The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am by Julia Cooke

Episode Date: March 25, 2021

Come Fly the World: The Jet-Age Story of the Women of Pan Am by Julia Cooke Glamour, danger, liberation: in a Mad Men–era of commercial flight, Pan Am World Airways attracted the kind of young woman who wanted out, and wanted up Required to have a college education, speak two languages, and possess the political savvy of a Foreign Service officer, a jet-age stewardess serving on iconic Pan Am between 1966 and 1975 also had to be between 5′3" and 5′9", between 105 and 140 pounds, and under 26 years of age at the time of hire.Cooke’s intimate storytelling weaves together the real-life stories of a memorable cast of characters, from small-town girl Lynne Totten, a science major who decided life in a lab was not for her, to Hazel Bowie, one of the relatively few Black stewardesses of the era, as they embraced the liberation of their new jet-set life. Cooke brings to light the story of Pan Am stewardesses’ role in the Vietnam War, as the airline added runs from Saigon to Hong Kong for planeloads of weary young soldiers straight from the battlefields, who were off for five days of R&R, and then flown back to war. Finally, with Operation Babylift—the dramatic evacuation of 2,000 children during the fall of Saigon—the book’s special cast of stewardesses unites to play an extraordinary role on the world stage.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

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Fortunate. Chris Voss. And on just about every group you can find on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, et cetera, et cetera. We've got a most amazing author on today. I've been really excited to have her. I grew up in an age of Arab airlines. It was at the very end of this beautiful sort of romantic era of flying. And I'm lucky enough, fortunately, to remember a time where you could go through an airport without

going through massive security measures, TSA, and everything else. And it was still fun, which I can't say the same for now. So it's great that our current author who's come before us is sharing this wonderful story in this book, highlighting some of the beautiful times in our history, some of the great moments in women's challenges and triumphs over those challenges. And I want to welcome her here today. It's Julia Cook, and she's written the book, The Jet Age Story of the Women of Pan Am. Come Fly the World is the title. Her journalism has been published in Time, Smithsonian, and the Condé Nast Traveler.

She's the author of The Other Side of Paradise, Life in the New Cuba, and a daughter of a former Pan Am executive, and she lives in Woodstock, Vermont. Welcome to the show, Julia. How are you? I'm good, thanks. How are you, Chris? Good, good. And to give us your plugs

so people can find you on the interwebs and order up this wonderful book. Sure, yeah. My website is juliacook.com, cook with an e. The website for the book is comeflytheworld.com, and I can be found on social medias as Julia C. Cook, C-O-O-K-E. There you go. And give us what motivated you to write this book? You've written stuff before. What brought you to this project and sparked your imagination or interest in writing it? It was really the women themselves that brought me to it, but in a roundabout way. As you mentioned, my dad had worked for Pan Am until I was about nine years old, which was how old I was when Pan Am went bankrupt.

But I hadn't really thought that much about the airline until I saw that the Pan Am Historical Foundation was going to host an event at the TWA terminal at JFK. I don't know if you've been there or if any of your listeners have been there. If you had, absolutely gorgeous. It's incredible mid-century modern building that's just fantastic. So I'd always wanted to go there. And when I went to this event, it was an event to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the first time the Beatles flew to the U.S. on Pan Am, of course. I wound up just talking to these women who had been former flight crew on Pan Am. They were in their 70s. They were bright and smart and totally sophisticated and had the best sense of humor.

