Cole is not only mentally and physically tough, he is also a man of deep faith, the superintendent of his Sunday school at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Falls Church. He is a devoted husband to his wife, Rosemary, and dedicated father to his five-year-old son, Gordon Jr., both back home in Virginia.
He is no stranger to the sea, and he respects both its beauty and its fury.
Commander Cole, directed to Seat 16A in the first-class, Rainbow section, is the perfect seatmate for Harold Sunderland, who is boarding behind him.
“You’re in Seat 16B, Mr. Sunderland,” twenty-six-year-old stewardess Yvonne Alexander smiles, pointing to an aisle seat in the left rear section of the luxurious cabin. Alexander, impeccably dressed in her sky-blue uniform with white blouse and blue pillbox hat, was driven to the airport this morning by her father, Albert, who is visiting from New York. Although originally from San Francisco, the confident stewardess had relocated less than a year ago from New York, where she worked Pan Am’s New York-to-Frankfurt run for several years before requesting the transfer to the West Coast to be closer to her divorced mother, Lucille, who lives in Larkspur and is fearful for her daughter’s safety in the air.
A former travel agency secretary, Alexander loves her stewardess job and recently told her mother, who had emigrated from Germany in 1926: “Mommy, as a matter of fact I feel safer up there than I do down here.”
Working the flight today with Alexander is the bright-eyed twenty-six-year-old Marie McGrath, a popular substitute teacher in San Mateo when she is not flying with Pan Am. A New York native who has traveled on five continents, McGrath was snow skiing in Austria this time last year with Pan Am colleagues. She is a graduate of Keuka College in upstate New York, where, as an English major, she edited the college’s literary magazine and dreamt of one day flying for Pan Am as a stewardess. Her dreams have come true.
Both stewardesses flash the famous “Pan Am (no-gums, all-teeth) smile” as they greet the passengers. They are perfect fits for Pan Am stewardess requirements: extroverted, trim, beautiful, fluent in English and at least one other language, culturally aware, able to walk down an aisle in heels without wobbling, witty, and bossy but not bitchy.
They are well trained to treat passengers like royalty, and they pass out postcards with color pictures of the Stratocruiser as their guests board the aircraft. The stewardesses will pick the postcards up shortly before arrival in Honolulu, and they will be mailed gratis by Pan Am, just another perk of flying on the finest airline in the world.
As he is seated, Sunderland is pleasant but isn’t saying much. That’s his style. An Air Force officer stationed with the 1134th Special Activities Squadron at Travis Air Force Base just northeast of San Francisco, he is off on a secret intelligence mission to Burma. Sunderland places a briefcase in the overhead compartment, quietly takes his seat, and settles in for the long flight. Sunderland is a spy, a listener, a man who covertly and sometimes overtly gathers information for the highest levels of the US government, and his destination is a hot spot for spies like him. He has been visiting his fiancée, Jean Spear, in Sacramento for the past few days.
Passenger Louis Rodriguez is in a state of shock and is on a sad mission today. He has been crying. Anyone can plainly see that. His eyes are red, and his face has that cried-out look. The fifty-five-year-old St. Luke’s Hospital surgical orderly is traveling to Honolulu for the funeral of his mother on Monday. It is his first time on an airplane, and the father of three is terrified.
Rodriguez, normally an outgoing, helpful machine technician for the Monroe Calculating Machine Company, had been working in his backyard garden when he received word that his mother had died.
Thirty-three-year-old US Navy Commander Joseph Jones confidently walks down the aisle, his uniform pressed sharply, as he sits down in Seat 6A, the window seat next to Rodriguez.
“Good morning. I’m Joe Jones. Looks like we’ll be sitting next to each other,” he says as he extends his hand, smiles, then scoots in front of Rodriguez and sits down.
Rodriguez nods politely and shakes the officer’s hand.
“Good morning to you, too, sir. I am Louis Rodriguez.”
Jones, a veteran of Pacific fighting in World War II and now commander of the Seventh Navy Mobile Construction Battalion on Long Island, New York, is on his way to Honolulu, where his fiancée, twenty-nine-year-old Navy Lieutenant Mary Ann Collins, plans to pick him up at the airport that evening. She will be accompanied by his mother, Katherine, who has been in Honolulu for a week helping her soon-to-be daughter-in-law with wedding arrangements.
