Tripping with Juan at Pan American Airways: 1935-1940

By Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser

Juan Trippe, CEO of Pan American Airways, was my mother’s direct boss
in 1935. She was a member of the first string secretarial pool who sat at the
ready on the 58th floor of the Chrysler Building just outside his office, which
TIME magazine described in its 1933 Trippe cover story as “spacious [and]
buff-papered ...[with] French doors open upon a balcony overlooking
downtown Manhattan and the harbor.”

Edie O’Neill arrived at Pan Am during the pinnacle of Trippe’s success

when he was 37 and already known as the “Clipper Skipper”. Just five
years before, and during the Great Depression, TIMES’ “swarthy young
president of Pan American Airways” had, with the partnership of Cornelius
Vanderbilt Whitney and John Hamberton, dynamically established the
prototype airline for nearly every first in the aviation industry.

My mother started at Pan Am in January of 1935, the year that marked

Pan!Am's inauguration of pan-Pacific flights. She took great pride in the fact
that, with several other hardworking women, she had transcribed some of
the most important business history of those heady days. I wish I’d known
this when she was still alive to tell me her perspective of that part of her
tenure, but the stories she did tell were more about the Whitneys,
Vanderbilts or Rockefellers who visited Trippe’s office, or the day she saw
Charles and Anne Lindbergh in the building, whom I’ve since learned may
have been there because the Lindberghs were technical advisors for
PanAm who charted trans- oceanic, air routes as pioneers for the first
Clippers, or “flying boats,” as they were known.

Imagining my mother in this setting, where she continued to work for the
next six years, gives depth to comments she often made about her life.
Orphaned at 15, she lived with a host of older siblings, a cramped situation
tight enough to induce strong determination to reach beyond the roles of
nuns, nurses, or young mothers calling out to the first generation Irish girls
she knew. In high school, Edie O’Neill set her sights on the City. She
finished secretarial school at the age of 19 and was placed, through an
agency, into a huge secretarial pool at a firm on Wall Street. There she
transcribed the boring, business letters of junior-junior executives who kept
correcting themselves mid-sentence as they dictated to pool transcribers
over an internal phone system. Having tired of the droning, unknown voices
who told her what to type every day, she noticed that PanAm was hiring,
passed the rigorous skills’ assessments and began her days witnessing the
birth of an industry. Surely when she gazed down from the 58th floor of the
77 story Chrysler Building, she had to have felt she’d begun an odyssey
that would take her worlds away from the banal future she feared if she
kept loving that Irish boy who drove a taxi or the other one who worked in a
bar near her home in Queens.

In her stories about this time, she said that Juan Trippe needed more than
a few secretaries to help him accomplish what he did in one day. He often
called in more than one of the most precise transcribers and typists to
come in for dictation. This expediency allowed fresh copies of the same
missive to be signed by Trippe and hand-delivered to power brokers
throughout Manhattan.

My mother was at Pan Am transcribing its business history during the

heyday of the airline industry. In her old tin Schrafft’s keepsake box, there’s
a first flight cover addressed to “Miss Edith O’Neill c/o Pan American
Airways”. It is stamped “Honolulu, June 18, 1935 first flight Midway”. The
envelope is part of a cache that officially flew along on the Sikorsky Clipper,
to commemorate an inaugural, pan- Pacific trip that had originated in
California. This was the biggest first for an airline that went on to create
food-service in tourist class and long range, weather forecasting for every
flight.
In 1936, my mother was at PanAm when the industry was buzzing about
Amelia Earhart taking delivery of a Purdue Uninversity financed Lockheed
10E Elektra to fly around-the worldl; she was there in 1937, the day PanAm
announced Earhart and her plane had disappeared. She was still
transcribing with the pool when she became engaged in 1938, as well as in
1939, when PanAm conquered the sky as the first airline to operate
scheduled trans-Atlantic service for passengers and mail. Other Flight
covers in the Schrafft’s box confirm these dates. The most telling are
stamped June 24th to 30th, 1939 because these are addressed to my
father at Thew Shovel Company, 500 Fifth Avenue. The stamps on each
read “Northern Trans-Atlantic First Flight”.

All the flights depart from New York, but each is stamped with a different
inaugural landing point: Marseilles, England, Ireland, New Foundland and
New Brunswick. I can envision my mother in PanAm’s offices because
there is a small, sepia photo of her standing at her desk. She is wearing a
Coco Channel rip-off sewn by her older sister, a gifted seamstress who’d
gone to school to perfect her skills and could create a pattern from any
designer in Vogue. In the photo, my mom’s engagement ring is obviously
on display as she holds her left hand against the bow at the waist of a soft,
fluid dress. Her skin is china-smooth and her face is framed by soft curls;
Manhattan stares in from the window behind her. A year later, when she
was holding her head in her hands at her desk one morning, Juan Trippe
asked if she was alright. When she looked up at him, he said: “Why, Miss
O’Neill. I believe you must be expecting!” My mother was astonished – both
at her boss’ outburst and the fact that she’d been clueless. Trippe was right,
of course, and in 1941 my mother left PanAm and boarded a plane for her
own first flight with her husband, their son, and their future.
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Suzanne McLain Rosenwasser is a freelance writer whose features about

Long Island have appeared in The New York Times and other
newspapers. She currently writes a column "Believing in Boys" for the
online magazine The Good Men Project (www.goodmenproject.com).