Stowaway | Criminal Podcast | Forensic Files

We have two teacup Shih Tzus. >> Oh, wow. So, they're little tiny dogs. >> Yes, they're little tiny dogs and uh
they're very, very, very, very cute. >> What are their names? >> Oh, Peekabboo and Polo because my name
is Pette and my husband is Paul. So, all of our dogs have had P names. Peekaboo,
Polo, Pooie, Pompom with Pinky. My husband Siri just helped me on that one. >> Have you ever had a dog named Phoebe?
>> No, but that would sound too much like an F as opposed to a PH. >> Plet Cooper Noble is 76 years old and
lives in Palm Beach, Florida. She's been married to her husband Paul for 31 years. She's the author of 26 books and
she writes a weekly column for the Palm Beach Daily News. What is the column about?
>> Pets, dogs and cats. I take various local people who are wellknown and I do stories about them and they have to have
had a dog or a cat have to have one and I weave the dog or the cat into the story and it's called pet set people.
>> So that's the criteria. If you had you can't no matter how interesting you are,
if you do not have a pet, they won't you will not be in your column. >> No, because it's the pet column.
>> I could have asked her about pets at people all day long. I can never resist an animal story, but that's not why we
called Pette. We called to talk about something she pulled off a long time ago, something that seems impossible to
do today. In the 1960s, Pette was living in New York. She'd heard about a kid who'd been caught stowing away on a
cruise ship. She remembers telling her friends the story over drinks. The stowaway had been caught hiding.
Pette argued that the reason he'd gotten caught was because he was hiding. I had
read Edgar Allen Poe's The Perlloin Letter and I was intrigued by the fact that if somebody was looking for
something, it was better to have it out in the open. That's what they weren't going to look for.
>> Pette told her friends that if you wanted to take yourself on a free cruise, you should walk around the boat
like you were supposed to be there. She couldn't stop thinking about it and how she would go about it. And because maybe
she was a little drunk, Pette told her friends she would prove it. She was 28 years old. So I thought, well, if I
wanted to stow away on an ocean liner, the thing to do would be to be very conspicuous, not to be hiding, to wear
sexy clothes, to be very, very friendly, meet as many people as possible, and that was my goal, and that is what I
did. >> So you weren't you weren't going to be hiding behind a stack of ropes, eating
little crackers for your voyage? >> No, no, no. The idea was definitely not to hide.
>> She planned for months going to the library to find out about how other people had gotten away with it. She read
about a famous Hollywood restaurant tour who claimed to have stowed away a number
of times. Once sleeping with his dog in the dog's kennel and once dressing like a steward and carrying dirty laundry.
One German man had nailed himself inside a box marked household goods. He spent the whole journey inside the box without
a problem. But when the box was taken off the ship in New York, the cargo handlers dropped it and the man
screamed, "He was caught." Pette was not planning to get caught. She decided on a
cruise from New York City to the Caribbean and back 7 days. Her boat was called the Leonardo da Vinci. It was
1969. Neil Armstrong had just walked on the moon. The Brady Bunch premiered. Pette
says things were more quote casual then and she wanted to see what she could get
away with. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is criminal. Her first idea was to pretend she was
pregnant and to hide all of her clothes in a pillowcase under her dress. That idea didn't last long. So, she came up
with another idea. A friend of mine who had been in the army showed me how you could put a lot of clothes in a tiny
ataché case by folding everything in half, rolling it up and putting rubber bands on the ends and you could squeeze
a lot of things in. And I squeezed I did a a black and white mix and match wardrobe so that it would look like I
was wearing different things. So, I had that different clothes and I had a little bikini and I had a chiffon
evening gown. I was able to get in there and also I had my makeup, but everything
had been tremendously reduced. Uh they used to sell, maybe they still do something called 5day deodorant pads.
And I had broke off my toothbrush so that it was just the bristles and I had a tiny hairbrush that probably didn't
comb more than five strands at a time. And I did have long hair, so I was really set. She didn't want anyone to
try and convince her not to go through with her plan. So, she didn't tell anyone what she was about to do. But she
did have a dog that would need to be cared for while she was away. So, she asked her next door neighbor to watch
the dog for her. When the neighbor asked where she was going, Pette told her the
truth. The neighbor wished her luck, but didn't seem convinced at all that this plan would work. Plet's next step was to
decide on a fake name. I use the name Paula Madison because when you use a fake name, it should be as close as
possible to your real name so that if somebody calls you, you will turn around. And I lived right off of Madison
Avenue, so I thought that was a nice name. In those days, Pette says most cruise ships had a going away party
before they left the dock. friends and family of those going on the cruise could come and have a goodbye drink on
