THE INTERVIEW: REMEMBERING PAN AM: JEFF KRIENDLER (PART 2)

Pan Am's Trippe and Boeing's Allen: Making History One Last Time!

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MM: Jeff, what are your memories of the various U.S. Presidents Pan Am carried?

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KRIENDLER: Oh! So many of them, as I had the opportunity to travel on the White House charters. I flew with Jimmy Carter, with President Reagan, with George Bush (Sr.). I flew with George Bush to Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Shield. I flew with George Bush on Thanksgiving Day to Dhahran. I flew on a number of international trips, and on presidential campaigns. I had the occasion to fly with heads of state, presidents, kings, many inaugurals---so many exciting things that occurred in my life because of my association with Pan Am, including the great honor of traveling with Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

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MM: And you knew Charles Lindbergh, right?

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KRIENDLER: Yes I did. He was on our board of directors and he religiously attended meetings. Typically he would come early to our offices in the public relations department, and he would visit with one of Pan Am's earliest employees--a lady named Gerry Lister. At the time, in the PR department, she was the historian, she kept all the company historical files. He was certainly just as described: a gentleman, very quiet, very unassuming, a wonderful guy. He was not a fan of the SST (Supersonic Transport) for environmental reasons. I must say that I helped him achieve one of his last wishes, which was to die and be buried in Maui (Hawaii). I worked with United Airlines to set up a stretcher so he could travel out to Maui. I've stayed in touch with his family through the years. His grandchildren have attended Pan Am events. We had a very large event celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the China Clipper in 1985 where we took a 747 over the original routing: San Francisco--Honolulu--Midway--Wake--Guam--Manila. We invited the Lindberghs and all four of his grandsons came aboard. It was a wonderful, tremendous event. We had James Michener on board too, along with a number of other celebrities.

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MM: For the benefit of my readers here Jeff, let's talk about how the Pan Am Historical Foundation had to acquire through a bankruptcy auction what was literally the employee's birthright?

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KRIENDLER: Without going into all of the historic firsts, Pan Am was a pioneer. Pan Am also had the good sense, as it was making history, to make sure that all of the documentation of the historical events were saved. There was a big collection of materials---objects, artifacts, and archival paperwork. And these items were spread all over the place. They were partly in The Pan Am Building (at 200 Park Avenue, New York), there were some items in New Jersey, some of them had been loaned out, and there were small exhibits through the years in different terminals. In the mid Eighties the Mayor of Miami wrote to Ed Acker (ex-chairman of Pan Am) and said, "As you know, our City Hall that we're occupying space that used to be the Pan Am Terminal at Dinner Key. We are planning to move out and we were thinking that it would be great to create an aviation museum right here". Well, of course we all brightened to that prospect. Ed asked me to deal with the City of Miami and we began to move items down to Miami for safe-keeping, for the eventuality that they would create a museum there for us. There was no Pan Am Historical Foundation at the time. The company just started to pull materials together and sent them to Miami for safe-keeping. Now, some were sent down there, and toward the end of summer 1991, when it looked like we were moving Pan Am II to Miami and moving out of the Pan Am Building (Delta agreed to finance a scaled down Pan Am--referenced earlier--owning 55% with creditors owning the remaining 45%). Right up until the fall of 1991, we sent truckloads to Miami. What happened? We were in Chapter 11 bankruptcy Reorganization and then we shut down on December 4. Literally, there were trucks en route to Miami with company materials, including historical material---and they were stopped. There was a concern about payment and, of course a lot of material was in effect--frozen. In 1992, there were auctions for the name of the company, for the routes, for property and so on. That was when we created The Pan Am Historical Foundation. We didn't have the resources to bid, so we joined with the University of Miai Library Archives Division. We were very concerned that all the historical memorabilia collection would fall into commercial hands, be split up, sold, and that would be the end of it. Trustee of the company, Peter McHugh, had the obligation to maximize the value of the assets that were left. So he could not give these items away to us, and we had to go into the public forum of an auction of what was really our birthright. But that was not the view of the trustee. And I think that people understood that as much as we hated to buy our own items, they were not really ours. They belonged to our creditors.

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MM: Yeah, heartbreaking. How did we ultimately prevail?

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KRIENDLER: Ultimately, we were the winning bid, I think it was $137,000 (US). Now what did we get? We got original Lindbergh letters, aircraft models, aircraft parts, menus, cigarette lighters, chinaware, uniforms, hundreds of thousands of photos, film, incredible first-day stamp collections, all the archives---the history of the company. We are still meticulously combing through all of that. (Note: Only 30 boxes remain to be catalogued at the Otto G. Richter Library in Miami as of this writing). Artifacts are with another partner, The Historical Association of Southern Florida. Ed Trippe (son of founder Juan Trippe) was the president right from the beginning, and it was a labor of love for him, of course it was really in his blood. As he has become increasingly busy with projects, he has handed over the reigns of the presidency to Pete Runnette. But Paul Roitsch (Pan Am's SST test pilot who passed away in 2005) should also be credited for making this happen along with Kathleen Clair (Juan Trippe's secretary--we will hear from both Kathleen, Ed and Pete later in this week-long salute). The Foundation is one organization. However The Foundation has 'Clipper Pioneers' (the Clipper Pilots), former Chinese pilots (from CNAC--China National Aviation Corporation), and pilots in Argentina. We have Pan Am Africa, and an Alaska Corporation. There are 30 to 40 individual groups. We also have a Miami group (to which this author belongs), a National Airlines retiree group, a group in the U.K., Japan and in Germany. (All: Pan Am once owned equity stakes in 33 airlines worldwide). The Foundation certainly would love to have more members. But we have more than 2,000 people actively involved in the preservation of the history of Pan Am.

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My sincere thanks to a mentor and my friend --Jeff Kriendler--a true Legend in Corporate Communications and Public Relations who is beloved and highly respected worldwide--for taking time to share his memories here with us!