They were really daring. And they talked about history with this level of knowledge and intimacy that I found so compelling and i just wanted to know everything about them so they were what they were what initially they were the spark and i think that area has been turned into a hotel now where you can go really soak in that whole sort of area you can even you can soak in an infinity pool on the rooftop so while you watch airplanes take off. So yeah, this was before that time, but, and I actually haven't, I moved away from New York in the years since, since it opened. So I actually haven't even been, and I'm dying to get there. Like I said, there's a romanticism to flying. At least this might've used to been when I was a kid,

my parents would take us to the airport and we watched them flying it out. And it was just like magical as a child. Would you say this book kind of profiles maybe the golden age of airlines and the industry? It does in a way. And more specifically, it profiles the women of the golden age of travel. I think that they're a group of women who haven't really been examined or profiled in the way that I think they should have been. They're really fascinating women. They had a level of access and involvement in these huge moments of history that hasn't really been looked at until now. And these women were world travelers, and they hung out with diplomats. Back then, the people who could afford to fly on airlines were people of wealth, education, experience. They were global people, people that they were highly educated.

It was unlike when I get on an airplane. I just bring everybody down. So give us a broad overview of the book, if you would. Yeah. So the book starts in about 1966. It covers the nine years from 1966 to 1975, basically. And it really profiles the lives of five women specifically, who all worked for Pan Am at different points in time in that time period. And they all really experienced different things within the airline. So the book, it talks about women's movement into the ranks of management. It talks about women who flew on really dangerous Vietnam War flights. And it talks about women who flew on really dangerous Vietnam War flights. And it talks about women who the legal battles that a number of stewardesses pioneered in order

to be able to keep their jobs and to dismantle the really pretty sexist requirements that were in place in 1966. And so it chronicles a really important moment in time in both the airline industry and in American life also. This was the era of when the civil rights movement was really impacting people's lives, changing the lives of Black Americans everywhere. And when the Vietnam War protest movement was kicking off in tandem with the Vietnam War itself. So it really chronicles this changing period in American life and the way those changes were felt by the airline industry, by the women who worked in it, and more specifically by the specific five women that I am profiling. And that's awesome. You sat down with these women, you got their stories, their experiences, some of their insights and some. What makes a lot of the women who work for

Pan Am really exemplary or special? They're an incredible group of really curious women who are to this day incredibly open to new experiences. They're an incredible group of really curious women who are to this day incredibly open to new experiences. They're all really very bright women in that moment in time in the early 1960s, mid 1960s. The requirements to work on Pan Am were both physical and a lot has been made certain weight, and really stereotypically pretty beautiful. But they were also required to be really smart, quick thinkers. They were required to have a college education and to speak two languages. So this was the statistic that I cite in the book is that in the mid-1960s, I think late 1960s, 10% of the women on Pan Am had graduate degrees. Now, in the American public as a whole, only about 7% of the American women had graduated from college. So this is a really elite group of women. And so to this day, they're an incredibly interesting, curious, world-hungry group of people who really

just want to travel and get out and do things and meet interesting people and see interesting things. And that's really unique to them. We had J.A. Jantz on the show. She's written like 65 books and she had talked about growing up in that era. And the social pressure for a lot of women or expectations, whatever you want to call it, was you find a man, you get married, you have kids, you go in the kitchen, you don't work a job. And we talked about on her show about how she was put off for 12 years by number one, her husband who said, I'll be the only writer in this house. And then by her work where she studied. So a lot of these women, would you say that some of this is helping them escape from some of that social thing where they can go do what they want? They

can travel the world, they can meet and learn all sorts of exotic things. Is that a- Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of what I heard from a lot of my interview subjects was that they felt like they had very limited options. They could get married and have a family. They could work as one of three professions. They could be a nurse, they could be a teacher, they could be a secretary. And then in came stewardessing. And that was also socially acceptable, but it gave you a ticket to the world. It got you out of your hometown. It put you in strange and interesting situations. It was an exciting thing. I think it's easy to forget that at the start of the 1960s, women were getting married incredibly

young. They were in the tiniest numbers in colleges and graduate schools, and they were in higher numbers in colleges. But still, law schools, being a doctor, these were not careers. They were careers that women could pursue, but they knew that they would be fighting, that they'd be fighting the current, that they'd be swimming upstream. So, you know, a lot of the types of really curious, interesting women, you know, also knew that they could become stewardesses and not have not faced that kind of social pressure and jet around the world. So it seems pretty appealing.

