Mom Flies Private! Dad Flies Pan Am!

Her showroom was in fact the sky. Issue...#10

ifOnlyi…knew how incredible it was for Dad to be loved by Pan Am staff. He treated them extremely well and was treated with a high level of respect. Mom worked hard, flying and entertaining.

Growing up, I was 70%-75% of the time with my mom, as my dad constantly traveled around the World to help build the family business, so much so that he was, in fact, the Number 2 most-traveled passenger in the history of Pan American Airlines (Pan Am).

Dad was treated exceptionally well by Pan Am, but it meant that I rarely saw him and missed him so much when he was gone. Mom and Dad worked together in the business, my mother handled all the domestic (USA) side of their business, and my father handled all the international side, as well as creating all the designs, building factories, and manufacturing plants

The most exciting thing about his travels was checking out his Passports to see how many new stamps he had and the number of pages he would have to add. I loved learning about all the Countries and Cities he traveled to and the gifts he brought home for us.

A normal-sized passport is so thin, maybe 20 pages, that his was well over 50 pages, as they had to keep adding pages to his, with stamps on top of each other as he flew from one country to another, to another, to another. I’m so proud to say I own them all. I do regret not convincing my Dad to write his life story while he was alive and healthy. I know it would have been a bestseller, off-the-charts successful, and entertaining for sure.

When my parent'’ company grew to the point where my mother no longer knew every buyer on a first-name basis (by the late '60s, there were some 15,000 of them), she did something about it. While my dad was away on a business trip, Mom bought a twin-engine Beechcraft King Air airplane that she christened the K-Liner and outfitted it as a comfortable "showroom in the sky." Mom and her pilot, Dave, flew the K-Liner around the country, taking her area sales force and buyers up in the plane for two-hour jaunts.

This is my Mother walking out of the K-Liner!

After flying over the buyers' homes and businesses and feeding them lunch and cocktails, Mom would present the new products to her captive audiences via a slide projector show and samples. Four flights were booked back-to-back each day, and it was rare for a client to miss such a presentation.

Sales took off. She was a maverick in the sky and was written about often in newspapers and magazines, highlighting her success and innovative idea of a showroom in the sky that attracted buyers to book appointments and buy new and established designs while eating and flying in the skies above. Genius!

ifOnlyi…. short stories are published chronologically, and follow my life growing up in California from 4 years old. If you’ve just found me, the stories will come together when you start reading from….Issue #1