Collins is a New York engineering school graduate serving as a personnel officer at Pearl Harbor. Tomorrow, she and Joseph’s mother plan to drive down to the Honolulu ports to meet the ocean liner Matsonia, whose passengers include her mother and rock ’n’ roll superstar Elvis Presley. Little does she know that by the time the Matsonia docks at Pier 10 it will have been involved in a huge air-and-sea search for her fiancé and forty-three others lost at sea.
Edward T. Ellis is another busy man with a lot on his mind this morning, not the least of which is a speech he is scheduled to make at a meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Management at the Hawaiian Village Hotel. Ellis is known in corporate circles as not only a visionary executive, but also an excellent public speaker, so it is not unusual for him to be away from home for meetings and speaking engagements.
Ellis is the type of person who seems to do everything right all the time. He has a golden touch in the business world; some might call him an overachiever. He is a meticulous planner, but also an excellent people person. He has never met a stranger, and he always makes those around him feel comfortable, whether a senior executive, a congressman, or an hourly production worker. In twenty-six years, he has risen through the ranks of McCormick & Company, the nation’s major spices-and-condiments seller, and is now a director of the company and vice president of its Schilling division. Colleagues believe the forty-five-year-old is in line to become president of McCormick upon the retirement of John N. Curlett.
The married father of three beautiful girls—Suzanne, Marilyn, and the recently married Joan—the executive settles into aisle Seat 10C and introduces himself to seatmate Robert L. Halliday, an Australian businessman, who booked this flight to get home to his family earlier after his scheduled flight on another airliner was delayed.
Ellis reaches into his coat pocket and hands Halliday one of his business cards, and the men begin chatting to get to know each other before the flight takes off. Ellis plans to stay with Colonel Howard H. Cloud Jr., director of manpower and organization with the Pacific Air Headquarters at Hickam Air Force Base, during his trip. Cloud is scheduled to speak tomorrow at the same conference as Ellis. The seatmates hit it off immediately.
Passenger Ruby Quong is a twenty-nine-year-old registered nurse who just two days ago resigned her job at San Francisco’s Kaiser Foundation Hospital for a temporary move from her home in Chinatown to Hong Kong, where she will assist her ailing mother. She sits down in window Seat 5D and is joined moments later by Bess Sullivan, a microbiologist whose husband of thirty-three years, Philip, a State Department executive, will be seated in the first-class section. Philip, a former missionary to China, has been in San Francisco for several days on official government business. Bess recently flew in from their home in Washington, D.C., and plans to visit their daughter in Kyoto, Japan, while her husband travels on to New Delhi for an important international conference.
The noise level in the cabin increases slightly as four excited children and their immaculately dressed parents board the aircraft and head for their seats in the first-class section. The Clacks are one of two entire families boarding this morning, and the Clack children soon will make friends with the Alexander children, David and Judy, who will be seated behind them. David and Judy’s father, thirty-eight-year-old Robert, and their mother, Margaret, a school PTA leader, are taking the kids on a vacation to Hawaii. Margaret and the children h
ave just gotten over bouts with the flu. Robert is an experienced Pan Am copilot, and his skills and experience may come in handy before the end of the day.
Dow Chemical Company executive Hugh Llywelyn (Lee) Clack, his college-sweetheart wife, the former Ann Mae Carter, and their four children have been on a three-month stateside working vacation, reuniting with family and friends in Michigan. Their family has grown in the past two years with the addition of their adopted Japanese-American daughters, Kimi, seven, and Mariko, two, and the Clacks enjoyed showing off their newest children during their visit to the United States—a place they told the girls was “The Promised Land.”
The Clacks already had two children, Bruce, nine, and Scott, six, and the boys quickly embraced their new siblings. Lee and Ann had always wanted daughters, loved Japanese children, and told family members they felt they should do their part to make amends for Japan’s war orphans.