the boat before the ship set sail. Her plan was to walk right on like she was coming to say goodbye.
She says she got dressed up and went to the port of New York with her atache case, went up the visitors gang way and
boarded the ship. >> And then they started making announcements. They always make
announcements, you know, all ashore, who's going ashore, and I just stayed. She wandered around the ship, making
note of all the ladies bathrooms and eventually found a lounge in the lower level that didn't seem to be in use any
longer. And I took my atache case and I put it I opened up the piano and I put it in the piano figuring that nobody was
going to play that piano down there. If they did then they could have played the
funeral march for me because it really did sound like there was an attache case on the keys.
>> She figured she would kill time at the bar. But when she went back upstairs, all the bars were closed. She didn't
know where to go. She thought she would hide in one of the ladies rooms. They were all locked, too. Most likely to
prevent stowaways, just like her, from hiding out in them. If you were a passenger, you could just go to the
bathroom in your own cabin. Pette says she wandered around the boat and tried to look as relaxed as possible.
in those days. She says that if a stowaway was caught early enough, they would just put them on the tugboat that
was still attached to the ship, helping it navigate out to open water. But if you made it out far enough, you got to
stay. In 1929, a 20-year-old woman named Rose Host stowed away on a Panama Pacific
liner from New York City to California after getting into a fight with her father. She was found out, but too far
away from any piece of land to be kicked off the ship. When she was caught, she explained that she quote simply had to
get to Hollywood. Newspapers picked up her story, and when the ship reached San Diego, she promptly
got a role in a new film. In the late 1920s, lots of women were stowing away on ships, hoping to see the
world and maybe make themselves famous. In 1929, a reporter in Hawaii wrote, "Who are the flapper thrillsekers who
now run away to sea, usurping a prerogative once held solely by the boys?" But by the 60s, when Pette
boarded the Leonardo da Vinci, stowing away for fun, had gone out of fashion. The advent of air travel changed things,
and the ships themselves with their bars and parties had become a destination. And part of my plan was to stay in the
bar as the excuse for not going in the dining room. You know, people say, "Oh, come on. Let's go. Time for dinner or
whatever. Join me." And I say, "No, I'll have another drink." >> So you you're sitting there, you're
people are saying, "Come to dinner." Say, "No, I'll have another drink." >> Yeah. Not I'll see you later kind of
thing. >> But are you thinking, "Okay, the hours are passing by. Where am I going to
sleep tonight?" >> That was a big problem for the whole seven days, which was that I didn't have
very much sleep. I would take a glass, fill it with water as if it was all alcohol, put it on the end table so that
I looked like I had passed out. But then I couldn't do that until about 3:00 or 4 in the morning, till everybody
was gone. And then by 7 in the morning, even 6:00, people started wandering around on the ship. So I had to get up.
>> The problem of finding a place to sleep has always been solved in interesting
ways. In 1928, an Italian designer was asked to decorate a new ocean liner. While he did it, he created a secret
compartment so he could hide in it and go along for the first voyage. When the cabin was discovered, they found it had
electricity, a chair, a bed, and bottles of wine. Last year, an Australian cockatu flew
onto a cruise ship leaving Brisbane on its way to New Zealand. When crew members found the bird, they alerted New
Zealand authorities who told them the bird would have to be euthanized or contained before the ship could come
near any ports. They didn't want to euthanize it. So, the crew gave the cockatu its own cabin where the bird
spent the next 10 days. A crew member was assigned to cockatu watch 24 hours a day.
What happened that second day? You'd made it through the first night. You were out at sea.
>> I was very hungry. I had not eaten. I remember eating bar setups and uh I like olives, but how many
olives can you have? And also, I remember trying a lemon wedge and discovering that that was horrible.
Then there were the little onions and they were peanuts, you know. >> So, you were just eating like garnishes.
Exactly. That's all that there was. I certainly couldn't take any food in that ataché queso.
>> Plet's plan was to survive on the all you could eat buffets. She couldn't go into the dining room for
the formal dinners because she would have had to have a table assignment. But that first night, there had been no
buffet, just the formal welcome dinner. Do you remember that first lunch buffet?
>> Yes. I was famished. I mean, that's another thing I had to kind of be careful cuz you can't look as if you
haven't eaten in 2 days cuz everybody else has has been eating. So, you had to be sort of graceful about, you know, not
putting too much on your plate and eating slowly in order not to arouse suspicion.
>> Slowly, she started to get to know people at the bars. She says she was getting more confident. She began
participating in the ship's activities, trying to keep a low profile, but still having fun.