Oh yeah. See the world, have fun. I've, I was engaged to a flight, is a flight attendant or flight stewardesses? I get yelled at for both sides of it. Now it's flight attendant. Now the right word to use is flight attendant. But the part of why I use the word stewardess is to denote the historical era that I'm talking about. Yeah. I figured I want to identify that. So I had one gal I was engaged to. she oversaw flight attendants at Delta in Salt Lake City at the hub. And of course she'd have to go work for people called in sick. And then I did another flight attendant years earlier, but yeah, I would get yelled at if I use the wrong terminology and I respect that. But it was interesting because I think in your, in the time you profile

on the book, are they considered more flight stewardesses or flight attendants? One of the first things that happened to me when I was talking to the women that I was interviewing. So I told you about being at the TWA terminal. So then I just wound up after that, my process was I just started crashing their parties. I would go to the luncheons that they hosted and I would go to the conventions they have. The Pan Am Alumni Association hosts conventions and conferences and luncheons. I hosted. And I would go to the conventions, they have the Pan Am Alumni Association hosts conventions and conferences and luncheons, and I just started going to them. And one of the first things that happened to me was when I was I referred to one of the women that I was talking to as a flight attendant. And she said, No, dear, I was a stewardess, it was a

different job back then. And I respected that's just her opinion. There were our women that I'm taught that appear in my book, for example, both Tori Werner and Hazel Bowie, who are two main subjects of the book. They were both stewardesses and flight attendants because they kept flying for 40 years. They are the reason why the much more gender neutral term flight attendant became the term that is used today. Yeah. That's interesting. Usually, I think the perception was from some of the people that in the flight attendant era of people that I dated, they're like stewardesses serve food. And I was like, we're not servers. And I'm like, I don't know. It's none of my business. But there was a time when flight travel was beautiful and there was so much they did on the plane. And it just seemed like it was all first class sort of experience, but no one wants to dismiss them as just waitresses of the sky. But that was what I was using. Yeah, no. And it's interesting. So there's a real perception that that was the case back then. And

that's the case now that there's a whole replacement song that goes waitress in the sky, waitress in the sky, et cetera. You don't want to hear me sing. But the point is that's a real, that was a perception then it's a perception now. And it's just as wrong in both eras because flight crews are, so a lot of what my book, the argument that my book makes and the proof, what it proves is that back then international diplomacy, these women were really acting, stewardesses were acting as what we would now term, they were doing soft diplomacy, what we would now call soft diplomacy. If you think about the places that they were flying around a globe that was undergoing massive changes and that was embroiled in not one, but two global conflicts, there was the Cold War and the Vietnam War. All across Africa and Asia,

countries were being decolonized in huge numbers in the 50s and early 60s. So there were all of these new countries who were figuring out how they wanted to interact with the rest of the world. And the air treaties that were being negotiated put these women in a lot of really dicey and fascinating situations. That's on one level. On a whole nother level, they were in charge of flights that were filled with diplomats, refugees, soldiers. In the Vietnam War flights that I write about, these women were flying into an active war zone. So they were really far from waitresses in the sky, and they were doing so much more. I think it's great that your book profiles this

and really puts the rest, some of those different machinations that people seem to imagine about what was really going on back then. One thing you put in the front of your book and a thing that was unique to Pan Am was their flight routes. Do you want to tell us more about what made them special? Yeah, totally. Pan Am was the only American airline that flew exclusively international routes. There were other American airlines

that flew internationally. For example, TWA had flight routes to Europe and Braniff had flight routes to South America. But Pan Am was the only plane, the only airline that when you stepped, when you set foot on a Pan Am plane, you were absolutely certain that you were going to get off, that the next ground that you would step on would be a foreign country. So they, and they were the only airline, the first American airline and the first international airline, to operate a flight that looped around the world. So you could fly all the way around the world from New York across Europe and Asia and then back to L.A. Or you could loop the other way around. And it was the only airline that did that.

