Classroom clipper, Vol. XVIII, No. 2, December 1961

              December 1961
Published by Pan American Airways
Vol. XVII!, No. 2
Clipper Hall Mirrors Aviation History
By Harvey Katz
Thirty-four years are only a flick of the pages of history, but that brief period spans the history of American international commercial aviation.
Highlights of international aviation’s pioneering past and history-making present are dramatized in visual terms at Clipper Hall, Pan American Airways’ museum, located at New York International Airport, Idlewild, N. Y.
Open to the public 24 hours a day, Clipper Hall attracts hundreds of visitors daily who stop in to look back into the stirring headline-making episodes of aviation’s history.
Among the visitors are hundreds of classroom groups and individual youngsters. Appropriately, on the wall of Clipper Hall they see a quotation by Herbert Hoover, former president of the United States, that reads: “History helps us to learn.”
In the ultra-modern Pan American Terminal at Idlewild—the jet age’s crossroads of international travel—Clipper Hall bridges the day just a little more than three decades ago when the first Pan American passengers flew in a tiny Fokker F-7 from Key West, Fla., to Havana—a distance of 90 miles—to the present when Jet Clippers fly to 85 cities around the world.
Perhaps, the younger generation is Clipper Hall’s most important audience. For most adults, the events illustrated in Clipper Hall are part of vivid memory, but for school groups Clipper Hall has the important mission of projecting aviation history from the written page to lively, living dimensions.
A worldwide treasure hunt has collected for Clipper Hall important memorabilia symbolizing the origins and development of international air travel—a story identical with that of Pan American Airways, America's pioneer over-water airline. Some 20,000 Pan Am personnel gathered items such as the airplane engine and propeller from Pan Am’s original tri-motored aircraft, a huge bell used to summon passengers at Brownsville, Texas, aircraft signal flags from Mexico, a Maori war club from New Zealand, pioneer aircraft radio equipment, a Mayan stone urn found in digging a landing strip in Latin America, the key to the City of Manila given to the crew of the first dipper flight across the Pacific in 1935, and thousands of other relics of important events and faraway places.
Nearly all of these were donated by the men who figured in aviation’s historical events. Because the growth of commercial aviation has been so swift, many of the pioneers are still vigorously pursuing careers in aviation—many as advisors, administrators, and flying officers for Pan American.
One day, for example, a visitor came into Clipper Hall with a bulky bundle under his arm. He was Gen. Charles A. Lindbergh, who more than anyone else personifies the pioneering spirit of American aviation. His package contained donations to Clipper Hall which demonstrate how Gen. Lindbergh’s story is intertwined with the history of Pan American.
Almost from the beginning of Pan Am history, Gen. Lindbergh was associated with the Company, assisting in the development of new aircraft, surveying new routes, and applying his experience in long-range overocean operations.
To Clipper Hall, Gen. Lindbergh turned over mementos of this long association with Pan Am. In the package were drafting instruments which Lindbergh used in laying
out air routes and courses on survey trip on behalf of Pan Am in the Caribbean, Arctic, Pacific, and Atlantic areas. These instruments were also used in drawing maps, chapter headings and other material for “North to the Orient,” and “Listen! the Wind,” books by Mrs. Lindbergh based on Lindbergh’s flights for Pan Am.
Another treasure in the bundle was a camera used by Lindbergh in photographing possible landing areas and base locations for Pan Am from 1929 through 1932.
Near the Lindbergh collection in Clipper Hall are a roll top desk, world globe, wall map and chairs—symbols of the early career of Juan T. Trippe, founder, aviation pioneer, and still president of Pan American. At the roll top desk President Trippe helped build the international route network which took the American flag to its present-day eminence in intercontinental commercial aviation.
The historic large world globe was in Mr. Trippe’s office from 1929 to 1942 and was used to lay out pioneering routes to Latin America, to the Orient, to Africa, across the Atlantic to Europe, and north to
Continued, on page C-2
MODEL DISPLAY — One of major attractions in Clipper Hall is a collection of models of aircraft that figured in Pan Am history. In the right foreground is a model of the Fokker F-7, with which service was operated over the first Pan Am route from Key West, Florida to Havana, in 1927. At left is a model of the Sikorsky S-38, an amphibian aircraft operated in the Caribbean and in Central and South America
beginning in 1929.