And then one day, she saw that there would be a pingpong contest. Pette is very good at pingpong. But I knew that I
would have to throw it. I mean, there was no way I could win the contest. And it was in the morning to sign up. And I
signed up, Paula Madison, and nobody else signed up. I went around the ship trying to find somebody else who would
join me. Nobody wanted to. So, I was declared the winner by default. And that was worrisome because then they
said, "Okay, you win a bottle of champagne and we will bring it to your table tonight." So, I said, "Well, I
don't drink champagne." They said, "Well, maybe your table mates will drink it." I said, "No, I don't want to do
anything for them." They said, "All right, well, we'll give you a picture of the ship inscribed with your name.
What's your cabin number?" So, I didn't know what to do. So, I said, "I'll pick it up." And, you know, I thought this
was sort of odd. And I hung around the social director's office almost all afternoon until finally they gave me a
picture of the ship, which turned out to be a wooden plaque with a picture of the
ship. So, I threw it overboard and somebody saw me do that and really thought, hm, this lady is very, very
odd. I'm sure I think a lot of things I did led people to think I was odd. But I'd rather they thought I was odd than
stowing away, right? >> What are some other things that you that you had to do that must have looked odd?
>> Well, the biggest problem I had is there were not a lot of women alone at all in
those days. And the biggest problem I ran into actually was the ship's doctor decided that he liked me and he went
after me and he wanted to, you know, to he insisted on walking me through my cabin. I had none. And in those days the
there was a big board and keys were metal and they hung you know people took their keys and opened up their doors. So
I saw that there was one, you know, key that had not been taken and I opened the
door saying this was my cabin. Bye-bye now. And he insisted on coming in. And I was very nervous because I looked down
and there was man's shoes were there and there was like toiletries there. And I obviously chosen a cabin of some man
that I was claiming was was my cabin. That takes a lot of courage to just grab a key from and just hope that hope
>> that the person wasn't in there. >> The person wasn't in there. >> Yeah. Well, if they were No, excuse me.
Wrong cabin. I had to do something. He was there. I bumped into him when I was, you know, like the last day or whatever.
And and he said, "Well, I hope to see you again." And I said, "Well, these ships are pretty expensive. You know,
I'm I'm not sure I can afford it." and he looked at me and he said, "Then why not stow away?" Well, you know, I think
all the color drained from my face. I couldn't tell whether he had caught on or not, you know? I mean, maybe he did
look up and find my name was not on the roster. Who knows? He didn't he didn't say anything. We just bye-bye kind of
thing. >> Were you able to take a shower? That was very difficult uh to take a shower
because I had my clothes. I couldn't really take my clothes off. What I did is I washed in the ladies room in a
ladies room that wasn't being used very much. But they had it was the towels were one of these roll
towels, you know what I mean? Not paper towels, but it rolled. And it was a little difficult for me because I only
5t tall. So, I didn't quite reach it. >> These oldfashioned things which kind of
just roll down from the wall as paper towels do now. >> Right. >> You can never take it away or take it
off. >> That's right. That's right. And you also can't dry yourself very low because it
doesn't reach very low. So, I had to stand there and kind of dry off a lot by, you know, the air while worrying
that somebody might come in. >> What about pool towels? Did you ever use one? No, but I did. One of the things I
had taken with me was one of these tiny little uh soaps and I tried once to bathe in the pool itself, but it it
bubbled. It bubbled. The little soap bubbled and it looked like I was, you'll pardon the expression, peeing in the
pool. What day three, day four, you're there in the bathroom. You're trying to take a shower in the bathroom. You're
Did you think I've had I've had an What? What kind of an idea was this? I think I thought that every minute like
>> But you were in it now. >> Too late. Too late. >> It's not like you can turn back. The
only option is to turn yourself in, >> right? Which I certainly was not going to do. I think by this point people
thought I was a very weird alcoholic >> today. Do you think that it would be nearly impossible for anyone to stow
away or would you commend anyone who did it? Yes, because nowadays everybody the
people are very uptight. They're very nervous. They there's constant security. There's also constant cameras every
place. It would be, you know, so easy to to look things up and no, it's completely different. And nobody would
treat it as a lark, which is what it really was. It was like, "Hey, this is a crazy zany thing to do, but you're a
crazy zany young girl, so go ahead and do it." It would not have been that kind of situation.
Plet's 7-day journey on the Leonardo da Vinci made two stops, Puerto Rico and St. Thomas.
She chose this cruise specifically because she wouldn't have to deal with a passport like she would have on a
transatlantic voyage. When the ship docked in St. Thomas, she decided to get off for a few hours and enjoy herself.
