The Pan Am Podcast

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Episode 48: Four Generations in the Sky: The Archer Family Story Jul 07, 2024

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In this episode we celebrate the Archer’s...a family of aviators.

89-year-old Pan Am Captain Stu Archer joined the airline in 1965 as an engineer after serving in the U.S. Air Force. Stu began flying the 727 and then was promoted to captain on the 747 and later Airbus A300 and A310. He stayed with Pan Am until 1991 and then went on to work for Delta Air Lines as a captain.

When he reached the then mandatory retirement age of 60 after three years as a Delta captain, he successful took the company to court forcing the airline to keep him as an engineer and worked for another seven years before retiring in 2000. Many credit his lawsuit as one of the reasons the mandatory age was raised to 65.

Stu credits his uncle, Lawerence Archer, as his aviation inspiration. Born in 1903, Lawerence was one of the early pilots trained by the Wright Brothers and was the first person to deliver mail by air in New England. Uncle Lawerence took Stu on his very first flight in a single engine, open air cockpit bi-wing plane when he was six years old and this forever changed the trajectory of his life.

Lawerence Archer gave his life in service to his country in 1945 during World War II serving in the U.S. Army Air Corps.

Stu’s daughter Deborah Archer joined Pan Am as a flight attendant in 1979 and worked for the airline until the end in 1991. Afterward, she hung up her wing and became a nurse. She sadly passed away in 2009.

Stu’s son, Captain Jeffery Archer followed in his father’s footsteps and became a pilot for American Airlines in 1991 and became captain in 1995.

And now his grandson, Stephen Archer, Jeffery’s son, carries on the family legacy started by his great-uncle and was recently been promoted to Captain with Envoy Air, a subsidiary of American Airlines.
All three of these captains will be joining us to talk about their passion for flying and careers in aviation.

A special thank you to American Airlines for allowing Jeff and Stephen to participate in this interview.

If you are thinking about starting a career in aviation and want to be a pilot for American Airlines, visit the AA Cadet Academy.

The Pan Am Museum also encourages you to visit the American Airlines CR Smith Museum in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. This museum is named after aviation pioneer and former President of American Airlines, Cyrus Rowlett Smith and has been open since 1993.

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A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support!

Episode 47: The "Nisei" Stewardesses of Pan Am May 01, 2024

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The Pan Am Museum Foundation recognizes the month of May as Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and in this episode we explore the history of Pan Am’s “Nisei” Stewardesses with Dr. Christine R. Yano, retired professor of anthropology at the University of Hawai’I and author of the book, Airbourne Dreams: “Nisei” Stewardesses and Pan American World Airways.
This book is the story of an unusual personnel program implemented by an American corporation intent on expanding and dominating the nascent market for international air travel. That program reflected the Jet Age dreams of global mobility that excited postwar Americans, as well as the inequalities of gender, class, race, and ethnicity that constrained many of them.
The Japanese word “Nisei” means second generation Japanese American.
In 1955, Pan Am began recruiting Japanese American women to work as stewardesses on its Tokyo-bound flights and for the airline’s celebrated round-the-world flights. Based in Honolulu, these women were informally known as Pan Am’s “Nisei” stewardesses, even though not all of them were Japanese American or even second-generation. They were hired for their Japanese-language skills, but in reality…few spoke Japanese fluently.
However, the main reason for the hiring of these women was to enhance the airline’s image of exotic cosmopolitanism and worldliness as the iconic American company pioneered new frontiers of race, language, and culture. These young women left home to travel the globe with Pan Am, forging their own cosmopolitan identities in the process.
In 2014, Chantelle Rose Acorda, Kim Nguyen, and Jasmine Pigford made a well-done student film and interviewed Hawaii state senator Glenn S. Wakai and Pan Am veterans Ailenn Sodetani and Mae Takahashi.
The Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii produced a short educational film, Pan Am Ambassadors, with interviews of Pan Am "Nisei" stewardesses.

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Episode 46: Capt. Mike Bannister, Chief Pilot of British Airways Concorde Mar 14, 2024

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In this episode we welcome back to the program Captain Mike Bannister, the chief pilot of British Airways' Concorde fleet from 1995 to 2003.
He is also the author of a recently published book titled Concorde. This book is available through your favorite bookstore or online retailer.
Also coming out to great fanfare in 2023 was a special Lego set of the Concorde designed to be built by adults. This special detailed replica from Lego of the world’s most famous supersonic commercial passenger airplane gives builders an immersive project that takes creativity to new heights.
To learn more about Super Sonic Transports or SSTs for short, listen to Episode 7: Supersonic Transports, An Angry JFK, and Flying the Line after this installment. In that episode we explored the race for the first passenger supersonic aircraft between a British and French partnership, the United States, and the Soviet Union.
This episode is also a direct follow up to Episode 19: Concorde where we explore the fascinating history of Concorde and interview three special guests:

Jetliner Cabins author Jennifer Coutts Clay who was Pan Am’s general manager for product design and development and before that worked on the Concorde project for British Airways.
John Lampl, a veteran executive of British Airways who worked for the Concorde program the entire 27 years of passenger service and a total of 41 years for BA.
And of course Captain Bannister was interviewed in that epsidoe. Again, if you haven’t heard Episode 19 already, we encourage you to listen after this installment.
Captain Mike Bannister joined BOAC, British Airways predecessor, in 1969 as a pilot and flight navigator on the Vickers VC-10 fleet. He joined the Concorde flight crew in 1977 becoming the fleet’s youngest pilot. In 1995 he became the chief pilot of British Airways Concorde program until the retirement of the aircraft in 2003.
Captain Bannister accumulated around 9,600 Concorde flight hours with almost 7,000 of which were supersonic.

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A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support!

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Episode 45: National Airlines Feb 20, 2024

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Pan American World Airways acquired National Airlines in 1980 and preserving the history of National is now the responsibility of the Pan Am Museum and we take this duty seriously.
In this episode we explore the fascinating history of National Airlines. Then we will be joined by four veterans of National Airlines: Captain Roy Berube and flight attendants Fran Smith Boros, David Hinson, and Mari Bacon.
Captain Roy Berube was never a stranger to aviation. His father was an airline pilot and Roy began flying at an early age. He joined National Airlines as a pilot in 1956 at age 19. In his career he has been a line pilot, check pilot, instructor, test pilot, and union rep. Just before Pan Am ceased operations, Captain Berube was transferred to United Airlines mainly flying the 747. He retired from United in the late 1990s and now resides in Buffalo, New York with his wife Sharon.
His other passion other than flying is music both composing and playing. Roy is a very talented musician and even has a YouTube channel where you can hear him play!

Mari Bacon joined National Airlines in 1976 as a flight attendant. After Pan Am ceased operations, Mari hung up her wings and started a successful career in nonprofit leadership and management. Today, she resides in Fort Lauderdale and enjoys crafting, being back in Florida, watching her ‘grand dogs’ and meeting up with old friends.

She and others have organized a luncheon event every 2-3 months open to all Pan Am and National former flight attendants, who enjoy reminiscing and catching up with old friends.
David Hinson joined National Airlines in 1977 as a flight attendant. After Pan Am, he transferred to Delta Air Lines in 1991 and hung up his wings in 1997 to start his own company. That company is called David Jeffery Designs, a wholesaler and retailer of unique handbags, mobile bags, coin bags, wallets, jewelry and accessories. And he has many Pan Am items! He resides in Atlanta, Georgia and continues to travel the world, especially India.
Fran Smith Boros was born and raised in Miami and joined National Airlines in 1976 as a flight attendant. After Pan Am closed down, Fran married her attorney husband and assisted him with his legal work. She also earned her real estate license and started a new career. Today Fran and her husband are retired and live in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She’s also close personal friends and neighbors with legendary newsman Sam Donaldson and his wife. Fran helped us get an interview with Sam and we encourage you to listen to Episode 36 after listening to this installment.

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Episode 44: Capt. Robert Ford and the Long Way Home Jan 07, 2024

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In this special episode we will be exploring the incredible life of Pan Am Captain Robert Ford, a trailblazing flying boat aviator that found international fame with an unscheduled flight round the globe. And we welcome back to the program Pan Am 747 Captain John Marshall that knew Pan Am legend Captain Robert Ford and recorded an interview with him in 1994 shortly before he died.
Excerpts of this rare interview are played and you will get to hear the actual voice of Captain Ford talking about his aviation career in the late 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s!
In December of 1941, Captain Ford was ferrying mail and passengers from San Francisco to New Zealand aboard a Pan Am Boeing 314 flying boat named the Pacific Clipper.
On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor and Captain Ford was ordered to evade the enemy and prevent the Japanese from capturing the aircraft for its technology. Skirting the trouble zone and watching for enemy aircraft, he headed the flying boat west over Australia, India and Central Africa, then crossed to South America, eventually making a safe landing at the Marine Terminal at what is now La Guardia Airport in New York on Jan. 6, 1942.
The entire trip covered 31,500 miles in 209.5 hours of flying time, some of it over war territory. The Clipper had a range of 4,500 miles, and its longest single flight was 3,583 miles across the South Atlantic from Central Africa, to Brazil. Captain Ford, who was then 35 at the time, called his round-the-world flight "a purely routine operation."
Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1906, Captain Robert Ford earned his wings as a naval aviator before joining Pan American Airways in 1933. He flew Pan Am’s routes in Central and South American, as well as, the Caribbean before transferring to the Atlantic division in 1939, flying Clippers between New York and Lisbon. He shifted to the Pacific route in July 1941. Before his round-the-globe journey, he had completed some 50 flights across the two oceans.
After retiring in 1952 from Pan Am, Captain Ford became a cattle rancher in Penn Valley, California, north of Sacramento. He died in October of 1994 at the age of 88. At the time of his death, he had been a rancher for 45 years.
Special thanks to Captain John Marshall, board member of the Pan Am Museum Foundation, for allowing this program to use his 1994 interview with Captain Ford.