And so these women are getting to travel the world. They're getting to meet all these diplomats and all these different things. You even profile some of the different things with the war that went on and some of the different ways they rescued orphans and everything else. What are some of the splashy and serious adventures or misadventures some of these women had? So they really, they ran the gamut. Throughout the 60s, airplanes were fired on while ferrying American troops around Southeast Asia amid global conflicts in Asia, but also in Africa and the Biafran War and in other conflicts. They were hijacked to Cuba in the golden era of

plane hijacking. One of the main women in the book, Tori Werner, who I mentioned earlier, who flew for a very long time, was caught up in a diplomatic kidnapping incident between two countries in West Africa. So in the 1970s, other women were going to Cold War Moscow, where they played games that they could like shake the KGB, because they all knew that they were being followed. They went to the circus and they waited in line for rations with other Soviet women. There was a lot of, there was fun, but there was also really serious, really, really serious work. They were flying in the Vietnam War. They were flying men into an active war zone. They were flying them into war. And they took that very seriously.

And as you mentioned, a bit of soft diplomacy. So they were the face of democracy to a lot of countries, peoples, diplomats, people who are traveling among countries. They're almost a representation maybe of American democracy. They absolutely were. And the airline was. There's a quote in the book from a CIA agent who in the 1960s and 70s said that in some countries, Pan Am was more easily recognized than Coca-Cola. So I think it's easy for us to forget now, almost 30 years since the airline went under, that that was the case, but that was certainly true. Yeah. And anybody who's been in New York has seen that iconic Pan Am building that used to be like a monument to that sort of the air age, the golden part of the air age.

Absolutely. Although now it's the MetLife building. So a lot of people in New York wouldn't even know that it was once the Pan Am building. That's true. So one of the issues that these stewardesses has, they're living their best life. They're traveling. There's danger. You post some great pictures in the book of some of the different adventures that they're on. One thing that was interesting to me is, and I was just going from the pictures that you'd posted, it seems like there is a lot of diversity in racial diversity in Pan Am's flight stewardess. Is that a correct analogy or am I just getting that wrong off the pictures? So basically, that does require a little bit of context, though. Like all of the

airlines of the era, Pan Am only began to hire women of color in larger numbers when they were compelled by the EEOC to do so after 1965. There were very small numbers of women of color on any airlines before then. But after that, they did work hard to hire women of different backgrounds, in part because they were flying to so many different places and they wanted people to see Pan Am as an international, diverse plane. That would make sense. If you're flying the world, that's diverse with all sorts of different people, you hopefully have a stewardess class of people that can reflect that as well. And that can help make different different passengers feel at home one of the challenges the women had is they're living their best life but there's a cap

on like age limit there's a cap on cap on height the cap on weight i certainly wouldn't make it but my dream i had to go find other dreams the one of the things that happens is uh they end up being a part or help shaping the American feminist movement because they have to deal with some of these issues of discrimination. Exactly. Yeah. So this is part of why my book deals with this really critical moment of time from 1966 to 1975, because one of the big things that changed in this time period was the way that stewardesses were able to do their jobs. So in the mid early and mid-1960s, the requirements were, as I mentioned,

they were weight, they were height, they were beauty, but they were also that the women be under 26 at the time of hire and that they be unmarried. And the airline was entitled to fire its employees, the flight crew, these stewardesses, if they got married or by the time they turned 35. So this was intended both to keep them as a group of employees cheap. It meant that the airlines didn't have to pay for expensive health

insurance claims or dependents or anything like that. But it also was intended to, it was just openly sexist. They were trying to keep their stewards as young and pretty and nominally available. The women very logically said, that's bunk. I'd like to keep my job. Thank you. I really enjoy it. And they took the airlines to court. And at first they were turned down. They lost their court cases. The judges who were by and large, pretty conservative still in the late fifties and early 1960s agreed with the airlines that the airlines also put up really comprehensive defenses. And let me tell you about reading some of those court cases. It was one of the most interesting parts of my research

