Sue Ling Gin 8/12 | Asian American Wonder Women

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n 1985 Gin was 44, McGowan was 57. By then there was no prospect of having children, but the couple decided the time had come to make their relationship legal. They wed in a ceremony so hush-hush that some friends and associates didn't learn about it until the following year when they made an official announcement and threw two back-to-back parties, one each in Washington and Chicago.

     Within a year, however, the festivities seemed to belong to another lifetime. McGowan suffered a massive heart attack that ultimately required him to receive a heart transplant. The decades-long battle against the industry goliath had taken its toll. It was many months before McGowan returned to work as MCI chairman. When he did, he began delegating most of his day-to-day duties as a hedge against looming mortality.

     While McGowan was winding down his career, his wife was cranking up hers. The Midway Airlines contract made Flying Food Fare one of Chicago's most visible minority-owned businesses. What's more, Midwayšs boom in passenger volume meant rapid growth for Flying Food Fare. That first flush of success and her marriage to Bill McGowan made Gin the golden girl of the Chicago business community. Suddenly, her name was eminently droppable. The happy patter of the long string of social recognitions began on May 30, 1985 when she was honorably mentioned at the Second Annual Pacesetter Awards presented by the Roundtable for Women in Foodservice. It grew louder on August 14, 1987 when she was one of three named to the board of Chicago Capital Fund, newly created to invest in small businesses looking to expand.

     By then Sue Ling Gin was known to own three restaurants--Cafe Bernard, Halsted Street Fish Market and Chicago Baking Company--and a real estate management and development firm called New Management. In addition, of course, was her prospering FFF which by early 1988 was serving 6,000 meals a day just on Midway Airlines flights.

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That spring Gin's keen political instincts became a matter of public record. For two years she had been vying for the food and beverage concession at Midway Airport. Shrewdly, she forged an alliance with four other local minority businesses to bid on the contract. Three of the four would each get 5% of the concession. The fourth, a hastily-formed corporation owned by several Chicago Housing Authority tenants, would get 15%. Flying Food Fare, the lead contractor, would get 70%. Awarding the concession to their group, the bid argued, would encourage initiative and promote employment among CHA's poor, mostly minority tenants. No question who had masterminded the bid. It won, giving Flying Food Fare the lion's share of the five-year $42 million contract to run the airport's 22 snack concessions.

In late October Sue Ling Gin was the only woman named among a dozen businesspeople who formed the Navy Pier Development Authority to create a major commercial and entertainment complex. Within months Gin was elected to the board of Michigan National Bank. By August, 1990 Gin's growing visibility inspired a Tribune article about Flying Food Fare's success in expanding into O'Hare International in August 1988, then to the airports in Seattle and Minneapolis. It listed among FFF's clients Air France, Belgium's Sabena, Poland's LOT, Spain's Iberia and the luxury American-European Express trains running from Chicago to New York and Washington. Italy's Alitalia, the article concluded, would be added to FFF's client list by October. PAGE 9

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