Traute Gleeson

Long time Glendale resident Traute Gleeson has passed away after a years long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. Traute has lived with her husband Gene in a home in the Verdugo Woodlands since 1983. She was born Traute Hildebrandt in Hamburg, Germany in 1946. She grew up in an apartment next to a rail yard. Her father was an engineer and the neighborhood was populated with families of Bundesbahn workers, many of them Traute’s aunts and uncles. They traveled by train every summer to Bavaria for vacations in the Alps and the journeys must have sparked a love of travel. In her late teens, Traute left Hamburg and moved to Henley on Thames, England to work as a family Au Pair. She wanted to experience the land of the Beatles and perfect her English. She returned to Germany in 1966 and signed with Lufthansa as a flight attendant. In her brief career in the air, she helped inaugurate flights to Nairobi, Kenya and Kampala, Uganda. And, she was called out of stand-by to escort race car driver Jim Clark’s body back to Scotland after a crash at Hockenheim Raceway. Her airline career however swerved off course a year later when she met Gene Gleeson who was serving in the US Army at Armed Forces Radio in Frankfurt. He was so smitten that he took a European discharge and stayed in Germany another year to be close to Traute. They married in Frankfurt in June, 1969 and moved to San Diego so Gene could finish his studies at San Diego State. Gene traded radio for TV News in 1970, while Traute worked in Travel. She owned her own agency, ‘The Travel Shop’ in Del Mar until the couple moved north to LA. In 1983 she was reunited with Lufthansa, working a series of ground jobs until she retired in 2003. In between she worked for Japan Airlines while Gene attended grad school in New York, and a stint at Air France in LA. Needless to say, the couple have traveled the world. Gene likes to joke, ‘she got free tickets for our honeymoons in Majorca and Greece and one-way tickets back to the US, and she’s been getting us free tickets ever since.’ Along the way they have developed close friendships with people all over the world. The couple had no children of their own. Traute is survived by her husband, two sisters in law, Betty Driscoll of Paso Robles and Mary Ann Stalder of Riverside, an assortment of nieces and nephews, and lot’s of cousins in Germany. 

Her memorial service will be held at Forest Lawn in Glendale on Friday November 8th at 1:30 PM.