was to read the way that the different things that the judges, that the airlines said as a reason why they had to hire only unmarried women. My favorite was that they said that they got too many complaints from husbands and they didn't have the switchboard. They didn't have enough, the bandwidth necessary to deal with the amount of men who would call and say, when's my wife going to be home? Where do you have her off to now? And there were a couple of judges

who actually bought into that at first. And then eventually over the course of the sixties, one judge said, how is a wife calling in with a complaint any different from a husband calling in with a complaint? This is not a good enough, not a good enough reason not to hire men. Eventually, this is a long-winded way to get around to saying that these lawsuits that the women brought against the airlines on the basis of gender discrimination, basically, set the legal precedent for gender-based labor law discrimination. There you go. Because they were definitely leading industry. Women are mostly controlling this industry, as you mentioned before, the other women that are in industry are just relegated to secretaries and other low-level positions. And these guys are high-profile women. And yeah, I think it was the Employment Act. I forget what

era it was issued. It was 1965. So this is right in that- The EEOC, exactly. And initially, the EEOC had not been intended to address the claims of women. It was primarily about racial equity, but the women stewardesses, in fact, were some of the first people through at the doors who said, we really love our jobs. We want to be able to keep it. We think that these requirements are sexist. Please help us dismantle them. I know they had to add sex later to the EEOC. Exactly, to the clauses.

Absolutely. Yeah. How did stewardesses of this jet age really define the profession that still lingers with us today? Yeah. So these very lawsuits really opened up the doors of the job to women of different ages, women who wanted to accrue seniority, men, eventually in 1972, the lawsuits that were brought by women of color, by Black women with the NAACP at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 60s opened the doors to diverse women of diverse backgrounds. Today, what that has led to was flight crews that much more accurately reflect America. Back in the early 1960s, flight crews were really just young white women. And now flight crews are us. Yeah, it's

everybody when you're flying. So, yeah. And they have such a hell of a job now, especially with the anti-maskers and they put it with so much shit. You know, it's so easy to forget. I think it's been really interesting to watch this, the poor flight crews that have to deal with the anti-maskers these days. God, it's easy to forget

that flight crews are first responders. They're frontline workers. They're there for our safety. In reality, they're often treated like these customer service, or again, waitress in the sky, people who were there to bring us drinks and food. In reality, if we're getting from point A to point B safely and nothing's going wrong, because there are a million things that can go wrong in the air still today. The fact that things don't go totally off the rails far more often is really a testament to the hard work that these people are doing. And it's easy to forget that. Yeah. They're for safety reasons and everything else. I fortunately dating a few flight attendants, I would hear about all the different things and things that they would do

and some of the issues they would have. And yeah, because of that, every time I'm on a plane, I'm nice to the flight attendants because they're great people and they're doing a great service. And if anything happens on the plane, you're going to need their help. Absolutely. There you go. My usual help is I just need an extra thing of vodka. So can I get the bottle? And they're always sweet. And they're like, you look like an alcoholic. We'll give you the whole bottle, Chris, the little mini bottle. But you profile some beautiful women in the book.

Some had worked up to 40 years. So by them being able to overcome those issues of prejudice and discrimination, they were able to have beautiful careers and live their lives. And like I said, the women that I dated, one of the things they just loved was that adventure of the job, being able to go to different cities. Some of them would be in three different cities in a day. And they would stay in the hotel and they'd go down to Soho or wherever and they'd get to adventure around. Of course, the airlines give them cab money and everything else so they can get around. They've got a nice expense account.

I don't know if they still do. It seems like everyone's clawing back all the fun stuff. It was fun and they love the adventure. I think you become a much better and broader-minded person when you travel. Absolutely. I could not agree more. It's interesting. I said that earlier that one of the things that these women all have in common is the sense of curiosity and their openness to new experience. I found that really inspiring. I had never met a huge group of 70-something, 80-something women who were all just open to new experience still at that age. And I really respected that. But there's this one quote in the book that I found that I think really encompasses what you're talking about, which is this woman told Ms. Magazine back in the 70s that she said, I've always thought it was ironic that we have this docile image.

