Friendly Skies? A Cultural History of Air Travel in Postwar

FRIENDLY SKIES? A CULTURAL HISTORY POSTWAR AMERICA OF AIR TRAVEL IN Anke Ortlepp Research Fellow, GHI “Pretzels and Pillows Take a Back Seat to First-Class Perks.”1 “At Dulles and National, the Wait Gets Worse.”2 When air travelers read today’s newspaper headlines announcing the constantly diminishing features of airlines’ in-flight service and the tightening of airport security checks, few may remember the time when travel by airplane was considered an activity that promised fun and excitement. Americans readily accepted Frank Sinatra’s invitation to “Come Fly With Me,” issued in a song he recorded in 1958 in which he daydreamed about trips to Peru and Acapulco Bay.3 By the 1950s and 1960s, American tourists were not only flying coast to coast in their own country, but were also busily exploring destinations in Latin America and venturing across both the Atlantic and the Pacific. Decreasing fares and faster planes enabled them to go more places in less time. At the same time, air travel promised participation in the desirable and chic jet-set culture that Sinatra personified. This project deals with the cultures of air travel in postwar America. It examines the ways in which traveling by airplane came to stand for a new way of living in which an increasing number of Americans participated. In this context, air travel is conceived of as a cultural practice, a system of cultural meanings and symbolic order that influenced people’s behavior and was in turn transformed by them. Culture here stands for a matrix or framework “in which events, behaviors and institutions can be described.”4 Whereas the car as a means of transportation has been explored from this perspective, we lack a cultural history of air travel, a gap this study seeks to fill.5 It does so by focusing on the decades between the 1940s and the 1980s, when air travel was transformed from an elite way of traveling into a means of mass transportation. During those years, it argues, Americans created a distinct “travel culture” in which both business and pleasure travelers participated.6 This project, then, conceives of air travel not only but also as an activity connected to leisure. It analyzes the characteristics of the collective experience of traveling by airplane and how this experience changed over the decades. Rooted in cultural history, the study also borrows methodologies from neighboring disciplines such GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) 115 as cultural anthropology, human geography, the history of architecture and design, art history, and gender studies. The different stages of a trip by airplane serve as the organizing principle for the study. The first chapter focuses on the stage of planning. It looks at the ways in which travelers were induced to travel by airplane and how they prepared for their trips. The arguments and images that were presented to prospective travelers by the airlines and that were designed to sell “air travel” can best be studied through an analysis of advertising. It shows that during the 1950s and 1960s, airlines tried to target a predominantly male traveling public. To do so, they promoted several themes that had a masculine connotation: technology, professionalism, and adventure. All three were spun around a set of three characters that constantly reappeared in the ads: the captain, the businessman, and the tourist. Captains were featured as their airlines’ most precious asset. In drawings or photographs, they appeared as handsome, white, middle-aged men. Captions described them as men who combined a number of personal qualities. Any captain was a highly trained professional who managed new jet-engine aircraft technology perfectly and got passengers to their destinations on time. Moreover, he was a reliable partner to his co-pilot and a fair and compassionate boss to his female in-flight crew, as Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones never tired of stressing in their fictional stewardess memoir Coffee, Tea or Me?7 At times the captain might have taken some liberties, spending an occasional night with one of his stewardesses. In general, however, he was a family man who longed to get home to his wife and children after spending demanding hours or days on the job. As part of this job, the captain took care of his passengers, whether they were a group of business travelers or a boy traveling alone. He was a knowledgeable person even beyond his high-tech expertise, and a patriot on top of that. American Airlines captain Willie Proctor, an ad stated in 1953, spent his summer vacation in the American Southwest to learn lessons that he could later pass on to his passengers via the plane’s communication system: “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, this is your Flagship