Miss Jo's San Francisco

MISS JO IS THE KEEPER OF HER LATE PARENTS’ OLD PHOTOS, LETTERS and sentimental odds and ends.

There’s her mother’s unpublished book; the sales receipt with notation in her father’s handwriting for his first granddaughter’s tricycle; a checkers’ score card from a game with his second granddaughter; a family newspaper Miss Jo and her sister penned as kids; the pocket watch of Miss Jo’s paternal grandfather; and international telegrams from the 1940s— during the early days of commercial intercontinental aviation— when her mother worked as a flight attendant and father as an airline sales executive.

Until Miss Jo moved to San Francisco in 2005 with her husband, Jeff, and octogenarian mom, June, she hadn’t had the time to delve too deeply into the family archives.

Once settled in the Golden Gate City, with an upbeat outlook for the first time since her father’s death two years earlier, Miss Jo broke open the boxes.

She gazed anew at the familiar black and white photos of her parents’ early travels, like of her mom and identical twin, Joanna, single in their 20s, bleach-blond and glamorous as Pan American flight attendants. There were also the  well-handled photos of the twins in late 1930s Managua, Nicaragua, where they worked as 19-year-old secretaries in the U.S. Embassy. The two had traveled a long way from their hometown of New Castle, Indiana.

Unfamiliar to Miss Jo were San Francisco newspaper articles saved by her mother detailing a plane crash she survived at the city’s airport.

It was a Feb. 27, 1948, aborted take off of a Pan American Clipper Douglas DC-4 propeller plane on its way to Calcutta, India, with a layover in Honolulu. While the plane skidded on its belly to a stop and there was a fire extinguished by the pilot, the 24 passengers and crew were uninjured.

Of course, Miss Jo had known all her life about her mom’s time based in San Francisco in the 1940s as a Pan Am stewardess. However, June’s surviving a plane crash in the City was a revelation

According to an SF Chronicle article, under a Feb. 28, 1948 front-page, double-banner headline “Clipper Cracks Up in S.F Take-Off—- No One Is Hurt,” the pilot had sensed something was wrong with the landing gear as the plane picked up speed on the runway.

“He throttled back the four engines before the plane was airborne,” the Chronicle reported. “With the speed decreased, the `lift’ on the wings was lost and the multi-ton craft settled heavily on the concrete strip. The main landing gear collapsed.”

The article continued: “Static sparks from wing metal screeching along the pavement ignited gasoline fumes in the inboard right engine.”

Reading about the close call gave Miss Jo goosebumps. For the first time, her mom’s stories of surviving the treacherous early days of commercial aviation came alive, giving a new level of respect to other tales like the emergency landing in a Costa Rican cow pasture when a plane ran out of fuel, or pushing bales of mail out the back of  Pan American planes hovering over U.S. WWII battleships in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

It puzzled Miss Jo why her mother never had mentioned the SFO plane crash, although her fear of flying later in life came into clearer focus.  Perhaps she didn’t consider the Clipper mishap a crash, since at the time it wasn’t uncommon for planes to crack up killing all on board or simply disappear over oceans or mountains.