Winding up her long career, Carolyn Fennell has personified Orlando International Airport perhaps more than anyone.
She’s worked there longer than every colleague, reported to 13 directors and nine chairmen, and helped grow her workplace from a backwater landing strip to the gateway for the nation’s top tourism stop. Along the way were recessions, a terror attack, mortgage crisis and pandemic.
Fennell has been director of public affairs for nearly 43 years. She’s had various titles for mostly the same job: the airport’s voice for all those people and events.
She began in 1980 when the airport was housed in a Quonset hut, when the Boeing 727 ruled, when Delta and Eastern airlines dominated and when the passenger count was 5 million a year. She drove across a tarmac used by jetliners to reach her parking spot, minding the boss’ admonishment: yield to 90-ton aircraft.
By 1995, Fennell was a recognized airport executive, appearing on the cover of Orlando Magazine in an iconic image with mayors, a lawmaker and other elected officials as one of 14 of “Orlando’s Leading Women – Redefining Power.”
She has armored her presence with scarves, pearls, appropriate nails and skill for public speaking – more on this below. She is not comfortable with casual, informal or her one pair of blue jeans. Early on, she donned heels to chaperone airport construction tours.
Fennell is the first woman and the longest-serving Black senior staffer at the airport.
She has been on hand as a blur of amateurs, suspected and convicted wrongdoers, stalwart public servants and visionary champions came and went from the airport’s halls of power and wealth. She accorded leaders steadfast loyalty, say her loyal friends.
Today’s most popular jetliner model at Orlando’s airport is the Airbus 321 and the busiest airline may emerge from JetBlue’s bid to absorb Spirit. That aircraft and those companies were born long after she started at the airport. So much has changed.
Another milestone, one she has anticipated as key to her career timeline, was the opening last year of the $2.4 billion Terminal C. It’s a showy shrine to a new era of transportation that Fennell will leave for others to navigate.
Friday is her last day. She plans to do what more than 50 million people annually at the airport do – travel – and globally, again.
“Time for more adventures,” Fennell said, announcing her retirement to the airport authority. “I hope to be in a lot of places real soon.”
Witness airports’ evolution
Fennell has been around long enough to take part in the generational pivot by airports from focusing on airlines and their airplanes to catering to passenger experiences.
Her passion has been Orlando International’s art presentation and overall aesthetic of blue sky, shimmering water and tropical flora..
“I’ve been privileged and proud being here and feel that I have contributed,” Fennell said. “There’s been turbulence, you know, and things that have happened in terms of the industry. We have very talented people here at the airport, and I didn’t build it. I jokingly say I just instigate a little bit sometimes.”
Outside the airport, she has had extensive involvement and leadership in arts, music, aviation and civic groups and the Jacksonville branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
She also, as the Sentinel noted in a 2003 story, “has eclectic circle of friends” which at the time included former NBA star Charles Barkley, Harlem Renaissance poet Nikki Giovanni, fashion icon Oleg Cassini. “When Oprah threw a birthday party for writer Maya Angelou, Fennell was a guest,” the story noted.
“I’ve always been impressed by and grateful for Carolyn’s commitment to our community through her service on numerous citizen and cultural boards to her mentoring and empowering young professionals, especially women,” said Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer, who has been an airport board member for 20 years.
Former Orange County Mayor Linda Chapin said Fennell has been tireless.
“As a sought-after host and moderator for good causes, Carolyn has spent about 40 years on the banquet circuit!” said Chapin, a former airport chairman. “Only occasionally did she take time out for a movie or a weekend away.”
Fennell won’t discuss age. Far from worn out, she seems indomitable. Driving home two years ago from the airport, she was hit by a car, leaving her banged up with lingering pain.
Afterward, ending a long day, she might wince while walking. It was fleeting and private.
She ends voice messages with a vaguely Euro-flavored sophistication: “cheeree, bye!”
It might seem misplaced, in light of where she works, which favors flip-flops, ultra low-cost airlines and swarms of hyper kids.
The phone mannerism may be one of the easier clues that she is deeper than four decades of airport work.
From Lake County to London
Fennell is from Leesburg, 55 miles from the airport, via Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland and other faraway places and events – like Peter Jennings’ ABC London bureau, armed coups, Russian defections and armored vehicles guarding her residence.