Captain speaking.” “From high in the sky,” the ad continued, “his detailed descriptions of points of interest made the whole trip seem like a personally guided tour. Scenic highlights and historic landmarks—Indian chiefs and pioneer heroes—Proctor wove them all into one fascinating American history lesson that thrilled thousands of travelers.”8 It portrays the captain’s efforts as an expression of the care he invested in his passengers. He wanted them to experience the landscape they traveled across not only as something remote and abstract but as a real space that had layers of meaning. One could assume that he also wanted to sell tickets for future trips with the same airline. Moreover, his 116 GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) shiny uniform and hat made any captain instantly recognizable. As a symbol of his job’s prestige, it commanded admiration and respect, something that the movie Catch Me If You Can has most recently played on. Frank Abignale (played by Leonardo di Caprio) easily makes the transition from check-forging con man to professional pilot whenever he puts on his Pan Am uniform. Colleagues and travelers greet him with respect, and female flight attendants shower him with attention.9 At a time when many middle- and working-class American men had difficulties making the transition from military to civilian life and finding their place in postwar American society, the captain seemed like an ideal role model of how this transition could be accomplished. Many airline pilots had been with the Air Force during World War II. After the war, the expanding passenger airline industry had provided large numbers of them with an opportunity to find high-profile employment in an emerging transportation sector.10 Most airlines had recruited their highly trained professional personnel almost exclusively from the military. The captain’s story suggests, moreover, that unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not have to compete with women in a highly gendersegregated job field. Instead, his profession provided him with the opportunity to display some qualities that were considered to be quintessentially male: expertise, command, independence, and adventurousness. These were the same characteristics that had defined the Anglo-American self-made man for centuries and had set him apart from men of other ethnicities, as sociologist Michael Kimmel has shown.11 To emulate the captain’s ideal, therefore, seemed like a chance for the average man to identify with his personal characteristics and his success story. The businessman shared only some of the captain’s qualities. He too was white, but while the captain might have been in his forties and fifties, the businessman was somewhat younger, in his thirties and forties. His group included both the corporate executive and the traveling salesman. Each chose air travel because it was convenient, fast, and reliable. They also chose it because it was the most modern and advanced means of transportation. A 1952 American Airlines advertisement bragged that while Don, who relied on the train, “made the trip—too late again,” his younger colleague John “made the sale—he took the plane.”12 The businessman liked to be among his peers, men easily recognizable by their grey flannel suits with their hats and briefcases. He enjoyed offers like the “New York Executive,” an all-male New York to Chicago flight that United Airlines offered between 1953 and 1970. Here he could enjoy the soothing presence of the stewardesses without having to deal with female fellow travelers. After all, each of their stewardesses, the same airline promised in 1967, “knows a Friday-night face when she sees one. It’s the tired face of a businessman who’s put in a hard week and just wants to GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) 117 go home . . . Extra care is different for every passenger. But they all get it.”13 As much as he enjoyed business, the businessman, like the captain, was a family man at heart. He longed to spend time with his wife and children and could hardly wait to return home in the evenings or at the end of a busy week. The image of the successful, air-traveling businessman was designed to sell tickets because it promised relief for the hundreds of thousands of corporate employees in the 1950s and 1960s. Caught in a life that oscillated between demanding, 9-to-5 white-collar jobs with limited career opportunities and suburban family life with its lack of excitement and gender segregation, many middle-class men experienced identity crises in the postwar decades, as Michael Kimmel and Anthony Rotundo have shown.14 Disappointed by what the “masculine mystique” had promised—fulfillment in their traditional role as breadwinners and protectors—increasing numbers of men began to question ideals of manliness