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Episode 43: Terror at the Rome Airport, December 1973 Attack Dec 15, 2023

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This is a special memorial edition of this program and recognizes the 50th anniversary of the Rome airport attack. We are joined by two survivors that were on a Pan Am plane that was firebombed at the Rome airport on December 17, 1973: Pan Am Flight Engineer Ken Pfrang and Pan Am passenger B.J. Geisler.
B.J. is the author of the recently published book, Terror on Pan Am Flight 110.
This episode is a follow up to "Episode 6: Hijackings and the Dawn of Global Terrorism." If you haven’t heard this episode, we encourage you to do so after listening to this installment.
In order to understand the gravity of global terrorism throughout the 1970s and 1980s, it is important to examine the 1967 six day war between Israel and neighboring Arab countries, the September 1970 hijacking of four airplanes all bound for United States, as a direct result of those hijacking…the subsequent Jordanian civil war also known as Black September(Sep. 1970- Jul. 1971), and the Munich Olympic attacks in 1972. These topics are discussed in Episode 6.
In the early afternoon of Monday, December 17, 1973 at Rome’s Leonardo Da Vinci Airport, a Pan Am Boeing 707, registration number N407PA, named Clipper Celestial was getting ready for departure with 53 passengers onboard and nine crew members.
At around 12:51 local time, five members of a radical Palestinian terrorist group pulled out weapons from their luggage in the airport terminal lounge and opened fire killing two people. They then ran out of the terminal on the tarmac and then attacked the Pan Am jet by running up the boarding stairs of the front and rear doors and threw three hand grenades inside the plane.
A total of 29 persons, including 4 senior Moroccan officials and 17 ARAMCO employees and family members were killed on the aircraft. Passenger Bonnie Presnell died later at the hospital with severe burns bringing the total killed from the attack on the Pan Am plane to 30.
We remember them…
The Pan Am Employees and Family:
Diana Perez, Purser; Lambert Tununga, Pan Am Catering; Bonnie Erbeck, wife of Captain Andrew Erbeck
Members of the Moroccan government:
Inani Abdelatif, Moroccan state secretary for economic planning; Mounlr Doukkali, Moroccan undersecretary of state for youth and sports; Mohammad Lazrak, general secretary at the Moroccan Ministry of Commerce and Industry; Mekki Zailacpii, attaché to the Moroccan Premier’s Office
ARAMCO Employees and Family
Muriel Berka, Henrietta Echmenn, Robert Ghormley, Charles Walker Heywood, Clarence Hildebrand, Thelma Hildebrand, Pamela Julavitis, Emily Kempf, Jane Kirby, Mary Martin, Bonnie Presnell, Edith Roundtree, Russell Turner, Mary Wamp, Margaret Wilson, Miss Wouters of Belgium
Additional Passengers
Giuliano DeAngelis, an employee of Alitalia, his wife Emma, and 9-year-old daughter Monica; Miss Filipe of Portugal; Raffaele Narcisco, an Italian mining expert; Miss Rodrigues of Portugal; A. Zietteman of South Africa

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Episode 42: Operation Babylift: The 1975 Saigon Evacuation Nov 21, 2023

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In this episode we explore Operation Babylift, the historic April 1975 evacuation of more than 3,000 Vietnamese war orphans just before the fall of South Vietnam.

We are joined by Thoa Bui, Vice President of Programs and Services for Holt International and Al Topping, Pan Am’s Country Director for South Vietnam.
This episode is a follow up to Episode 4: Evacuation of Saigon, Wings of Freedom Mission. If you haven’t heard that installment, we encourage you to do so after listening to this episode.
Operation Babylift was directed by U.S. President Gerald R. Ford in the final days of South Vietnam shortly before the country fell in 1975.
Pan American World Airways sent two Boeing 747 jumbo jets, one charted by Holt International and the other by American businessman Robert Macauley, to assist in the evacuation.
On April 24, 2022, the Pan Am Museum partnered with Holt International and hosted a 47th anniversary celebration. In attendance were two dozen babies, now adults, and their families. They were re-united with three Pan Am flight attendants on their flights and Al Topping. Bringing these groups together for this special humanities program demonstrated the massive positive impact this one historical event had on generations of people to this day. Watch the video from this incredible event in the episode description.
In future episodes we plan on exploring the stories of the children, now adults, of Operation Babylift and the Pan Am flight attendants that cared for them on those historic flights.
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Thoa Bui is Licensed Master Social Worker and serves as Vice President of Programs and Services for Holt International. She implements Holt’s vision and strategic leadership to ensure growth in Holt’s programs for vulnerable children in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the U.S.
Pan Am veteran Al Topping is the author of the book, “Wings of Freedom: A True Story,” about his incredible experience in Saigon. Purchase Al's book from the Museum’s online store.
In 1990, NBC made a movie out of Al’s story called Last Flight Out starring James Earl Jones, Richard Crenna, and Rosliand Chao. Watch the full movie on our YouTube channel!

