“You’ve struck a chord.”
“Clipper Crew seems to be filling a gap that is missing from other Pan Am Organizations.”
“We hope you will include other groups in the Pan Am family.”
Well, we hear you!
A superb article by Anne Sweeney on the global impact of Pan Am’s iconic InterContinental Hotels Corporation (IHC) launches a new section of our website, Retrospectives. Sharing our special memories of Pan Am, Retrospectives takes Clipper Crew readers back in time with personal recollections of the airline’s history. Retrospectives tells our story with passion and pride and Anne’s piece shows the exceptional role that InterContinental Hotels and Pan Am played in the development of business travel and today’s global economy.
We are proud to feature the InterContinental Hotels Corporation (IHC) that was such an important part of our Pan Am history, and as Anne’s article notes, the brainchild of FDR and Juan Trippe.
Click here to read Anne’s article: Pan Am’s Layover Hotels
Clipper Crew owes a great debt of gratitude to Mr. Neal A. Prince, and the Neal A. Prince Special Collection and Archives, New York School of Interior Design, New York, for supplying many documents and photos and giving us permission to reprint them. Mr. Prince, as Vice President of the Graphics and Interior Design Division for the InterContinental Hotels Corporation, was the driving force behind the unique interiors of each hotel. We extend our heartfelt thanks to him for sharing his memories, documents, stories, interviews and photos from his private collection. Just as our focus on the history of the Pan Am flight attendant is centered on “the view from the jumpseat”, an article devoted to Mr. Prince and all the work that went on behind the scenes to create such amazing hotels, will be published in the coming weeks.
Clipper Crew also thanks Claude Hudspeth founder of the site paacrewlayover.com for allowing us to use photos from his wonderful website, which covers so many of the unique places where Pan Am crew stayed. If you haven’t visited his site please have a look!
We would like to acknowledge those that came before us who continue to work to preserve Pan Am’s history. Just as it took many divisions of Pan American World Airways to create and run the world’s iconic airline, it takes many Pan Am groups and authors to document our illustrious history. Edward S. Trippe and his brother Charles W. Trippe, Jr., officers of the Pan Am Historical Foundation, feature an overview of IHC on their website.
Kelly Cusack founder of Everything Pan Am , a terrific “virtual Pan
Am Museum” and an advisory member to the Pan Am Historical Foundation, deserves mention as well as Jeffrey Kriendler, a Director of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and co-author of “Pan American Aviation History Through The Words of its People”.
World Wings International, Inc., the charitable organization of former Pan Am flight attendants, has done much to honor our legacy with its impeccably preserved and documented Uniform Collection, special events and support of the Pan Am Collection at the University of Miami’s Richter Library Special Collections Unit. This comprehensive collection contains Pan Am’s official archives, reorganized and represented and now available to scholars wishing to study Pan Am’s contributions to aviation. We are indebted to the the library’s dedicated staff for rescuing these priceless records.
Finally, we salute those flight attendants who published their personal memoirs and/or aviation related novels inspired by their years with Pan Am. You can’t beat the experience! Please see Flight Attendant Authors and Artists.
We’ve done our best to include everyone, if we’ve missed your book or art, please let us know.
Clipper Crew will feature more historical background and vignettes on some of these wonderful hotels in greater detail in the coming weeks.
We look forward to adding to Retrospectives in the future. We welcome your ideas, stories and photos, which are suitable for publication. Simply contact Clipper Crew.