The Pan Am Podcast

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In this episode, we are joined by Admiral William O. Studeman, United States Navy, retired, and his wife Diane, former Pan Am stewardess and one of the most gracious ambassadors the airline ever had.
Their connection to Pan Am runs deeper than most. Diane grew up in Milford-on-Sea in Hampshire, England. The navy and aviation were not just a backdrop to her childhood but its very fabric. She joined Pan Am as a stewardess in the early 1960s, at what many would argue was the cultural apex of the Jet Age, when the uniform was a statement and the Clipper was a promise of something larger than the ordinary.
Bill is, in the truest sense, a Pan Am kid. His father, Oliver J. Studeman, joined Pan Am's Western Division at Brownsville, Texas in 1933, flying mail-carrying tri-motored Fokkers from Texas through Mexico to Panama and across the north coast of South America. He was known professionally as O.J. and had the nickname of "Stude" by his friends and colleagues. Over four decades, O.J. rose from Chief Pilot of the Western Division to Operations Manager of the Alaska, Pacific, and Latin American divisions, to Assistant Vice President of Pan Am's Guided Missile Range Division at Cape Canaveral, to Vice President of the Metropolitan Air Facilities Division at Teterboro, New Jersey, where he retired in 1972. His uncle, on his mother's side, also worked for the airline. Bill was born in Brownsville in January 1940. Pan Am, for him, was not just a company. It was a family inheritance.
Bill and Diane met in the summer of 1962 at London's Heathrow Airport, where Bill was working the Pan Am ticket counter and Diane was working the TWA desk. She joined Pan Am shortly after. He entered Officer Candidate School in 1963 and spent the next 32 years in the United States Navy as a naval intelligence officer. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Senator Frank Murkowski said Bill had "mastered, as few others have, the intricate and arcane world of signals intelligence." He served as Director of Naval Intelligence, Director of the National Security Agency, and Deputy Director of Central at CIA, twice serving as its acting director of the agency across two presidential administrations. Diane hung up her wings to become a Navy wife and mother. They settled eventually in Annapolis.
Before the interview, this episode explores three places that rarely appear in the standard Pan Am narrative: Brownsville, Texas, where the airline learned to fly in the clouds and where O.J. "Stude" Studeman first fell in love with the sky; Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, the man-made island built to launch the Boeing B-314 Flying Boats toward Asia, whose art deco terminal still stands today; and Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, the oldest operating commercial airport in the New York metropolitan area, and the place where O.J. Studeman's remarkable Pan Am career came to a close.
Bill and Diane's son, Rear Admiral Mike Studeman (ret.), recently published a book on leadership called Might of the Chain: Forging Leaders of Iron Integrity now available in bookstores and as an audiobook. 
This is Episode 65 of The Pan Am Podcast, and the final full episode with Tom Betti as host in the history and humanities format that has defined this program since its first season. Episode 66, the season finale and Tom's final episode, will be a five-year retrospective with special guests.
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A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and  Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support!

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In this episode, we are joined by two women who gave the best years of their careers to Pan American World Airways, and who have remained close friends for more than four decades since the airline closed its doors.
Florette H. Vassall was born in New York City, the daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Panama. Aviation was a constant in her life from the very beginning. Her father was passionate about flight, and as a young girl, Florette watched Pan Am's famous flying boats cross the sky above New York City, an impression that would last a lifetime. Then the war came. Her father was drafted into the Army and assigned as an air traffic controller because of his background in radio, while her mother served as an officially designated air raid warden. Those years brought challenges that went well beyond the war itself.
In 1967, Florette was looking for a job that came with travel benefits so she could visit friends she had made while living in Acapulco, Mexico. Pan American World Airways hired her. Perhaps it was not entirely a coincidence. What started as a practical decision became a 24-year career. Florette worked as a ticket agent, trainer, and supervisor at the Pan Am Building in the heart of midtown Manhattan, right up until the airline shut down in Miami in December 1991. For more than two decades, she was a fixture at Counter Vanderbilt, the largest ticket counter in the world at the time. Customers, employees, company visitors, special guests, and board members all knew her by name.
The 59-story Pan Am Building, constructed between 1960 and 1963 above Grand Central Station, was the largest commercial office space in the world by square footage when it opened on March 7, 1963. Pan Am founder Juan Trippe had signed a 25-year lease for 613,000 square feet, and the airline occupied 15 floors. Listeners who heard Episode 10 will recall the late Richard Roth Jr., whose family firm Emery Roth & Sons worked alongside Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi to bring the building to life. Richard passed away in late 2022 at the age of 89, just one year after sharing his remarkable firsthand account with this program.
Florette is a retired teacher, a former model, and an actress. For more than 40 years she has produced multicultural arts and culture programming for television in New York City. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Fordham University and is the author of the chapter titled "The Pan Am Building" in the book Pan Am: Personal Tributes to a Global Aviation Pioneer, compiled by Jeff Kriendler and James Patrick Baldwin. At 91 years young, she has never stopped.
Diane Krumholtz Lyras began her Pan Am career on January 24, 1977, hired as a Clerk Stenographer in Labor Relations. She went on to work in Reservations as a Sales Agent, then as a Sales Account Manager serving the White Plains and Long Island markets, before returning to the Pan Am Building as Manager of Administration for the Northeast Division, and ultimately as Manager of Administration for the United States Division. Like Florette, she was there until the end, leaving in August 1991.
Listeners who heard Episode 27 will remember Diane from one of the most difficult chapters in Pan Am's history. On September 5, 1986, Pan Am Flight 73 was hijacked on the ground in Karachi, Pakistan, in an act of senseless violence that left 20 people dead and more than 100 injured. Diane Krumholtz Lyras, then of the White Plains Pan Am sales office, was sent to Karachi as part of the company's crisis response team to assist staff and families in the aftermath. Diane also serves on the board of the Pan Am Museum Foundation.
Florette and Diane met inside the Pan Am Building in 1980 and became fast friends. They are still friends today.
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A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and  Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support!

