And We Think Competition is Tough Today!

Many years ago – it was sometime in the mid-60s – I was working for an advertising agency that had several interesting tourism accounts, mostly in the Caribbean. The man who headed up that division was Vic Cheena. Vic was quite elderly at the time and was, in fact, the third employee ever hired by Pan American World Airway. Of course he had some wonderful stories about the early days of that venerable airline. I remember one in particular.

PanAm started service in 1927 and its first scheduled flights were between Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba. According to Vic, the one-way fare for that 90-mile flight was $26.

Back in those days, people traveled by train or by ship. They were usually away from home for weeks, not days, and they packed all the necessary clothing for trips of that length in huge steamer trunks.

Of course, baggage of that size and weight could not be accommodated on board PanAm’s airplanes of that day, so the heavy trunks we sent ahead of time on one of the steamships that ran back and forth between Florida to Cuba.

It didn’t take long for the steamship companies to realize that they were losing business to this new upstart airline and soon trunks belonging to PanAm passengers started to disappear – lost overboard en route to Havana under mysterious circumstances.

According to Vic, PanAm countered this tactic by hiring young Cuban boys to baby-sit every steamer trunk on its journey over to Havana and back. Thus, that airline ticket not only provided a seat on one of the early PanAm Clippers, it also bought steamship passage for one steamer trunk and one young Cuban boy … all for 26 dollars.

Pan American World Airways collapsed on December of 1991, and to this day I am saddened whenever I think about it.