Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am - Julia Cooke Audiobook

Written by Julia Cooke
Read by Julia Cooke
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: HarperAudio
Release date: March 2, 2021
Duration: 07:32:58

Glamour, danger, liberation: in a Mad Men-era of commercial flight, Pan Am World Airways attracted the kind of young woman who wanted out, and wanted up

Required to have a college degree, speak two languages, and possess the political savvy of a Foreign Service officer, a jet-age stewardess serving on iconic Pan Am between 1966 and 1975 also had to be between 5′3″ and 5′9″, between 105 and 140 pounds, and under 26 years old at the time of hire. (Plus 20/20 vision, which let me out).

Cooke’s intimate storytelling weaves together the real-life stories of a memorable cast of characters, from small-town girl Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few Black stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of their new jet-set life. Cooke brings to light the story of Pan Am stewardesses’ role in the Vietnam War, as the airline added runs from Saigon to Hong Kong for planeloads of weary young soldiers straight from the battlefields, who were off for five days of R & R, and then flown back to war. Finally, with Operation Babylift—the dramatic evacuation of 2,000 children during the fall of Saigon—the book’s special cast of stewardesses unites to play an extraordinary role on the world stage.

Kirkus Reviews..
A breezy account of Pan American World Airways in its glory days is smoothly interwoven with the engagingly complex stories of several longtime flight attendants. Journalist and travel writer Cooke, the daughter of a former Pan Am executive, explores the global role of the airline in the 1960s and ’70s, before the company’s decline and bankruptcy declaration in 1991. In this limber, well-researched book, the author touches on a handful of relevant characters, concentrating on three stewardesses, as they were then known, whose lives intersected during Operation Babylift at the end of the Vietnam War. Lynne was biology major from upstate New York, Karen a former manager at a military service club in Germany, and Tori a young Norwegian woman with a gift for languages. .., and Cooke excels at placing their individual stories within this context without turning them into object lessons. …. An entertaining, insightful look into a gritty and glamorous era in air travel.

. VERDICT This engrossing account, which reads like a novel, offers a combination of riveting personal stories and little-known history, and will draw in readers from the first page. A must-read. —

A super airline founded in 1927. Beginning in 1947, it had Flight 001 that did the around-the world route, west bound from San Francisco and Flight 002 traveled eastbound from New York. For a quick weekend, you could leave LAX about 11P Friday and arrive HNL 9P. Return Sunday in the AM or as late as 430P HNL to LAX by midnight and maybe make it to work Monday. Blurry eyed but there. Why did Pan Am die? The world was in upheaval, they sold off the overseas routes that they were known for, and–poor & arrogant upper management, of course, in later years.