and to look beyond their normative construction.15 The image of the businessman as jet-age professional seems like an attempt to reconcile middle-class men with America’s postwar economic order. It still centered around family and work. At the same time, however, it offered travel as a possibility to escape from everyday life and to participate in a new lifestyle, if only for a few days. Air travel and its possibilities revamped the corporate clone and transformed him into a sky-smart individualist. The tourist seemed like the most adventurous character of all. He used the airplane for pleasure trips, and did not need to worry about managing technology or arriving on time. He, too, was white, but he was also someone who had considerable financial means at his disposal, at least in the 1950s and early 1960s ads. Travel for him was an opportunity to get together with his best friend for a weekend of male bonding: “That special ‘somewhere’ you dream about—don’t let earthbound concepts of time and distance block it out of your thoughts,” a TWA ad recommended in 1951, showing two men in a fishing boat on a lake.16 Travel was also an opportunity to explore exciting places within the United States and abroad. San Francisco and Las Vegas were fun destinations if the traveler wanted to take only a short trip. For extended vacations abroad, Europe, the Caribbean, Latin America, and Pacific islands like Hawaii were coming closer with each new generation of airplanes. The tourist explored these destinations not with his family but with a beautiful female companion: his wife, maybe, or a friend. With Pan Am, Europe was only 6 hours and 55 minutes away. Rome, London, and Paris were just around the corner.17 In Latin America, Punta del Este, Uruguay, was recommended by Pan Am as a place that offered beautiful beaches, the ocean, perfect weather, yachting, polo matches, and lush 118 GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) entertainment.18 Alternatively, tourists could explore the Hawaiian Islands or try the Caribbean: “Head for Barbados and Antigua for British accents. Mark down Martinique and Guadeloupe for French flavor. Go Latin in Puerto Rico. Or try our Dutch treats—Curaçao and Aruba.”19 The cosmopolitan globetrotter would see all these places, and enjoy the best that they had to offer. He provided the loftiest ideal for white, middleclass men to emulate. He would not help them come to terms with their colorless existence like the businessman did: He would make them forget their identity crises and help them to invent an alternative, if only imagined, existence. As adventurous explorer of the jet-set frontier, the middle-class man might rediscover his roots and give his manhood the boost that it needed to cope with the gradual loss of male prerogatives. During the late 1960s, airlines began to look beyond their white male customers and increasingly targeted travelers of different gender, racial, and social backgrounds. “Fashion” now became a recognizable theme in advertising, as airlines competed for the most up-to-date look of their flight attendants. Many airlines introduced or reinvented their slogans and logos—United went public with its “Friendly Skies” campaign in 1965—to be more recognizable and distinct from their competitors. Pan Am by then had become a pioneer in creating a corporate identity that provided a design vocabulary for anything from its letterhead to its ticket offices. For those who were ready to buy a ticket, ticketing agencies and electronic reservation systems, which many airlines introduced during the 1960s, brought more convenience.20 Chapter Two deals with airports as places of departure, focusing on Idlewild/John F. Kennedy (New York City), Love Field (Dallas), and O’Hare (Chicago) Airports. Like most major American cities, New York, Dallas, and Chicago began expanding their airport facilities during the 1950s. Large and complex structures like JFK Airport were constructed to cope with rising numbers of passengers and demands for accessibility and convenience. Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal at JFK, which opened its doors in 1961, translated the idea of flying into architecture and inspired corporate designs for airlines.21 After its completion, the building was celebrated as an architectural masterpiece that gave built expression to a new postwar spirit of mobility. Its cool, free-flowing concrete structure was a big step away from the Beaux-Arts architecture that had dominated airport design during the 1930s and 1940s. At the same time, it provided a stylish, space-age alternative to the internationalist language of form that had inspired the International Arrivals Building or the American Airlines Terminal. The TWA Terminal ideally translated the idea of flying into architecture, for its main concourse seemed to