Maybe in the past that was true, but most of the women I know began to fly because they were just too independent and curious about the world to sit around in a nine to five job getting cramps in their shoulders. Yeah. Yeah. With J.A. Jantz, she was sidelined for what, 12 years, I think. I hope I'm getting her name right. I have to check it, but she was sidelined for 12 years. She's put out 65 books since then. And you just look at her and go, wow, if she would have had those 12 years, who knows what even more she would have written prolifically. And just so much talent contribution that can come to the world. One of the other things that I heard in watching some of your interviews was there was a quote from one of the women that you interviewed. And it was about how when she flies, she doesn't book

a return flight immediately. I thought that was really interesting. That was when I knew that I had to write this book, when I met this woman at the TWA terminal and I offered her. So what happened was we were there and I had driven my car from my apartment in Manhattan out to JFK. And I said, do you want to ride back home? And because she also lived in Manhattan, not far from where I lived. And she said, of course. And I said, so you didn't take the train out here. You don't have a return ticket.

She said, oh, darling, I never buy a return ticket. You never know what's going to happen. And I thought, you are amazing. I think I learned that from some of my girlfriends. There's whenever I go to a big city and I usually take a camera. So I get like an ice can or something that I'll rent. I used to buy them. And then I'm just like, you can rent these and then you don't have to have them laying around all the time. And so usually what I'll do, if I've got to fly back, I'll try and spend the day in the city. And so usually there's either a shuttle I can

call and it'll be there within a half an hour, or you can grab a taxi to the airport. But usually I just take my bag and I've got a little gig bag and I wander around, shoot stuff, take pictures, and just experience the city. Like Chicago, I'll walk around the bean, go to the pizza place, and just wander around and soak it in for a whole day. And then right before I got to jump the plane, but I usually make time to do that. One time I went to, I think it was St. Louis or someplace, and I spent, I had to speak for just, you know,

a couple hours on stage, but I basically booked it for three days so I could eat as much barbecue as I possibly could. That sounds fun. That was crazy. The, why do you think the Pan Am legacy is still so nostalgic? Why does that bring back that golden age era?

Is it because flying now is awful? No, so it's so interesting. I thought a lot about that as I was doing this book. And I think there are so many different layers to that question, or to the answer to that question. In the first place, I think that anything international really held a waft of glamour back then. This was after World War II, after the post-war stability of the 50s. And so in the 60s, really the international was seen as very glamorous and Pan Am was exclusively international. In the second place, there was the glamour of the airline itself. The airline worked

really hard to cultivate that glamour. It hired the best architects to do its corporate headquarters and designers to do forms, and it really invested a lot in image. So that has stuck with us. But it's also because on Pan Am, in part because of its involvement with these different global conflicts, and in part because of the international roots, Pan Am flew troops around the world in various conflicts, brought soldiers back home after really harrowing tours of duty. It brought refugees and immigrants from war zones, from the former USSR, from other regions for the first time to their new homes in the US. So for some veterans, refugees, immigrants, and many other people with a lot of internationalism in their backgrounds, Pan Am became a really powerful symbol of freedom and change. And I think there was a story you told about how at one point the Pan Am was charging a dollar a month or something to transport troops. Yeah. So, so Pan Am's involvement in Vietnam really was one of the big surprises to me when I began researching this book.