>> I wonder when you got off and had your feet on firm ground and St. Thomas, did
you think, "Oh god, I've got to go back and risk it all again. I made a history.
>> Yeah, cuz you're you're lying in the sun and it it feels so good and you're on a
beach chair and you can finally sleep and you don't have to worry for a few hours that anybody's going to ask a
question. You can't answer that anybody's going to catch you. It was just very, very relaxing. But I did have
to go back. I had to get home. >> She managed the rest of the trip without too much incident. 7 days to the
Caribbean and back. Pette says by the end of the cruise, the other people on the ship were wary of her. This woman
who'd passed out on the couches every night and ate a lot of garnishes. But she was thrilled she'd done it
without even coming close to getting caught. On the final day, she went down to the lower lounge, retrieved her bag
from its hiding place in the piano, and watched the ship pull into New York Harbor.
Everybody was getting off and that was when there was immigration and I didn't know what to do and I had
thought I'll hide in a cabin but the cabins had been locked and they were cleaning and they were closed and
that was the only time I went to a room steward who was cleaning and I said I'm not feeling well I need to lie down for
a little while close the door so by the time I got off it 3 or 4 hours later and the customs
people had cleared everybody. So my job was simply to walk off the ship, although that's the point at which I
came the closest to getting caught. >> Tell me what happened. >> Well, what happened was that it was at
New York. It was very cold. I had not been able to stow away a, you know, any kind of a fur coat or any warm coat. And
I stood there just shivering to death. There were no taxis. I was trying to decide how to get home. Thought I had
made it. Everything was fabulous. And at that point, a sort of a police type car
pulled up and there were three or four security guards and they asked me if I had been on that
ship and I said yes. And they said, "Where's your luggage?" And I said, "I had a fight with my
boyfriend." and he took it and went to his place and they said, "Well, where do you live?" And at that time I lived at
16 East 80th Street and they said, "Oh, that's not too far. We'll give you a ride.
I was driven home by the security guards and when we pulled up to my place, I said, "Well, you know, thank you very
much." And they said, "Aren't you going to invite us in for a drink?" Of course,
it was about 11:00 in the morning, but I said, "All right." And as I walked into
my little brownstone, the woman who was taking care of the dog, my neighbor friend, she saw me with these
three huge security men and I knew what she was thinking and I mouththed her, "Don't say one
word." Because I was so afraid she'd say something like, "Oh, I knew you'd be caught or I knew you wouldn't get away
with this," whatever. And she just looked at me quizzically and I invited the men in and I gave them everything
was hard liquor in those days in the morning and we chatted. Not really but you know for a little while they had
their drinks and then they left. >> Did things seem more possible in 1969 than they do today?
>> Did what seem more possible? cruises >> things, you know, I cast stowing away on
a ship, inviting security guards up for some, you know, whiskey at 10:00 a.m. >> That's That's I think by then it was 11,
but that's all right. Yes. No, I mean, I think things were much much more casual.
They really were. >> Do you still go on cruises? >> Constantly. In fact, uh I just came back
from uh a transatlantic voyage. I'm going on a short one in September. When you get on a new ship, each each time
you're about to set off, do you kind of case it for how you'd take this one on if you were stowing away?
>> Well, you know, you kind of notice how many pianos there are. Criminal is created by Lauren Spore and
me. Nia Wilson is our senior producer. Audio mix by Rob Buyers. Special thanks to Susanna Robertson. You know the thing
about a a teacup Shih Tzu. Now that'd be a good dog to stow away. >> Yes. Yes. Yes. That would be
>> Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at
thisiscriminal.com or on Facebook and Twitter criminal show. That'd be an easy one to just slip
in your bag. Well, they're good dogs for stowing away because they don't bark very much.
>> Back in 1969, Pette Cooper wrote about stowing away for Cosmopolitan magazine.
You can find a link to her piece and information about her 26 books and her pet column at pletcooper.com.
Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio WUNC. We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a
collection of the best podcasts around. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. You know, that must have taken a lot of
nerve for you to walk onto that cruise ship. Do you think the fact that you did it successfully has helped you carry
that nerve through the rest of your life? No, I think that the older I've gotten, the more chicken I've gotten, I
if I if I look at a travel brochure and it has the word panorama on it, I immediately become ill. I'm really not I
don't ski. In fact, I don't like height. I don't like speed. I don't like cold. The only way I would ski would be
indoors, slowly uphill. But basically, no. I I don't think it changed me in any way.
That's not the answer you wanted, but that's the truth. >> Well, the truth is good enough.
>> Radiotopia >> from PRX.

