The men on the moon, and the colonies to follow, will surely need Scotch brand recording tape for all their magnetic-tape needs. Don Rushin, a magnetic-tape salesman, who is also a magnetic tape salesman—behold, the power of the hyphen!—might one day add the moon to his sales territory.
With our move to Minnesota, he is already adding all of earth to his purview, moving up in the world, from car-based salesman to international jet-setter at the most propitious time in aviation history.
As if preparing for Dad’s new-won responsibilities, Boeing is, at this very moment in 1969, putting the finishing touches on an engineering wonder, a winged Titanic called the 747. It will be the first “jumbo jet,” twice the size of Boeing’s 707, which itself was twice the size (and twice as fast) as the prop plane it usurped, the Stratocruiser. The 707 was the first jet to achieve commercial success as a passenger plane. On its debut in 1958, Pan Am ushered in the age of jet transport and created the jet set. But Pan Am founder Juan Trippe had also worked to ensure that airline travel was not entirely closed off to the common man, that international destinations could be aspired to. And so he created a second class of seating—tourist—in an effort to democratize global travel. As early as 1949, Trippe appeared on the cover of Time magazine above the line “Now the world is every man’s oyster.”
“Mass travel by air—made possible in the jet age—may prove to be more significant to world destiny than the atom bomb,” Trippe said. “For there can be no atom bomb potentially more powerful than the air tourist, charged with curiosity, enthusiasm, and goodwill, who can roam the four corners of the world, meeting in friendship and understanding the people of other nations and races.”
Trippe was convinced the masses would be drawn to travel in the 1970s. In 1965, Pan Am forecasted a 200 percent increase in international travel by 1980. Planes would have to get bigger to accommodate the demand of an eager public to see a shrinking globe.
Enter the 747, the love child of Juan Trippe and Boeing chief Bill Allen. It’s bigger than anything previously dreamt of. Six stories tall, with a fuselage twenty feet across, it necessitates all manner of new parts and designs and even words, beginning with “wide-body.” It holds three hundred fifty passengers, and two aisles are required to evacuate them in ninety seconds, as the FAA mandates. The ceilings are eight feet high, with no center overhead baggage bins, so that stepping onto a 747 will feel like walking into an airy cathedral.
The plane weighs 355 tons fully loaded. To look at a 747 on the ground is to fail to imagine such a thing airborne. But Pratt & Whitney have built a revolutionary engine called the JT9D, four of which are sufficient to carry the beast away, like a baby borne aloft by the four corners of a stork’s blanket. Each of those four engines is seven feet nine inches in diameter, large enough for a stewardess to stand up in. And stewardesses frequently do precisely that in promotional photographs, which tease a public longing for this sexy new conveyance.
The 747 is meant to be only a stopgap until Trippe can shrink the world even further. It is designed to move passengers only until the mid-1970s, when the new supersonic transport planes—SSTs, already a joint project of the French and British—are expected to become the workhorses of commercial air travel, ushering passengers from New York to London in three hours. Toward that end, Trippe insisted the 747 be bi-level, with the cockpit on the upper level, and the front nosecone lifts straight up so the plane can be easily converted to a cargo carrier by the time everyone is flying on the Concorde or its equivalent in America’s looming bicentennial year.
I don’t know it in the predawn darkness outside the Shady Lawn Motel in 1969, but Trippe is already carrying my father Up, Up, and Away from me.
When Trippe placed his massive initial order for the 747, one of his longest-serving employees was living in Darien, Connecticut. Charles Lindbergh would take the New Haven Railroad into Grand Central, then walk to the iconic Pan Am Building for consultations on the project. Lindbergh approved of the 747, which was somewhat better appointed than the Spirit of St. Louis had been. “He frequently flies to Paris,” wrote Lindbergh biographer Walter S. Ross in 1968, “and the jets he takes follow the same great-circle route which he was the first to fly successfully.”
A little more than four decades after Lindbergh’s first Atlantic crossing, that great-circle route is about to become a swinging cocktail party in the skies. Of all the 747’s technological innovations, the upstairs lounge is the greatest: at the top of a spiral staircase, conveniently adjacent to the cockpit, is an open bar, groovily appointed—some have Wurlitzer organs—where a wide-tied businessman might drink all night from the United States to Europe. Continental Airlines enlists Playboy Bunnies to ply the aisles on its Chicago to Los Angeles route. Other weeks, magicians roam the cabins doing card tricks. To a child of the 1970s, the name itself—747—holds a strange magic.
At Boeing, model numbers in the 500s are reserved for turbine engines, 600s are for rockets, and 700s are devoted to jet aircraft. The round number 700 had been deemed insufficiently alluring for Boeing’s first release, so the marketing department—liking the bookend cadence of two 7s—called it the 707. It was followed, over the years, by the 717, the 727, and the 737, those 7-and-7s hinting at the cocktail-fueled flights to come on the 747.
Even before the jet’s maiden voyage, airports fear massive human logjams when the 747 attempts to unload three hundred fifty passengers at a time. The long lines anticipated at toilets after overnight flights have airlines contemplating waking the passengers in shifts to empty their bladders. But the truth is, passengers are already wetting themselves in anticipation of flying the 747, Dad included.
Juan Trippe’s gamble begins to look like a stroke of genius. “If anyone ever flies to the moon,” said James Landis, head of the Civil Aeronautics Board, as the plane was still in development in the middle 1960s, “the very next day Trippe will ask C.A.B. to authorize regular service.”
Well, as of this summer night, someone has flown to the moon, just hours earlier, and Dad will soon be in flight as well: Pan Am plans its 747 voyages to begin when the new decade does, in January of 1970.
That date promises an age of wonder in which just about anything can happen. A leading cancer researcher, Dr. James T. Grace Jr., has confidently asserted that cancer will be a memory by 1979. “I predict that we can enter the decade of the ’80s without the specter of cancer hanging over our people,” Grace says, a statement that everyone can suddenly affirm with the brand-new sentence starter: “If they can put a man on the moon, surely they can [fill in the blank with your wildest dream].”