And there's a reason why I was, I included so much of that in the book too, because I thought it was really fascinating that there was this contrast between the perception of the role that these women played, which was really that it was just really glamorous and that they had all this international fun. And then the reality of it, which is that for a lot of the women, especially those who were stationed, who were living on the West Coast and flying out of LAX or SFO, They were flying in and out of an active war zone. So what happened was Pan Am, like other airlines in the US in that time period, contracted with the US government to fly troops into Vietnam as the troop buildup was happening from 1965 on. In 1966, the DoD announced that it wanted to be able to do a five-day R&R trip for each soldier at some point over the course of his year in country, but that they didn't have the ability to do that until they just lacked airplanes. So Pan Am stepped in and said, we're going to do that for you. We're going to operate,

I think it was something like 18,000, but I don't remember actually the specific number of flights per month, but they said they were going to operate a ton of flights every month from Saigon to, from Saigon, Cameron Bay, Da Nang to Hong Kong at first. And they were only going to charge the US government a dollar a month for the first four months. From then on out, they charged at cost. But the point is that Pan Am, these planes required crews. So those crews were composed of women. So this meant that a ton of women were just flying in and out of very dangerous situations. I heard stories of women in planes being shot at. I heard that they watched mortar fire below them. They watched bodies being loaded into the plane underneath them. They helped soldiers with PTSD on board. One woman told me a really horrible story about a man

who tried to open the rear door of the airplane rather than go back into combat. She had to talk him down from that. And so these women were fulfilling these very different roles than what they were seen as fulfilling. Real pioneering, that sort of stuff. Because I think during the Iraq war and stuff, we used some of the airlines, or I think probably in all of the wars, we've used the airlines to back us up. Exactly. So the U.S. government, unlike other countries where the government owns the airline or doesn't own it, there's what's called a flag carrier, a national flag carrier, which is an airline that's associated with the government. The U.S. doesn't work like that, but the U.S. also doesn't have enough planes to fly

troops into a conflict. So there's a standing contract, a standing agreement with the civilian airlines that they will help, that they will contract out their services in the event of a war. And one of the things you profile in your book is the flight out of, I believe these are the Cambodian babies or the Vietnamese babies? Yeah, this was Operation Babylift. So it was at the very end of the Saigon or of the Vietnam War. The U.S. had officially left Vietnam a couple of years earlier, but this was in 1975 at the end of just as the North Vietnamese were about to take over South Saigon. And the various orphanages had been struggling to get all of their, the children who were slated to be adopted by American families. They were trying to get them out of the country. And there was a log jam

and the U.S. Air Force offered to send in a plane to bring out a couple hundred of them all at once, but that plane crashed. So the next day it was tragic. Half of the people on board died. Um, it was a really horrific crash and it re it, it spurred and Connecticut businessman to charter a Pan Am flight out of, you know, to go pick up the survivors of that crash and a couple hundred more babies. And that was the beginning of what was called Operation Babylift eventually. It was a really complicated event in American history for a lot of different reasons that I go into more detail about in the book. But what I found so fascinating about that moment was that there

were women who were at a hotel room in Hong Kong, and they were told that their flight was going to, that they were being reassigned onto a flight that would go into Saigon. And they did not know in that moment whether, why that plane had crashed the day before. All they had heard was that they were going to pick up children who needed them. And they had heard was that they were going to pick up children who needed them. And they said, yes, they jumped on the plane. And one of the interesting facets is that they're saving these kids' life. And evidently, they were children of GIs, I think. A number of them were. Yeah. And again, this is a really, it's a, man, it's a thorny moment of

history because some of them were the children of GIs. Some of them were actual orphans. Some of them were not orphans and just got swept up and the paperwork was not well covered. So in those cases, it almost looks like a kidnapping, but in some of the cases, it was a really necessary thing. So that's of the the complication of the whole the operation baby lift issue like in a moment of time but yeah and there were and there was and there was worry that they would get slaughtered if exactly yeah the rumor in saigon had it that that as the north vietnamese came had come through cities to the north they just were were slaughtering these half half american half vietnamese or they were they slaughtering these half American, half Vietnamese. They are American,

