A book being written now
The men who kept Pan Am flying
There are shelves of books about Pan American World Airways — about Juan Trippe, about the pilots, about the stewardesses and the china and the Clippers.
There is not one book about the mechanics. We're writing it, and we need your help to do it.
Takes a few minutes. You keep your originals.
Why this book
When Pan Am shut down in December 1991, its records — some eighty-five thousand boxes — went to auction. Former employees sorted through what was salvaged and chose what was worth keeping.
Legal: 1,351 boxes
Marketing: 2,065 boxes
Engineering: 13 boxes
The record of how the airplanes were actually maintained — the standards, the schedules, the men, the methods — was thrown away by people who kept the advertising. Pan Am's own maintenance records and personnel files were spared from destruction by the bankruptcy court, and then never arrived at any archive. Nobody knows where they went.
So the history of this trade now exists in exactly two places: a thin slice of paper in a university library in Florida, and the memories of the men who did the work.
Who's doing this
Raymond Finkelstein was an aircraft mechanic at Pan Am. He kept in touch with the men he worked with — they still get together — and he's writing this with his son, who is doing the research.
This isn't a corporate history written by an outsider. It's meant to be the shop floor, in the words of the people who were standing on it.
What we're looking for
- Photographs — the hangars, the shops, the airplanes, the crews. Also the reunions and get-togethers since. A picture of the same men at a diner in 2005 matters as much as one under a 707 in 1968.
- Paper — work cards, log pages, training material, manuals, badges, ID cards, patches.
- Union material — a contract book, a pay stub, a seniority list. These are unusually valuable: no record of what a Pan Am mechanic was paid survives in any public archive we've been able to find.
- Stories — how you got hired, an ordinary shift, the first 747 you ever saw up close, the last day.
- Names — anyone else we should talk to.
What happens to what you send
- Keep your originals. We only need a photograph or a scan. Please don't mail anything.
- You decide how it's used. You can be named, or not. You can ask to see anything of yours before it's printed. You can change your mind at any time.
- Somebody will write back — usually to ask what we're looking at. The story behind a photograph is worth as much as the photograph.
- Nothing is sold, and nothing goes to anyone else without your say-so.
Why now
A man hired at Idlewild in 1960 is about eighty-five today. The documents in Florida will still be there in ten years. The people won't all be.
That's the whole reason for the hurry.
Would rather talk than type? Start here and leave your phone number — we'll call you.