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Episode 41: The Stewardess Labor Movement of the 1960s and 1970s Sep 28, 2023

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In this episode we are joined by Nell McShane Wulfhart, author of the book The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet.
Nell is a frequent contributor to the New York Times travel section and wrote the column “Carry On” from 2016 to 2019. She has written for Travel + Leisure, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, and T Magazine. She is also the author of the Audible Original Off Menu.
Her recent work, The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet, is a book about how as travel in the jet age became more and more popular in the 1960s, women from across America applied for jobs as stewardesses.
They were drawn to the promise of glamour, the chance to travel, and as an alternative to traditional occupations for women of this time period like homemaking, nursing, and teaching. But as the number of stewardesses grew, so did their suspicion that the job was not as picture-perfect as the ads would have them believe, including some of their supervisors spying on their personal lives (thankfully this was not the practice of Pan Am or TWA).
These women had to adhere to strict weight limits at all times. If they gained a few extra pounds, they were suspended from work. For many airlines, stewardesses couldn’t marry or have children or risk losing their employment. Requirements for hair styles and makeup had to be followed and was strictly enforced and girdles were mandatory at all times. It was also common for most domestic airlines that stewardesses had to resign by age 32.
In the latter half of the 1960s, stewardesses began to push back against their employers creating an employment movement that changed the industry. Nell Mchane Wulfhart crafts a rousing narrative of female empowerment, the paradigm-shifting 1960s and 1970s, the labor movement, and the cadre of gutsy women who fought for their rights and won.
Gloria Steinem said of Nell’s book, “the true story of women who stood up to huge corporations and won, creating momentous change for all working women.”
The Pan Am Museum’s high school intern Michael Gentner assisted with this interview as guest co-host.

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Episode 40: Tom Betti and a Rock Song About History Aug 18, 2023

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In this episode we are turning the tables…the interviewee becomes the interviewer. Guest host Phillip Keene interviews the host of The Pan Am Podcast, historian Tom Betti to bring our listeners his story. Phillip is a podcast guest in episodes 18, 29, and 30.

This program is marking a milestone as this is the 40th episode and the beginning of season three.
Tom Betti is dedicated to bringing history to life through entertaining and engaging storytelling. Although having a career in public service and government work for over 20 years, history has always been his constant passion.

He currently serves on the board of the Pan Am Museum Foundation with Phillip and has co-authored five books on Columbus, Ohio history. His latest book, written with his mentor Doreen Uhas Sauer, is titled Forgotten Landmarks of Columbus.
Since 2006, Tom co-leads various local history tours and educational programing with Doreen where he always brings dry humor and wit, but also makes learning about history engaging and fun. He works closely as a professional partner with the Columbus Metropolitan Library on neighborhood tours, special events, and presentations…and has been a guest on WOSU Public Media.
In addition, he is an active member of the 501st Legion volunteer organization, a LucasFilm affiliate, providing screen accurate Star Wars character appearances to charities and good causes like children hospitals, libraries, hospice centers, and museums. To learn more, watch this video.
To watch the education video of "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel, click here.
Tom earned a Master of Arts in History from Norwich University and lives in the historic Hartman Hotel Building in Columbus, Ohio with his pug, Roosevelt.

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Episode 39: Madeline Smith and a Romance in the Sky Jul 30, 2023

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In this episode we are joined by 98-year-old Madeline Smith and her daughter Valerie Smith O’Grady Skinner.
Both were Pan Am flight attendants…Madeline joined the airline right after the war in 1946 and Valerie, following in her mother’s footsteps, joined the company in 1977.
Madeline was a stewardess until 1951 when she resigned to marry the love of her life. But although personally leaving Pan Am’s employment, the airline was still an important part of her family as her new husband was a Pan Am pilot named Charles Smith. The two met on an overseas working trip and were inseparable, marrying only six months after they met. Captain Smith passed away in 1989.
Valerie stayed with the company until the end in 1991 where she was hired by Delta and would continue flying for almost two decades.

Today, Madeline is still a force to be reckoned with. At 98 years young…a typical day for Madeline is playing nine holes of golf, an hour of tennis, kayaking, and then walking two miles!

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