Whether standing in line at a store’s checkout counter or walking down the street, Sunday J. Ahrling always extended a kind word to those she met.
She did the same when she served passengers during her 35-year career as a flight attendant with United Airlines.
“Sunday never knew a stranger,” said her sister, Charneil Swenson. “She was really magnetic and vivacious her whole life. She loved United so much, and it was a mutual love affair, as far as I could tell.
“She was very beautiful with flaming red long hair, green eyes–quite a beauty with a big flashy smile. She had Midwestern values, really humble.
“She would send us, her family, greeting cards for everything and would underline four times all the key words on how much she loved us,” her sister said.
Mrs. Ahrling, 62, of Gurnee, died Tuesday, Nov. 29, of lung cancer in Lake Forest Hospital.
She was born Sunday Searles and raised in Kansas, which she “loved more than words can explain,” said her sister.
In 1966, she was a student at the University of Kansas when she answered an advertisement by United seeking flight attendants. She went on to become one of the airlines’ top attendants.
“Our relationship began professionally, but Sunday was the type of individual that once you meet her, she was your friend,” said Sara Fields, senior vice president of human resources at United and her supervisor in the 1970s. “I met her as a co-worker but knew her as a friend.
“I am at the senior level at the company and have known thousands of people. Sunday would stand out as the best of the best. She was a person who had such a passion for life and people, and she left a mark. She touched your heart and soul. … She was really an amazing person.
“It was always about others, not about her. When you talk about people who see a glass half empty, or half full, Sunday always saw it as absolutely full.”
Mrs. Ahrling considered the airline part of her extended family, according to her husband, Curtis.
“She loved her job, being around the people, and she loved the company. It was like a second home for her,” her husband said.
The couple met in 1967 in the parking lot of the apartment building where they both lived. She was with a fellow attendant, both with their hair in curlers, when she approached him and his friends, explaining that they had car trouble and asking for a lift to get a hamburger.
The group turned the two women down, but a few days later when tenants were gathering near the windows in the building’s hallways to watch a snowstorm, she walked out of her apartment door.
“She was drop dead gorgeous,” her husband said. “I asked her who she was and she said, `Remember the girl you turned down for a hamburger?’ I talked her into going out with me.” They wed in 1970, living for about eight years in Arlington Heights before moving to the HeatherRidge development in Gurnee.
That community’s ponds and open space enticed numerous animals to visit. Mrs. Ahrling soon became the unofficial healer of the wounded ones, and about 15 years ago she received a state license to rehabilitate injured wildlife.
“Sometimes you didn’t know what you would find in our house,” her husband said. “One time I opened the door of the powder room, and there were two ducks in the sink and one sitting on the dresser in there. We had raccoons in the garage, opossums, a bat in the house that she fixed, squirrels, plus our pet dogs and cats.”
She also enjoyed riding her thoroughbred hunter jumper, Zackrey, that she purchased about a year ago after her first horse, Humphrey, died.
“That first horse was way over her head as far as her being able to handle him, but she didn’t know better, and she just gentled him to the point where he became a great horse,” her husband said. “So her demeanor did not just extend to people, it went to animals as well.”
Besides her husband and sister, Mrs. Ahrling is survived by two other sisters, Tracy Jones and Kimberly Young.
A memorial service will be held at 10:45 a.m. Saturday, in Marsh Funeral Home, 305 Cemetery Rd., Gurnee.
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bsherlock@tribune.com
