When flying was fun

Out of America’s TV factory comes the latest hot show, Pan Am, inspired by that long-ago time in aviation when flying was glamorous and people dressed up to get on a plane. Pan Am, just launched in the US, is a drama series set in the 1960s about aircrew members’ lives.
Retro themes are big right now and viewers are loving stories set in more confident times when Kennedy was in the Oval Office, America ruled the world and the future looked assured. Even if they were clueless about ending the Vietnam war.
Pan American Airlines was all over the globe back in the ‘60s, and flying deep down to the South Pacific even earlier than that. Here’s a New Zealand newspaper ad from the 1950s.
The words give you a taste of flying in the piston-engine age. The Boeing 707 was still a far-off, jet-fuelled dream when the Strato Clipper was the queen of the air – its “four giant engines” boasting a range of 4000 miles, “more than double the average non-stop flight”.
But even so its power wasn’t beefy enough to get you to Hawaii in one leap, so if you flew Pan Am across the Pacific and the United States to London, you had to island-hop with Fiji as the first stop. Crossing the world took at least five days and cost a lot of money; in that era long-distant travel usually meant going by sea.
Perks available in business class today were standard back then – “superb meals” with complimentary champagne, and “a choice of individual sleeping accommodation to the USA at no extra charge”. The Clipper even foreshadowed the 747 in having two decks connected by a spiral staircase.
The ‘stewardesses’ wore pale blue suits, white gloves and polite smiles. Captains were veterans of World War II. Passport control was casual. Security was a breeze.
No-one was x-raying your suitcase, taking your fingerprints or demanding you carry lip balm and eye drops in a plastic bag. It seems like a sweet dream to us now.
How impossible it would have been for Pan Am staffers of those days to imagine the day in 1988 when a jet in that familiar blue livery would lie smashed to pieces in a village called Lockerbie, brought down by a terrorist bomb.
Dear old Pan Am, founded in 1927, was an icon of the 20th century but, bankrupt and struggling, it was forced to close its doors in 1991.
Makes you realise it’s smart to enjoy life’s good things while they last.

High Altitude Harbingers of Change

I last wore shoes like this when I was about 17. I remember red ones with a bow on the front, just like this sketch of mine. (Only there were no imps playing inside.) And I had some super-glam gold lamé ones. That is ‘lamé’ with an accent on the e to denote glittery fabric, which is now so out of fashion that you may not have heard of it. Without the accent you’ll think I’m writing ‘lame’ which is a whole different word. Although if you wear shoes like this for long enough you get quite lame quite fast.

I’m careful about confusion these days because I was interviewed by a journalist for Sunday magazine before Christmas for a story on optimism, and gave her a list of qualities which I thought were good to have if you wanted to live a cheerful life. I gave her words like gratitude, calm, playfulness etc and included civility in there. She wrote that down as servility. Just a little bit off the mark!

Anyhow, back to shoes. I note that in the fashion-show world, heels have never been thinner or higher than they are now. You too will have seen leggy models falling off the things on slippery runways. (Who knows why they’re called runways, because models lope, stride or teeter or but are rarely seen running. Shoes like this would, anyway, make that impossible.)

But given that it was the 1960s when heels were last like this, I begin to wonder whether women’s shoes and times of great change are not somehow connected. The last time girls wore stilettos was a pretty crazy period when old ways were crumbling and everything was shifting from post-war to new-era. And now, here they are again, just as everything seems new and challenging all over again. It’s as if the more uncertain the times, the higher the heel. I await the next few years with interest. Watch for women’s heels to go shorter and wider next year as the world strives for more balance and stability. Like the impish fellow on the slide, we are in for a ride.