Julia Cooke - Come Fly the World

Copyright 2021 by Julia Cooke

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cooke, Julia, author.

Title: Come fly the world : the jet-age story of the women of Pan Am / Julia Cooke.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020034163 (print) | LCCN 2020034164 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358251408 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358448990 | ISBN 9780358449355 | ISBN 9780358251385 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Pan American World Airways, Inc.History. | Pan American World Airways, Inc.EmployeesBiography. | Flight attendantsUnited StatesHistory20th century. | Flight attendantsUnited StatesBiography. | Sex role in the work environmentUnited States.

Classification: LCC HD 8039. A 432 U 6323 2021 (print) | LCC HD 8039. A 432 (ebook) | DDC 387.7/42092273dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034163

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020034164

Cover Design by Jessica Handelman

Cover Illustration Lincoln Agnew

Cover Images: Getty Images (main woman, reflection in glasses, walking stewardesses) and The Pan American World Airways Digital Collection at The University Of Miami (plane, waving stewardess, map, logo on hat, yellow pan am logo)

Author Photograph Patrick Proctor

Maps by Lucidity Information Design, LLC. Adapted from the 1968 edition of New Horizons World Guide. Used by permission of Pan Am Airways, Inc. Records, Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries.

Letters of Lynne Totten, 19661975, used by kind permission of Lynne D. Rawling.

Letters of Karen Ryan, 19661974, used by kind permission of Karen Walker Ryan.

The Air Hostess by Army Warrant Officer Jim Reese used by permission of World Wings International, Inc. Records, Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Miami Libraries.

v1.0221

For my father
and the window seats he saved for me

LUCIDITY INFORMATION DESIGN, L.L.C.

LUCIDITY INFORMATION DESIGN, L.L.C.

Stewardess Wanted.
Must Want the World.

PAN AM RECRUITMENT ADVERTISEMENT, 1967

Lynne Totten stood in the doorway for what felt like a very long time, looking at the women sitting in rows in front of her. Only minutes before, she had walked confidently down Park Avenue to the Pan Am Building, an octagonal skyscraper of broad-faceted glass and concrete. As Lynne approached the fifty-nine-story buildings shadow, she took in the enormous letters of the companys name at its crown. Shed walked through the Pan Am lobby and taken the elevator up to the offices above as if she knew where she was going and what she was doing.

Now Lynne stood facing bouffants and elegant French twists. As she headed to the front of the room, she saw the faces of the women who wore themperfect eye makeup. Lynne, short and dainty in her brown suede skirt suit, with long dark hair down her backshe had not thought to pull it up into a bunconsidered the reality of where she stood, waiting to be interviewed for a job as a stewardess.

How can you change a world youve never seen? a Pan Am magazine ad read. This was the yearning that had sent Lynne to the interview. On television, the same campaign asked, Why dont you join the country club? A golfer on a green field was quickly surrounded by people in varied international-looking clothingmen in the striped shirts of Italian vaporetto drivers or in baroque military jackets; women in Japanese yukata. Big countries, small countries, old countries, new countries.

But another Pan Am advertisement frequently aired in 1969 might have sent Lynne walking away just as quickly as shed come: a gorgeous woman with flawlessly applied eye makeup brushing mascara onto her lashes and then striding down the street as the camera panned up from the sidewalk, taking in the stewardesss perfectly cut blue suit, her tidy purse, her hair in precise waves under her hat. When Lynne considered how she must look to the assembled crowd of aspiring stewardesses, country bumpkin was the term that came to mind.

Lynne had grown up in Baldwinsville, thirteen miles outside of Syracuse, on the twisting Seneca River. In the summer, when the sun lit the streets long into evening, children came home only briefly for dinner, then went back out. Baldwinsville was an overgrown suburb with a quaint village of two- and three-story brick buildings, shade trees glowing orange and yellow on autumn afternoons, and church steeples of various Christian denominations rising above it all.

Until right now, Lynne had felt sure that this job was what she wanted. Her parents had worked hard to send herthe bright and promising student-body president of her small-town high school, obedient and optimisticto college, the first one in their family to go. Lynne was grateful, but at college, her awareness of how lucky she was competed with a bone-deep disaffection for the lab work her biology major required. She was not always the only woman haunting the lab at the State University of New York at Oswego late into the night, but she rarely saw more than one other woman around. As far as she knew, she was the only female biology major in her year.

In the lab she barely glanced at the young men blending and separating compounds. Lynne paid strict attention to her own measurements; she harbored diffuse fears of blowing the building up. Why are you here? the men asked Lynne. It could have been intended as a compliment for a pretty woman under artificial lab lights, but the words had a hectoring edginess.

For Lynne, declaring a major was a promise, and she did not break her promises. She spent four years in class and in the lab and acquired two assistantships to keep herself afloat financially, including one working with soil samples for a palynology professor. Lynne was good at extracting hundred-year-old pollen from soil; it impressed her that pollen could not be destroyed and would always provide a map of the past. But beneath her commitment to her biology major, her gratitude to her parents, and her determination in the face of the subtle intimidation in the labs, Lynne had doubts. Sometimes she wondered what she was doing, what she was preparing for, especially as she learned about the world outside of upstate New York.

In Baldwinsville, around the dinner table on Sundays, when her parents closed the general store they owned to eat together as a family, international politics never came up. But at the coffee shops and diners in Oswego, Lynnes peers debated government policy ardently. Combat in Vietnam escalated throughout Lynnes undergraduate years and Lynne listened to her college boyfriend and his friends discussing the war. The first few times they challenged the decisions President Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara were making in Washington, she felt uneasy. Who were they to question figures of authority? she asked.

They were male college seniors in the United States, they answeredtheir draft numbers and the end of their deferment upon graduation entitled them to question the government. Around the country and the worldin West Berlin, Sweden, Mexico Citystudents had begun to protest a war that, Lynne learned, had never been declared a war by Congress. Now she realized that covert American intervention in the region went back decades, to the Second World War and the decolonization that followed, separating Vietnam into north and south. Communism ruled in the USSR-allied north; a nominally democratic regime ruled in the south. American interest in the region centered on natural resourcesVietnams tin, tungsten, and rubberand the fear of what President Eisenhower had called a decade earlier the falling domino principle.