but these racially mixed children. And so the mothers of these children in particular were just terrified. They just wanted their babies to be safe. So they left some of them at orphanages and hoped that the orphanages, they knew that Americans and Europeans were adopting a number of Vietnamese orphans. And so they hoped that their children would be saved. And blessed that they got those children out because the Viet Cong, they killed a lot of people. And then Cambodia and everything else, the killing fields, et cetera, et cetera. A beautiful book, of course, covering all these different aspects of this era, the challenges

that this was a really pivotal time in our nation's history. And anything we haven't covered about the book that you'd like to touch on or tease readers with to get the book? I think the only thing that I would say is that it's a moment of time that has a lot of relevance to today, both for what these women did and the precedent that they set for the ways in which they really claimed independence in a moment that in which it was not given to them. And also, they were all doing, they were performing this really gritty, dangerous, interesting role while making it look pretty effortless. That was one of the things that I found so fascinating and inspiring about these women. And of course, that there's a cost to that. They were not, they should have gotten this respect a long time ago, but a lot of them, a number of them were really pleased to be telling me their stories. That was

one of the things that I noticed when I began to research this book was that it felt like a number of these women that I was profiling were really excited to tell their stories to someone who would take them seriously and not just look for the glamour in it, but also the gravity. And that's what the book tries to do. It tries to cover both. That is awesome. That's what I learned a long time ago with me. It's not all about the glamour with this face. It's about the hard work too, but there's the glamour. So I certainly appreciate you coming on the show and sharing this data with us, Julia. And profiling the sage, because I still have romanticism in the sage. There was a beauty, there was an elegance. I love watching old videos of the movies on the planes and just first-class service, the dining,

stuff you don't see on your coach flights these days on Southwest. I like Southwest. No shade, no darkness to them. But you just see it, just beautiful opulence and elegance. And you're just like, wow, the serving stuff is all stainless steel or whatever. And you're just like, my God, those people were living it up. It was pretty beautiful. Yeah, it was pretty great.

Can we go back to that? Can I at least just get more room on my seat? and it was pretty beautiful. Yeah, it was pretty great. Can we go back to that? At least, can I at least just get more room on my seat? Like, I think we're moving to the point where we're just gonna be standing up and in flight travel and God, I wish we could get back to getting rid of the TSA. I get it, but I really don't. But I'm so blessed to have lived through so much of an age where you didn't have to have a phone, a mobile phone, or you didn't have to have some of the things you used to have. And it did seem like a better romantic age, but I don't know. They always say you can never go back. Every time I go back, it's,

I don't know, for me, when I go back to places, it's not quite as fun, but this was certainly an interesting age and everything that it did. So thank you for coming and spending some time with us, Julie. We certainly appreciate it. I will say these days you got to make your own glamour. It's still, it exists, but you got to find it yourself. There you go. I work at it every day with this face. Brad Pitt calls me and says, Hey man, you got any tips for me? And I'm like, dude, there's only so much you can work with.

Work hard, Brad. Yeah. If you look at the list of sexiest men, I'm usually like third behind George Clooney and him, but so there's that. So give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs in order. So the book is come fly the world, the jet age story of the women of Pan Am. It can be found anywhere. Fine books are sold. The, the, its website lives on the internet at come fly the world.com. And I am Julia cook and

I, my internet, my social medias are Julia C. Cook on both Instagram and Twitter. There you go. There you go. Thank you, Julia. I was playing Come Fly With Me from Frank Sinatra because I thought that really captured the romanticism, that song, Frank Sinatra, come fly with me. I'm not going to sing. Anyway, guys, be sure to check out the book, The Jet Age Story of the Women of Pan Am. Come Fly the World. And I love the cover. It captures it perfectly. Oh, thanks.

Those glasses and everything else. So check out the book, guys. Order it up. Refer to your friends, neighbors, relatives. Go see the video version of this on YouTube.com. Forge, that's Chris Voss. Go to Goodreads.com. Forge, that's Chris Voss.

See all the groups we have on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, wherever, wherever. We got all sorts of stuff going on. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Be sure to wear your mask. Stay safe and we'll see you guys next time.