Lee is general manager of Dow International in Tokyo and successfully opened Dow’s first Far Eastern office just two years ago. The World War II Navy veteran did graduate work in chemistry at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is considered not only brilliant, but compassionate as well. While home in Michigan he and Ann spoke to several civic clubs and enjoyed telling about life in Japan, and sharing the history and customs of the Japanese people.
Lee is a rising star in Dow Chemical, and the Clacks seem to be the perfect American family. They love America but are eager to return “home” to Japan.
Marion Florence Barber takes window Seat 9A about midway in the aircraft, and immediately fastens her seat belt. She flips nervously through a travel magazine as the other passengers settle in, but she is not really interested in reading anything as the plane is readied for takeoff.
She has been waiting so long for this day that nothing else seems to matter.
A Shaker Heights, Ohio, housewife, the forty-nine-year-old is flying to Honolulu, where she plans to meet her husband, Army Colonel Keith H. Barber, who is returning from duty in Vietnam—long before Vietnam becomes a household word. They plan to vacation for a few days in Honolulu and then fly back together to the US mainland, where he will take on a new assignment at Fort Hood, Texas, a sprawling post where armored tanks crawl the mesquite-covered hills and rule the day.
William Deck, like Commander Jones, has love on his mind this morning. The twenty-four-year-old former sailor met Masako Sasaki while stationed with the US Navy in Japan two years ago, but they haven’t seen each other in the eleven months since his discharge. Deck left his home in Radford, Virginia, yesterday, and it seems like he has been on an airplane ever since. A former student at Virginia Tech, he is flying to Japan for his wedding, and then plans to return to the US mainland and enter the Milwaukee School of Engineering. Masako, who is finishing college in Japan, will join him later in Wisconsin. Before leaving Virginia, he sent this telegram to his sweetheart:
“Meet me at Kyoto Station, 6:30 a.m. Monday.”
Deck checks his watch. This plane can’t get off the ground fast enough for him. His heart races with just the thought of his bride-to-be. He walks up the ramp steps and smiles to himself as he notes the name lettered on the side left of the aircraft: Romance of the Skies.
“It sure is,” he says. “It sure is.”
He takes a seat beside Tokyo-bound twenty-five-year old Melih Dural of Ankara, Turkey. Dural is returning to Ankara to serve a two-year stint in the Army after studying engineering at the University of Illinois and Florida Southern University. He plans to visit a friend in Tokyo before proceeding on to Turkey.
Thomas McGrail of Dover, New Hampshire, is en route to Rangoon, Burma, for his new assignment as cultural attaché at the US Embassy. He celebrated his fifty-second birthday yesterday and is looking forward to his new position. He’d been in Washington, DC, for the past several months after serving in Tel Aviv and Tokyo. A former English professor at the University of New Hampshire, he has worked for the US Information Agency for seven years and is eager to leave the backstabbing bureaucracy of Washington behind.
Soledad Mercado has already settled in to window Seat 12D by the time McGrail arrives at his seat, next to hers. The petite and impeccably dressed Mercado is a widely known dress designer and manufacturer who lives in Phoenix, where she is known as Soledad of Arizona. She is bound for Tokyo to visit her son, Andy, and then on to Manila, where she plans to see long-lost relatives. Finally, the fifty-three-year-old designer will board another Pan Am flight to Hong Kong, where she will buy merchandise for her clothing line.
Mercado has had a lot on her mind lately. Just eight months ago the Arizona Supreme Court ordered the estate of a wealthy socialite, Mary Louise Anderson, to pay her $20,000 for taking care of the elderly spinster. It has taken two years to get to this point, and the legal battle has been not only emotionally exhausting, but bitter as well. A flight to Asia is just what she needs to get her mind off all the hassle.
Six years after arriving from her native Philippines in September 1933, Mercado met Anderson and became her cook, housekeeper, laundress, maid, and nurse. She later married her employer’s chauffeur, Emilio Ray Mercado, and in 1949 started sewing for extra money in a small cottage at the rear of the Anderson mansion in Biltmore Estates. Sewing was second nature to Soledad, who learned the skill a child and was designing and making her own clothes by the time she was in high school.
By 1950, her sewing business was beginning to boom, but Anderson insisted that she not leave her side.