She grew up amid the racist terrorism waged by Willis McCall, former sheriff of Lake County, which takes in Leesburg.
She remembers as a kid that family members debated and feared traveling in a car alone or in a group and encountering McCall and his deputies.
“It was assumed if you were a Black man you could be pulled over,” Fennell said.
She also recalls as a child sneaking defiant drinks of water from the whites-only fountain in a Woolworth store, until her family sternly warned her not to.
Her parents had separated. Wanting to be a minister, her mother left the Baptist faith, which wouldn’t let her do that. She became a Pentecostal, established her own church, taught Sunday school and mentored African American women as leaders.
Grammar and storytelling were among her mother’s priorities. Fennell took to them with some innate ability. “I always had this deep voice, and I was loud,” she said.
Her grandmother stressed confidence through appearances, including nail care. “She would do Windsor Rose polish every morning to make sure she didn’t have chipped nails.”
Her father lived in Tallahassee, where Fennell was born in the Florida Agricultural & Mechanical University hospital, where Blacks went because all but a handful of hospitals then in Florida were for whites only.
She attended FAMU’s high school and then the university, arriving as the Civil Rights movement roiled the nation. Fennell, loud and short, found herself stationed at the front of protest marches.
Fennell met a FAMU student she would marry. He was hired by the U.S. State Department as a diplomat. Fennell followed him to Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka and Fiji, adapting to strife, intrigues and dramas, and having two sons.
With their last posting, in London, Fennell had been frustrated long enough over her status as a diplomat’s spouse. Her assignment, as with all embassy spouses, was to burnish his resume, which precluded pursuing a job or career.
Fennell landed a position with ABC News as a production assistant in the bureau of the rising international correspondent, Jennings.
It was thrilling, but her marriage ended.
After two years, she and her sons returned to the United States in 1978.
She was Black, unemployed and divorced. Her teenagers had been educated internationally speaking multiple languages and studying Latin. Awaiting them was the Southern culture of newly desegregated Orange County schools.
The Colonial High School principal would not let Fennell’s sons enroll in gifted classes. He didn’t give much of a reason. She told him she would alert the media to the injustice. They were tested and admitted.
Becoming an ‘Angel’
Walt Disney World hired Fennell as a publicist. She worked closely with two others reporting to Disney’s director of publicity, Charlie Ridgway. They would become known as “Charlie’s Angels,” a reference to a television show about crime-fighting women.
In his “Spinning Disney’s World” book published in 2007, Ridgway credited staff for making his job easy.
“Among them is a group who call themselves Charlie’s Angels, the mostly young and attractive women I was lucky enough to hire,” Ridgway wrote. “I make no apologies for that.”
In 1980, Fennell went to work for the Greater Orlando Aviation Authority, the independent government organization set up by state law to run the airport.
In 1981, the authority opened its north terminal complex, inaugurating the airport’s modern era and defining its passenger experience with elevated shuttle trains that travel among tree tops and over lakes.
Fennell sent more than a few Orlando Sentinel reporters into paroxysms of whiny agitation by parceling out airport information.
“She is very protective of the aviation authority,” said Suzanne McGovern, a former Charlie’s Angel and a retired communications professional. “That was her job that she was very good at.”
Likened to a city, the airport is an amalgam of government bureaucracy, striving small businesses, behemoth corporations, major and minor airlines from many countries and an alphabet soup of authorities: FAA, TSA, FBI, CBP, OPD and DOT.
Because of rigid “lanes” of responsibility, Fennell said, she would speak for only one authority, that of the airport, even when reporters expected answers for all the authorities.
“She’s extremely professional,” said Wrenda Goodwyn, also a former Charlie’s Angel and a communications consultant. “The fact that she has done that job and done it so well for such a long time, we’re just very proud of her.”
Fennell said her pearls and scarves were a conscious part of her path from small town girl to diplomat’s wife to being known as the airport lady.
They were also tools for when speakers at airport meetings had reached their time limit. Fennell, by prior understanding, would signal for a wrap-up by flipping her string of pearls and, if needed, tossing her scarf.
“It’s like an adjustment if you didn’t know what it was,” Fennell said.
With retirement, Fennell will not hang up the pearls and scarves or lower her volume.
Nor will she stop leaning into an encouragement from her grandmother, who had made the vivid impression with Windsor Rose nails.
She often told Fennell in trying times: “You can do it, baby.”
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