imitate the body shape of a landing eagle, the American national symbol. It welcomed GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) 119 busy travelers at curbside to take them under its wings and helped them make the transition from ground transportation to airplane. As a liminal space, or to use Mark Gottdiener’s term, a transition space, the terminal also served as a platform where travelers’ everyday movements and states of mind connected to their air-travel experience, which in the 1950s and 1960s still had the flavor of exceptionality and exclusivity.22 The architects of the Pan Am Terminal at JFK Airport, which began serving passengers in 1963, envisioned a flowing transition from everyday life to air travel. Travelers did not enter the building through doors but instead had to pass through an “air curtain.” The idea was to remove “congestion caused by funneling passengers through several doors and confusion as to which doors are ‘in’ and which are ‘out.’”23 Both terminals provided the stage for the different kinds of activities associated with departure and arrival: the main level housed ticketing and check-in counters from where departing passengers could proceed to the main lobby. Arriving passengers could pick up their luggage in the baggage-claim area. The second floor or Gallery Level provided a more leisurely atmosphere. Here the traveler could wine and dine or choose between different lounge areas. The TWA terminal offered three lounges: the International Lounge, the Ambassadors Club, and the VIP Lounge. They provided room for conversation, drinks, or waiting, while their names suggested the exclusive character of these activities. The trend to conceive of airport terminals as multifunctional spaces has continued since the 1960s. It has found expression in the construction of new airports such as the Denver Airport, which opened its doors in 1995, or the renovation if not reinvention of the United Airlines concourses at O’Hare International Airport in Chicago designed by the German-American architect Helmut Jahn. Travel is only one of the many activities people engage in at airports these days. Airports function as gateways to national and international destinations, but they are also shopping malls, places to eat, convention centers, hotels, and, if we are to believe Steven Spielberg’s movie The Terminal, places where people live. Increasing numbers of people seem to go to airports without even planning to travel anywhere.24 Instead they spend their time much like they would in a shopping mall or amusement park. Those who do travel often find it difficult to navigate terminals and to keep their bearings from the building’s entrance to the departure gate. Extensions and additions to existing structures have left many buildings less than clearly laid out. Attractions like the ones named above add to the sense of disorientation, as does the uniformity of design that characterizes many terminal interiors. Passengers can no longer see and visually connect to their aircraft once they arrive at the airport. Whereas the design of the Pan Am 120 GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) Terminal had evolved around the idea that the plane had to be brought to the passenger, not the passenger to the plane, today’s travelers often see the plane that is about to take them someplace at the very last minute upon arrival at the gate.25 Airports give built expression to transition and movement from one place to another and from one experience to another. They can no longer be considered as places where people feel a sense of belonging, however, as Marc Augé has argued. Instead we have to understand them as the quintessential non-places of our time, “in which neither identity, nor relations, nor history really make any sense; spaces in which solitude is experienced as an overburdening or emptying of individuality, in which only the movement of the fleeting images enables the observer to hypothesize the existence of a past and glimpse the possibility of a future.”26 A third chapter of my study deals with the “in-flight” experience. It looks at the introduction of different classes (first class, business, and economy), interior design, entertainment, fashion, and food. In-flight food service started almost with the inception of commercial passenger service. At first, airlines offered only snacks and sandwiches, but they soon served full (albeit cold) meals. The rapid development of kitchen technology enabled some airlines like United in the 1930s to start serving hot meals, parts of which could be prepared in the airplanes’ galleys. By the end of the war, hot meals had become a regular feature of in-flight service.27 Airlines now advertised a passenger’s choice of meals, fancy recipes, the quality of the products that were offered, and the ingredients that