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In this episode, host Tom Betti is joined by three special guests - Pan Am flight attendant Karen Walker Ryan and adoptees Carol Mason and Dr. Matt Steiner - to mark the 51st anniversary of Operation Babylift, the frantic evacuation ordered by U.S. President Gerald R. Ford of Vietnamese war orphans in the final days of Saigon in 1975.
But this episode is about more than history. It is about what happens to people after history moves through them. It is about memory, identity, and the bonds that form in the most unlikely of circumstances. It is about three people whose lives were bound together by a single flight fifty years ago - and who have never let go of each other since.
Karen Walker Ryan served as a Pan Am flight attendant from 1969 to 1978. She volunteered to fly into Saigon in the final days of the war, and her photograph holding baby Carol Mason was later published on the cover of Reader's Digest. Karen has stayed in close contact with several of the children from that flight ever since. Her story, and her decades-long bond with Carol and Matt, was featured on ABC's Good Morning America and ABC's 20/20.
Carol Mason was five months old when she was airlifted out of Vietnam on the second Operation Babylift flight. She grew up in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, and learned about her own story at age 25 when her mother spotted Karen's photograph in a magazine. Hers is a story about what it means to search for yourself - and what you find when you finally do.
Dr. Matthew Steiner was born in Vientiane, Laos in 1966 and raised in a Saigon orphanage before being evacuated to the United States at age nine through Operation Babylift. He went on to become a high school valedictorian, and today serves as an emergency physician helping patients facing life-threatening conditions. The boy who once needed saving, now doing the saving. 
This episode also features an original song, "Waking Up American," performed by Jared Rehberg - himself a Babylift adoptee - at the Pan Am Museum's 50th Anniversary event in Garden City, New York. Jared composed the song years earlier as a meditation on growing up between two worlds, and it is the only way this episode could end.
Please watch the 13-minute documentary Operation Babylift: A Celebration of the Human Spirit.
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A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and  Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support!

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In this episode, we are joined by Al Gilbert, known by his friends and family as Ace, a former Pan Am reservations employee and the author of Pan Am Stories: You Can't Make This Up.
Al's career at Pan Am gave him a front-row seat to one of the most remarkable chapters in aviation history, and the stories he collected along the way are as funny, surprising, and human as the airline itself.
After leaving Pan Am, Al channeled decades of memories and experiences into his book, a collection of firsthand accounts and tales based on true stories that capture the personality, culture, and spirit of an airline unlike any other.
This episode is a celebration of storytelling, what it means to preserve history through personal narrative, why the Pan Am story deserves to be told, and how even the most unlikely moments can become the ones that stay with you forever.
Over five years and 62 episodes, host Tom Betti has built one of the most distinctive independent history podcasts available, earning nearly 200,000 downloads, a perfect five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, several awards, and listeners in over 180 countries. He did it with no budget, no staff, and no paycheck, driven entirely by a passion for Pan Am history and the belief that great storytelling can make anyone care about a subject they never knew they were missing.
And we open with one of the best: the true story of Felix the cat, who in December of 1987 disappeared into the cargo hold of a Pan Am 747 and didn't surface for 29 days and nearly 180,000 miles.
From the sales and reservation offices of Pan Am to the pages of a book that refuses to let the legend fade, Al Gilbert's story is a reminder that history is best kept alive by the people who lived it, and by the ones who loved it enough to make sure it wasn't forgotten.
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A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and  Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support!

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In this episode, we are joined by Laurie Gwen Shapiro, a bestselling author, journalist, and adjunct professor at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. 
A member of the Explorers Club, her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. She is the author of The Stowaway, the true story of a teenager who stowed away on a ship bound for Antarctica during the Jazz Age, and The Aviator and the Showman: Amelia Earhart, George Putnam, and the Marriage that Made an American Icon, a New York Times Editors' Choice and one of the best books of the year by NPR, The New Yorker, and Smithsonian Magazine.
But before our conversation with Laurie, we set the stage, because the Amelia Earhart story is deeply a Pan Am story.
On January 9, 1929, three defining figures of the aviation age stood on the tarmac of Pan Am's new Miami terminal, Juan Trippe, Charles Lindbergh, and Amelia Earhart. Trippe invited Earhart aboard Pan Am's Fokker F-10A, captained by Edwin Musick, for the inaugural flight to Havana.
At the center of that relationship was Fred Noonan, Pan Am's greatest navigator, who charted the transpacific routes. 
When Earhart assembled her team in 1937, Noonan was the navigator every conversation kept returning to. Trippe extended Pan Am's full cooperation, and Pan Am mechanics spent a week on her Lockheed Electra in Miami. On July 2, 1937, Earhart and Noonan departed Lae, New Guinea, bound for Howland Island - 2,556 miles of open ocean...and vanished.
This episode also features rare archival audio from the Elgen and Marie Long oral history collection...aired publicly for the first time. Their 220-plus hours of recordings are preserved at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum as the Amelia Earhart Project Recordings. Among those voices is Pan Am's Harry Canaday, recorded in 1985 at age 76, reflecting on Noonan, the Pacific survey flights, and the world that produced the Earhart flight.
These recordings are presented courtesy of David Jourdan of Nauticos and the Smithsonian Institution's Amelia Earhart Project.
Support the show
Visit Us for more Pan Am History! 
Support the Podcast!
Donate to the Museum!
Visit The Hangar online store for Pan Am gear!
Become a Member! 
Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter!

A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and  Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support!