One day in 1969, Paulette Cooper decided to see what she could get away with.

Learn more about Paulette Cooper on her website (http://paulettecooper.com/). Here’s her 1969 Cosmopolitan piece about stowing away onboard the SS Leonardo da Vinci (http://www.oceanliner.org/stow_away.htm).

Criminal is a show about people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle. Hosted by Phoebe Judge. Part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

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Episode 118 originally published July 5, 2019. https://thisiscriminal.com/episode-118-stowaway-7-5-2019/

Music in this episode: “That's Alright” by Podington Bear “Cumaribo” by Blue Dot Sessions “Hedgeliner” by Blue Dot Sessions “Crumpet” by Blue Dot Session “The Cornice” by Blue Dot Sessions “Trois Gnossiennes” by Blue Dot Sessions “Airliner” by Podington Bear “Violet” by Podington Bear

Brief Summary

Pette Cooper recounts her 1969 stowaway adventure on a cruise ship, detailing her planning and experiences aboard.

Key points

Pette's Pet Column. Pette writes a column about pets and their owners, weaving their stories together.
The Stowaway Plan. Pette shares her audacious plan to stow away on a cruise ship.
The Close Call. Pette nearly gets caught by security upon returning to New York.
Stowing Away on a Cruise. A humorous reflection on the casualness of past adventures, including inviting security guards for drinks.
The Nerve to Travel. An introspective moment about how past bravery contrasts with current fears.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

I couldn't stop thinking about it and how I would go about it.

Pette's thoughts on stowing away

2:32WatchJun 23, 2026

Tension

70/ 100High tension

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