were used. In a 1953 press release, Pan Am extolled the virtues of its cooperation with the Paris restaurant Maxim’s on the flights between the United States and Paris: “For over sixty years, the gilt-framed mirrors above the red plush seats of this famous restaurant have reflected the faces of kings, princes, millionaires, actresses, artists, publishers, war heroes—the celebrities and near-celebrities of world-wide society. This extraordinary restaurant . . . has made a specialty of catering to the eccentric demands and fastidious palates of everyone who ever was anybody.”28 If kings and queens were satisfied, this quote suggests, Maxim’s creations would also please the delicate palates of Pan Am’s American customers. Meals were prepared and precooked in canteen kitchens in New York and Paris and reheated and arranged aboard the aircrafts. Leaving New York in the direction of Paris, a traveler was served “créme de volaille, aiguillette de caneton (duckling) aux pèches petits pois à la francoise, Pommes Anna, pain, beurre, Salade du Chef ‘Clipper’, mousse glacée, café, and thé”.29 The single courses of the meal were arranged in a way that made the trip seem short and enjoyable: “Starting from the New York takeoff, the Jet Clipper is over Boston when the cocktails are in the shaker and the canapés on the tray. Over Nova Scotia, the passenger is GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) 121 having his consommé or spearing his shrimp cocktail. Directly south of Greenland, pastry and fruit are being served. Coffee, cognac and a nap leave Paris or London just two or three hours away.”30 To infuse the atmosphere with even more European character, Pan Am chose to serve French wines with its meals and printed all its menus in French. Focusing on French cuisine on its European routes, the airline snapped up contemporary trends in cooking culture. Cookbooks like television chef Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking sold millions. It familiarized Americans with French products and ways of preparing meals that were very different from what most homemakers and hobby cooks were accustomed to. It also suggested that expensive ingredients, new kitchen gadgets, and fancy recipes could be status symbols that defined a cook’s or a food connoisseur’s class status.31 Consuming French products was expensive, trendy, and glamorous, and that is why Pan Am offered a taste of them in its service package. The lure of exclusivity and the promise of participation in the jet-set’s lifestyle that they suggested were intended to induce customers to travel with the airline. A look at flight attendant uniforms and fashion leads me back to my argument that air travel must be understood as a thoroughly gendered experience. Before men were once again hired as flight attendants, the airlines’ efforts to dress their in-flight crews focused on women. While the design of the captain’s uniform changed but little in the decades after the war, the design of women’s uniforms quickly changed and stewardesses became fashion trendsetters during the 1960s. In the immediate postwar period, most airlines chose flight attendant outfits that looked similar to the uniforms that army nurses had worn during the war. Styles still mirrored prewar stewardesses’ job qualifications, which included a professional nursing degree.32 The suits worn by flight attendants displayed the classic 1940s silhouette: jackets with broad shoulders and narrow waists as well as pencil skirts that opened up toward the bottom. The skirts ended around the knee, less a statement of sexual liberation than a result of fabric shortages during the war.33 During the 1950s and 1960s, airlines paid increasing attention to fashion trends. The uniforms that Pan Am introduced in 1952 were inspired by Christian Dior’s New Look, which celebrated women’s hour-glass shape but also reintroduced the corset.34 Many airlines now hired famous designers to create their uniforms. Trendsetter Braniff International Airlines made headlines in 1965 when they asked the Italian fashion designer Emilio Pucci to infuse air travel with color and to design a collection of outfits that would match the new corporate motto “The End of the Plain Plane.”35 Braniff flight attendants now wore ultramodern cuts, lurid colors, and fancy headgear. Clothes became an event, part of the entertainment that the airline offered to its passengers. On international flights, 122 GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) Braniff’s flight attendants performed “the Air Strip.” Over the course of a trip they changed their outfits numerous times. But instead of dressing and undressing, they simply peeled off layers of clothing until they wore their blue arrival outfits.36 In comparison, the uniforms that flight attendants wore who worked for Southwest Airlines during