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The Pan Am Podcast

The Pan Am Podcast

By: Pan Am Museum Foundation
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Experience the legacy of the world’s most iconic airline, Pan American World Airways! This award-winning history and humanities program brings Pan Am’s 64-year history to life through engaging storytelling and insightful interviews from Pan Am employees, passengers, historians, authors, fashionistas, and aviation enthusiasts! Hosted by historian Tom Betti, the program has won the following awards: Platinum 2025, Gold 2024 & 2023, Silver 2022 - Muse Creative Awards; Platinum 2025, Gold 2024, Silver 2023, Arcturus 2022 - Vega Digital Awards; Gold Award from the 2023 Hear Now Palooza of the National Audio Theater Festivals; and Arcturus 2022 Vega Digital Award (Best Host). The Pan Am Podcast is brought to you by the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York and is sponsored by the generous personal support of Mr. Adam Aron, CEO of AMC Theatres and President of the Pan Am Historical Foundation. The Pan Am Museum Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)3 organization and would appreciate your consideration of tax-deductible donations to support our work.

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Episodes
  • Episode 66: A Farewell to Tom Betti

    Episode 66: A Farewell to Tom Betti
    May 31 2026

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    In this final episode of Season Five, host and producer Tom Betti reflects on five years of preserving the stories of Pan Am, answers the question he has asked guests since the very first episode, and says farewell to the listeners who made this program what it became.

    After five years, 66 episodes, more than 95 hours of history and humanities content, and over 200,000 downloads in more than 180 countries, this is Tom's final episode.

    This special retrospective features six guests across three segments, including returning voices Becky Sprecher, Wendy Knecht, Phillip Keene, and Jennifer Coutts Clay, along with Kenn Yazzie of the SFO Museum at San Francisco International Airport and longtime listener Maddex Henry.

    "This program has been the flight of a lifetime." -Tom Betti

    Read Tom's recent LinkedIn article: "I Beat Multi-Million Dollar Companies With a Microphone and Zero Budget. Here's What They Got Wrong"

    To learn more about the SFO Museum, visit: www.sfomuseum.org.

    Read the article written by Ken Yazzie: "Destination SFO: A Labor of Love"

    Visit Jennifer Coutts Clay's website, Jetliner Cabins.


    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!

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    1 hr and 40 mins
  • Episode 65: A Ticket Counter in London with Bill and Diane Studeman

    Episode 65: A Ticket Counter in London with Bill and Diane Studeman
    May 28 2026
    Send us Fan MailIn 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.Support the showVisit 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!
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    1 hr and 34 mins
  • Episode 64: The Best Job We Ever Had with Florette Vassall and Diane Krumholtz Lyras

    Episode 64: The Best Job We Ever Had with Florette Vassall and Diane Krumholtz Lyras
    May 21 2026
    Send us Fan MailIn 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.Support the showVisit 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!
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    1 hr and 12 mins
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