“‘Soledad, I am getting too old now. I can’t live without your help,’” Anderson told her, according to testimony Soledad had given in a lawsuit she brought against the estate. ‘I’ll pay you well in my will if you will just stay with me.’”
When Anderson died in 1953, she didn’t leave Soledad Mercado a single penny. Instead, she left the bulk of her $350,000 estate to Vassar College for Women in Poughkeepsie, New York. Strangely, however, she left her 1953 Lincoln, $3,000 in cash, and all of her household belongings to Soledad’s husband and business partner, Emilio.
By this time the Mercados really didn’t need the money from the estate; her sportswear line was prospering, and she not only was manufacturing clothing in Phoenix, but also had retail shops in Estes Park, Colorado, and Scottsdale and Chandler, Arizona.. Her fashionable line of clothing was making headlines all over the country, and the beautiful and vivacious Soledad was on top of the world. No, it wasn’t the money that drove the hardworking Soledad to file a lawsuit; it was the principle of the thing. After all, she had worked for Anderson for nearly twenty years without any direct compensation.
Soledad has other matters on her mind this morning as well. She is about to open a new shop in Prescott, Arizona, and things have been a bit tense with Emilio in recent months. Still, Emilio accompanied her to San Francisco and kissed her goodbye before she walked up the staircase to the big Stratocruiser a few minutes earlier.
World traveler Helen Rowland of Springfield, Vermont, has just completed a visit with her aunt in Palo Alto, and is boarding the plane today out of necessity. She doesn’t like flying but knows that the most convenient way for her to reach Tokyo for a lengthy luxury cruise is on an airplane. The sixty-year-old is in the business of restoring old houses and loves to travel the world as a sideline. She takes window Seat 7A and straps her seatbelt tightly.
Cassiqua Soehertijah VanDer Bijl is a history teacher on her way home to Jakarta, Indonesia, after a conference in Rome. She’s spent the past several days sightseeing in San Francisco. She is in aisle Seat 6C.
Tomiko Boyd is excited about seeing her husband and family as she takes window Seat 6D. There is no one seated between her and VanDer Bijl. Boyd’s husband, US Army Master Sergeant Robert Boyd, is stationed in Korea, and after visiting family in Japan she plans to reunite with him for a brief time before returning home to Baltimore, Maryland.
Mrs. Boyd looks out the window as the ground crew loads baggage into the airliner’s big belly. She wonders h
ow they keep track of all those bags and hopes that hers is among those being put aboard.
Toyoe Tanaka and assistant plant supervisor Hideo Kubota of Tokyo are returning home after a hectic business trip in the United States. The fifty-year-old Tanaka is executive director of Koa Oil Company. They are in Seats 14C and 14D in the President section, directly in front of the Clack children.
The cheapest seat on today’s flight is reserved for the troubled lodge owner William Harrison Payne, and he squeezes in to Seat 7, a middle seat between machine mechanic Frederick B. H. Choy and Army Sergeant David Anderson Hill, both of whom have been aboard for several minutes. The thirty-one-year-old Choy, married and the father of two sons, is headed to Honolulu to visit his bedridden father, Harry, whom he hasn’t seen in six years. After receiving word last night in his San Mateo home that his father was gravely ill, he bought a last-minute ticket and hopes to arrive in time to visit his father before he dies.
A bachelor, the twenty-one-year-old Sergeant Hill has been on leave in North Carolina and is returning to Hawaii, where he works for the Army Security Agency at Helemano Radio Station.
Payne, who arrived a few minutes late, seems annoyed that he must take a middle seat. Neither Choy nor Hill is interested in talking, and that suits Payne just fine. He has other things on his mind, too.
It’s combination work/vacation time for several passengers, including Robert and Nicole Lamaison. Mr. Lamaison has spent much of this year flying across the country promoting his company and its low-priced, high-efficiency cars. Detroit is worried because imports have quadrupled in the past three years, and Lamaison’s company is one of the domestic automakers’ biggest concerns.
“Why buy a car that gives you only fifteen miles to the gallon when you can buy one that gives you forty?” Lamaison, vice president and general manager of the French-owned Renault, Inc., loves to tell audiences. The economy-car market is booming, and suburbanites in postwar America are beginning to buy second cars.
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