Here’s a little intellectual exercise I recently undertook, with help from — who else? — my Dad. I found this gem at the Chicago Book Fair Lit Fest a couple of weekends ago:
For $7.50, I purchased a piece of history. This was a original ad run in the Saturday Evening Post. Pan-Am was the first airline to market discount airfares to the U.S. middle class, discussed beautifully in Christopher Endy’s book Cold War Holidays, which explores how the U.S. promoted post-WWII tourism to France as part of the Marshall Plan. (I highly recommend it either as undergraduate course material or casual non-fiction reading.)
As an anthropologist of tourism specializing in Latin America, this seemed to be the perfect thing for my office. It was clearly post-WWII, but when exactly? The vendor told me it might have a date on the back, but since it was packaged in plastic I decided to do some guesswork first. My first guess (close but incorrect, it turns out) was 1952.
The ad includes flights to Havana, a popular tourist destination in the 1950s, clearly placing this before the U.S. embargo on travel to Cuba in 1960. But the other information here was less clear: Pan-Am had been flying out of Brownsville airport since 1929. Pan-Am’s clippers flew starting in the late 1930s.
The date turned out to be on the reverse side, written in a language that my Dad speaks fluently:
This is where being part of a family with a serious hereditary car obsession comes in handy. With Dad visiting for a week, I knew he could solve this mystery for me. He was polite about the Pan-Am ad, but when I showed him the other side he got very excited. He immediately dated this car to the late 1940s, and a bit of searching on google images pinpointed the model to 1947 (you can see an example here). You can see similar Chrysler ads to this one here.
When I told him I planned to frame this for my office, he asked (in his typical deadpan fashion), “Which side?”
Other data pointing to 1947 include this 1948 Pan-Am route map, which is very similar to the one on the Pan-Am ad. And a bit more searching revealed that the everythingpanam.com site actually has a copy of the same ad, which they date to May 1947. It may have been run in later magazines, but that would suggest that the special mentioned ran from May-Sept of 1947.
In short, Dad was right! Happy Father’s Day!
