The Kettles were neighbors of Betty and Robert Heskett. Betty married Bob in 1927 and they moved to a chicken farm in the Chimacum Valley on the Olympic Peninsula. Betty and Bob had two little girls, but Bob's alcoholism and abuse caused Betty to take the girls and leave in 1931. She eventually (as Betty MacDonald, after marrying Donald Macdonald) wrote "The Egg and I," a humorous rendering of her life as a chicken farmer. She portrays the Kettles as uneducated, crude, slovenly, and having a casual moral sense. The book was made into a movie, and the Kettles were spun off into a serious of films in which they are portrayed as naive and unsophisticated as they are placed in one unfamiliar situation or another.

I don't think a Kettle is necessarily an economy class traveler. In addition, I do not think of Kettle as a pejorative. So somebody is an inexperienced traveler, so what. I've said before that "elites" fly because they have to; "Kettles" fly for pleasure. An "elite" is somebody worrying about getting into Comfort (on Delta) so he can drink alcohol out of a plastic cup on a flight to Des Moines. A "Kettle" drinks in a bar in Rio, and maybe plays "The Girl from Ipanema" while the piano player is taking a break.