01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, February 25, 2004

By ROBERT HIGGINS
Special to The Journal

Who would have thought that the country's best known customer service agent was once afraid to fly?

Fall River native Mike Carr, 43, is a "star" of Airline, A&E Network's reality show that shows the inner workings of Southwest Airlines. The program, which airs locally on Mondays (10 and 10:30 p.m.), documents life at Southwest's Los Angeles and Chicago terminals.

For the last 10 years, Carr has been a Southwest customer service supervisor in Los Angeles. He likes his job, and he said he likes showing the TV audience "the daily challenges all airline employees deal with every day."

Some of the "challenges" have been real eye-rollers.

In one episode, an elderly man suffering from Alzheimer's disease soils himself, and Carr, equipped with plastic gloves, offers to clean the traveler up before he and his wife board a Phoenix-bound plane.

Carr's humane handling of the situation caused the A&E Web site to be choked with positive calls. "I'd never received such enthusiastic response," he said. "People were moved to tears."

In another episode, a passenger without a ticket boards a plane with just a boarding pass. It's up to Carr to remove him from the plane. It turns out that Carr figures out that the guy, attempting a con, never had a ticket.

In other shows, airline personnel assist a late-arriving Chinese couple attempting to make a tight connection to Beijing; ask an oversize passenger to purchase an additional seat; and deny seats to a musician with a ticket who is drunk and another ticketed passenger with intolerable body odor.

Being a reality show, none of the episodes is staged, said Carr. The incidents are filmed as they happen. An A&E film crew continuously hangs out with Carr, as well as other airline employees).

"I'm on a radio all day," Carr said. "I'm told that at such-and-such a gate, this-or-that is going on. I go over to see if I can rectify the problem -- and the film crew follow."

The crew stick to him like Elmer's glue.

"If I went on a break, they went on a break," he said. "They're in my face eight hours all day, waiting for something to happen. At first, it was unnerving." But after a while he became oblivious to the crew, he said.

Carr said that his job as a customer service supervisor calls for him to put out small fires before they become infernos. "I'm a supervisor," he said. "If a passenger isn't happy, they call me in."

An episode called "High Spirits," which aired a few weeks ago, turned out to be special to Carr. In it, he announced that he is gay.

Carr and other Southwest employees were on their way to a company shindig in Oakland. Seated next to Carr was Ethan, whom Carr introduced as his boyfriend. He explained: "I'd never done anything like that, so it was a pretty big step for me. But I'm 42, going to 43. I can't be concerned anymore what people are going to think."

Filming the 18 episodes of the series started last June and ended around Christmas. A&E and Southwest are negotiating for a second season.

Carr is the son of the late Louis T., a construction worker, and Vilma Carr. He has five brothers (a sixth is deceased), and one sister.

At 16, he took his first job making sandwiches and subs at D'Angelo on Canning Boulevard. He was a freshman at B.M.C. Durfee High School at the time, where he was on the wrestling team.

It's a sport he thought he was pretty good at -- if a little on the light side. I weighed 107," he said. "But I made them put 144 on my jacket because I didn't want people to know how thin I was."

At Durfee, Carr was half-interested in dramatics. "I helped out in productions,' he said. "I couldn't sing. Still can't."

But, apparently, he could dance -- and did so in Fiddler on the Roof.

After high school, Carr harbored an ambition to go on a game show or a soap opera. "I wanted to get on TV and that seemed to easiest way to do it," he explained.

He left Durfee in his senior year, before graduation, but earned a high school equivalancy from Bristol Community College. Then he served in the Navy for four years. "I asked the Navy to station me in California, which I knew was the entertainment capital. But, instead, they stuck me in Newport."

But he still wanted to give California a go. "I knew Fall River would always be there if I wanted to come home," he said.

In 1985, Carr decided to go to the Golden State. But he didn't fly there. He had a fear of flying.

"I was definitely a white-knuckle flyer," he said. He traveled to Los Angeles via Greyhound. "It took me four days and four nights."

Later, in California, he cured his fear by skydiving out of a Cessna. "After the initial terror, I felt a wonderful serenity."

During his first six months on the West Coast, Carr, after a lot of waiting around, landed a spot as a contestant on the CBS game show Card Sharks.

"It didn't require a lot of intelligence," he recalled. "Just better luck."

Carr's luck was more than just OK. He walked off with $10,000. "Actually, it was $9,640," he said. Either way, it was a nice nest egg.

Starting at 24, Carr worked as a bartender and waiter at a Los Angeles Mexican eatery, and in 1993, joined Southwest Airlines in an entry-level position at $6.40 a hour.

"Within 10 months I was a supervisor," he said, "which increased my salary nicely."

Since Airline started airing, Carr has received a goodly mount of fan mail. "At first, I was taken aback by it," he said. " Now I feel honored that people want to share their struggles with me."

He's also been spotted by fans.

"I was in a buffet line in Las Vegas recently when a woman came up to me and said, 'Oh, my God, it's you! My husband will be so jealous that I saw you!' And she was in tears."

"When things like that happen, it's a real shock," he said. "And terribly flattering."