the 1970s were much more minimalist, featuring miniskirts and go-go boots. Moreover, they were tight, accentuating the female body shape and leaving much of the leg exposed.37 Such outfits suggested that Southwest offered the bodies of its in-flight crews as an extra feature of its bargain tickets. One can read the marketing campaign that National Airlines ran in 1974 and 1975 along the same lines. It showed the faces of flight attendants along with the invitation “Fly Me.”38 Both built on the sexist assumption that airlines could sell more tickets by advertising the sexual availability of their flight attendants. Two factors eventually led to the reevaluation of such blatant forms of gender stereotyping: the readmission of men to the flight attendant profession and the unionization of flight attendants in the early 1970s.39 By the 1980s most airlines had returned to classic cuts and the colors black and blue. They also introduced pantsuits for women. The designs that airlines such as United, American, and Delta Airlines now featured were much more subdued and were created specifically to express respectability and professionalism.40 A final chapter of the study will focus on issues connected with “arrival.” It will return to the airport as the travelers’ gateway to their destinations. It will also concern itself with frequent-flyer cultures and explore the relationship between air travel and travel by car, two travel cultures that intersect at the airport. My findings so far lead me to conclude that the way travelers experienced a journey by airplane thoroughly changed over the course of the postwar period. Not only did they go through the transition from pistonengine to jet-engine aircraft and the transformations of airports: they also experienced the expansion and class differentiation of in-flight services, as well as their reduction to a no-frills level. Over the years, the choice of destinations increased, as did the number of people who were able to afford a trip by airplane. Increasing numbers of Americans of different backgrounds were able to use a means of transportation that only few had been able to afford before the war. By the late 1960s, the airplane had brought about an increase in mobility that compared to and even surpassed that triggered by the railroad and the car. Businesspeople and tourists, men and women, used and benefited from the availability of cheap air travel in different ways. By using the airplane and by claiming air space as their territory, however, they helped create a new and distinctly American travel culture. GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) 123 Notes 1 “Pretzels and Pillows Take a Back Seat to First-Class Perks: As They Make Cuts in Coach, Airlines Use Amenities to Retain Higher-Paying Fliers,” Boston Globe, 14 August 2005. 2 “At Dulles And National, the Wait Gets Worse: TSA Official Worries About Holiday Crowds,” Washington Post, 31 October 2006, D01. 3 Frank Sinatra, “Come Fly With Me,” Come Fly With Me, Capitol 1958. 4 Thomas Mergel, “Kulturgeschichte—die neue ’große‘ Erzählung,” in Kulturgeschichte heute, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig and Hans Ulrich Wehler (Göttingen, 1996), 41–77, 60. See also Clifford Geertz, Dichte Beschreibung: Beiträge zum Verstehen kultureller Systeme (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), 21. 5 Scholars argue that the car increased people’s mobility and at the same time triggered processes of individualization, issues that also need to be explored in regard to air travel. See for instance Mark S. Foster, Nation on Wheels: The Automobile Culture in America since 1945 (Belmont, Cal., 2003); David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein (eds.), The Automobile and American Culture (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1983); Warren J. Belasco, Americans on the Road: From Autocamp to Motel, 1910–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 1979). 6 The term derives from James Clifford’s “travelling cultures.” Clifford assumes that all cultures are traveling cultures and that negotiation and intercultural transfer produce cultural identity. German scholars and historians of German history like Rudy Koshar have used it to refer to the practices and traditions of travel. See James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 17–46; Rudy Koshar, German Travel Cultures (New York, 2000), 9–11; Hermann Bausinger, Klaus Beyrer, and Gottfried Korff (eds.), Reisekultur: Von der Pilgerfahrt zum modernen Tourismus (Munich, 1991). 7 Trudy Baker and Rachel Jones, Coffee, Tea or Me? The Uninhibited Memoirs of Two Airline Stewardesses (New York, 1967). 8 American Airlines Ad, print advertising campaign 1953, appeared in various news magazines and newspapers. 9 Catch Me If You Can, Dir. Steven Spielberg, Perf. Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Christopher Walken. Umvd/ DreamWorks, 2002. 10 Roger E. Bilstein, Flight in America: From the Wright Brothers to the Astronauts (Baltimore, 2001), 195; David T. Courtwright, “The Routine Stuff: How Flying Became a Form of Mass Transportation,” in Reconsidering a Century of Flight, ed. Roger D. Launius and Janet R. Dalz Bednarek (Chapel Hill, 2003), 209–222, 213–214. 11 Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York, 1996), 13–78. 12 American Airlines Ad, print advertising campaign 1952, appeared in various news magazines and newspapers. 13 United Airlines Ad, print advertising campaign 1967, appeared in various news magazines and newspapers. 14 Cf. Kimmel, Manhood in America, 223–258; James Gilbert, Men in the Middle: Searching for Masculinity in the 1950s (Chicago, 2005). 15 Andrew Kimbrell has coined the term “masculine mystique.” It stands for the male experience of what Betty Friedan has labeled “the problem that has no name” in her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. She described the frustration of middle-class women who could not find fulfillment in their roles as wives and mothers. She called for a redefinition of gender ideals and set the stage for the second wave of American feminism. Cf. Andrew Kimbrell, The Masculine Mystique: The Politics of Masculinity (New York, 1995); Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York, 1963). 16 TWA Ad, print advertising campaign 1951, appeared in various news magazines and newspapers. 124 GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) 17 Pan Am Ad, print advertising campaign 1959, appeared in various news magazines and newspapers. 18 Pan Am Ad, print advertising campaign 1965, appeared in various news magazines and newspapers. 19 Pan Am Ad, print advertising campaign 1967, appeared in various news magazines and newspapers. 20 Delta Airlines, for instance, introduced its electronic “instant” reservations system in 1962. “Delta Through the Decades,” http:// delta.com/home/press_url/dal_stats_facts/ daltimeline/index.jsp. 21 Mark Lamster, “Introduction,” in The TWA Terminal, with photographs by Ezra Stoller (New York, 1999), 1–11. 22 Mark Gottdiener, Life in the Air: Surviving the New Culture of Air Travel (Lanham, Md., 2001), 9–11. 23 “World’s Largest Air Curtain Eliminates Congestion and Confusion at Terminal Entrance,” Press release, n.d., Box 162, Folder 2, Pan Am Records, PAWAR. 24 The Terminal, Dir. Steven Spielberg, Perf. Tom Hanks, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Stanley Tuchi. Dreamworks, 2004. 25 “The Air Terminal that Brings the Plane to the Passenger,” Press release, n.d., Box 163, Folder 2, Pan Am Records, PAWAR. 26 Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London, 1995), 87. 27 Jochen Eisenbrand, “Essen an Board,” in Airworld: Design und Architektur für die Flugreise, ed. Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, 2004), 212–228. 28 “Maxim’s of Paris Serves Pan American’s Transatlantic Passengers,” Press release, 30 January 1951, Box 247, Folder 2, Pan Am Records, PAWAR, 1. 29 “Maxim’s of Paris,” 2. 30 “Two Dozen Choices Plus Champagne on New Pan Am Jet Menu,” Press release, 25 November 1958, Box 247, Folder 2, Pan Am Records, PAWAR. 31 Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, Julia Child, Mastering the Art of French Cooking (New York, 1961). 32 Cf. Suzanne L. Kolm, “Women’s Labor Aloft: A Cultural History of Airline Flight Attendants in the United States, 1930–1978” (Ph.D. diss., Brown University, 1995). 33 For pictures of United Airlines’ and American Airlines’ 1940s uniforms see William Garvey and David Fisher, The Age of Flight: A History of America’s Pioneering Airline (Greensboro, 2001), 132 and Helen E. McLaughlin, Footsteps in the Sky: An Informal Review of U.S. Airlines Inflight Service, 1920-Present (Denver, 1994) 134, 1940. 34 “Pan Am Stewardess Uniform—1952,” Press release, n.d., Box 293, Folder 4, Pan Am Records, PAWAR. 35 Ads and images that illustrate the Pucci look as well as the “End of the Plain Plane” advertising campaign can be found at http://www.braniffinternational.org/image/ puccifashion.htm and http://www.braniffinterntional.org/image/advertising.htm. 36 The ad promoting the “Air Strip” can be found in Johanna Omelia and Michael Waldock, Come Fly With Us: A Global History of the Airline Hostess (Portland, 2003), 102–103. 37 Omelia, Come Fly With Us, 118. 38 Ads appeared, for instance, in Newsweek and Ebony magazines. 39 Cf. Cathleen M. Loucks, “Battle in the Skies: Sex Discrimination in the United States Airline Industry, 1930–1978” (M.A. thesis, University of Nevada, 1995). 40 “High-Flying Fashion Show Introduces New Pan Am Uniforms,” Press release, 29 June 1980, Box 291, Folder 13, Pan Am Records, PAWAR. GHI BULLETIN NO. 40 (SPRING 2007) 125