairway onto the airstrip. Pflug was the last one. She spent five hours lying with corpses on the tarmac, afraid that the terrorists would shoot her again if she moved.
But, in fact, she wasn`t sure if she could move at all. Drifting in and out of consciousness, she remembers that she was visited by her dead grandmother, who took her hand and led her toward a blazing, radiant light. Rising above her lifeless body, she says, she felt a calmness and realized she had died. Then, suddenly, she knew that she ”had to go back.”
During the hours before she was shot, Pflug says, she had reviewed her life and prayed as she sat with a hand-bound group of Americans and Israelis who were being executed one by one.
”I became safe and calm within my body,” she recalls in her lectures.
”I decided that God would decide what was supposed to be. But at the same time, I asked God for my life.”
Later, lying among the bodies, Pflug became aware of intense discomfort as water from a rainstorm dripped into the bullet wound in her head.
”I asked God to stop the rain, and he did,” she says, adding that only later-years later-would she fully realize that ”God has always had a special plan for me.”
When she speaks on tour, Pflug generally spends about 30 minutes describing the hijacking and its immediate aftermath. Pflug and another wounded hostage survived, but during the gun battle and fire that occurred when commandos stormed the plane, 52 other passengers and four of the five terrorists died. The heart of her message, however, deals with recovery and triumph. It is a story of self-help and a willingness to seek help from others.
But she does not have an altogether happy story. Her bouts with depression and moments of out-and-out rage strained her friendships and her marriage. Scott Pflug, in fact, declined to be interviewed for this story.
”We each had different ways of dealing with what happened,” Jackie Pflug explains. ”Mine was totally different from Scott`s.”
One of the greatest obstacles to her recovery, she believes, was the fact that she looks so normal. But she is not normal. Nor does the world look the way she remembers it.
Pflug suffers from left-sided peripheral blindness. Her brain does not register objects on her left side, though her eyes appear perfectly healthy. To illustrate the extent of her disability to audiences, Pflug uses an overhead projector to show a few sentences the way she sees them on a page.
The simple phrase, ”By the way,” looks like this:
”y he ay.”
Pflug invites her listeners to decipher the splintered sentences, and when they inevitably falter, she laughs with delight.
”Actually, I`m making it easy for you,” she teases, ”because I not only don`t see part of each word, but I also see only half of each letter.”
During the last three years, Pflug has learned to read, albeit slowly, by ”back scanning” across each line of text. She also has qualified for a license to drive a car, though she tries to stay off the road after dark.
”My recovery began when I chose to be healthy,” she says. ”When I chose to be healthy, to quit whining and feeling sorry for myself, people started to appear in my life to help me to get well.”
Pflug acknowledges, however, that she was the one who took charge. She insisted, for instance, that her doctor change her prescription for the drug used to control her seizures. As a result, the bouts of depression ended. And, despite her doctor`s opinion to the contrary, she believes that someday she will be ”pill-free.”
Pflug also sought aid from traditional and nontraditional health practitioners. When a medical doctor suggested that her strange left-sided numbness was related to permanent brain damage, she sought another opinion. She went to a ”holistic chiropractor” in Minnetonka, Minn., who spent five weeks helping her recover from her problem of numbness.
The chiropractor also put Pflug in touch with a licensed psychologist in Minneapolis who helped Pflug deal with her rage and terrors.
Pflug says her process of emotional recovery ultimately boiled down to forgiving the terrorists. ”I think it`s real important for people to understand that you have to let go of the negativity in your life,” she explains. ”If you can`t, it makes you sick.
”So I started letting that go. I started forgiving those men who hurt me, forgiving them for what they did to the eight children (who were killed)
on board the plane, for all the lives that were taken. It`s not something you can do in a day. It takes a long time.”
She tells the Tupperware women: ”When I think of those hijackers, I don`t think in hate. I try to surround them in love.”
Eventually, as her condition improved, Pflug started thinking about the big hurdle: going back to work.
Based on her skills as an educational diagnostician of learning-disabled children, Pflug landed a job with IBM, where she was hired to work with educational computer programs.
”I found out fast that I couldn`t do it,” she says simply. ”I was devastated by that fact.”
After leaving IBM, she remained unemployed for four months. During that time, she attended motivational courses at Executive Futures, a group-counseling service based in Excelsior that specializes in ”erasing limits” and ”discovering your greatness.”
Knowing that being a good teacher ”had always been my special gift,”
Pflug worked up the courage to apply for a job as a part-time instructor of learning-disabled students.
She disclosed everything at her job interview, recalls Louis Benko, principal at Greenwood Elementary School in Wayzata. At the time, her epilepsy was not totally controlled (it is today). And she was frank about her visual and memory problems.
As it turned out, Benko says, Pflug immediately established ”a special rapport with the kids.”
”I had a tough group: learning-disabled 6th-grade boys, the kind who have lots of behavior problems,” Pflug says. ”They were wonderful. Part of it was, I was one of them. I had a hard time reading. I knew how hard it is to look normal, to be thought of as lazy because our brains won`t allow us to focus.”
Last year Pflug arranged to teach learning-disabled children in the mornings and regular 1st graders in the afternoons. She shared the 1st-grade class with Marcia Behring, and the two soon became close friends.
”She`s got a million ideas. Everyone who meets her learns that real fast,” Behring says. ”And she`s constantly setting new goals for herself.” One of those goals, of course, was a career in public speaking. At first, it began as a therapeutic device, a way of coming to grips with painful memories. Pflug talked to church groups and schools and eventually flew to Philadelphia to appear on a local TV talk show.
After that, the requests for appearances began to pour in. Pflug, who had no experience in speechmaking, was astonished at her ability to hold a crowd in rapt attention. It was a gift from God, she decided.
But, Pflug says, she needed to polish her delivery. Eventually, she formed a partnership with Bill Behring, her teaching partner`s husband, who helped her develop a series of presentations that cater to business, educational and religious organizations. Behring also books Pflug`s speaking engagements under the auspices of a company they formed, Professional Speech Partners.
Earlier this summer, just after the closing of the school year, they launched her full-time speaking career in earnest. And business has been good. Pflug is not sure when it will end.
”I feel like God is saying, `Okay, I`ve carried you this far. Now, go tell the world what can be done. That there is hope. That good can come from bad. That you have to hang in there.`
”Every day for me and every day for you is a struggle,” she tells her audience of Tupperware saleswomen. They murmur in agreement. They applaud loudly. And crowds of women hug her before she leaves the room.
