Miss Jo's San Francisco

Okay, it’s time to tell the tale of Miss Jo’s Pan Am dinner and salad plates.

We’re talking 1960s Noritake with a presidential seal that once graced Pan Am First Class cabins with linen napkins and crystal, serving heated-up aviation gourmet, perhaps the filet mignon and chocolate mousse cake featured on Pan Am international menus from the era.

The plates had been knocking around Miss Jo’s kitchen since the 1980s, ever since her Pan Am exec Uncle George gave her the incomplete, discontinued place settings that became a signature of her single-girl kitchen along with tomato, basil and mozzarella salad.

Besides their Pan Am novelty, Miss Jo’s castoffs had a broader historical reach. The plates commemorate FDR’s Pan Am flight to Africa during WWII to meet Winston Churchill & Joseph Stalin, when the airline’s First Class service was branded “The President.”

Far from having a complete table setting like the one pictured above, Miss Jo’s airline porcelain still spoke to her aspiring young-sophisticate journalist side with intrigue in the wings. And while she may never know if the plates stoked romance from under the pork roast, they did give her the chance to boast to dinner guests about the Pan Am vein that runs through her family.

During the pre-jet era, her mom was a Pan Am stewardess, sometimes flying with her identical twin. In the mid 1940s, she was based out of San Francisco Airport, flying to India, Japan, China and points in between.

For almost three decades, whenever Miss Jo put grilled cheese or piled spaghetti on her Pan Am plates she turned sentimental for her mom’s stewpie stories.

There was the tale of the woman in some far-flung place who held her baby over the aisle to pee or the recollection of egg breakfasts cracked and scrambled in the galley, standing in high heels, apron and crisp wool uniform while the propeller plane rumbled over the Pacific.

There was the story of pushing bales of wartime mail out the back of the plane for awaiting U.S. Navy carriers anchored somewhere between California and Hawaii. In 1948, she was aboard a Calcutta-bound Pan Am Clipper that crashed at SFO on take off with no casualties.

When Miss Jo married, the dinnerware came along, as it did in 2005 when she and Jeff moved cross country to San Francisco from Washington, D.C. Amazingly, her Pan Am stewpie mom, in her 80s and ailing health, came with them to the Golden Gate City for one last fling. (She is pictured, above, in mid-1940s SF outside her Nob Hill apartment on California Street.)

Motivated by a tug from her inherited Pan Am pedigree, and a desire to honor her mom who died of Alzheimer’s in 2006, Miss Jo recently decided to donate the plates. There were still eight good ones left  rattling around the house. One was being used as a potted geranium saucer and another for cat food.

Without hesitation, Ken Yazzie of the San Francisco Airport Museums welcomed Miss Jo’s artifacts into the collection as its first Pan Am presidential plates, to add to a full complement of glassware.  “You don’t have a teapot ?”  Ken wished.

Excited she had found a good home, Miss Jo also felt a fleeting sense of regret. She hung up the phone and wondered, with the plates gone, could she live without any Pan Am relics ?

The Noritake was the last of the Pan Am stuff that had been part of her life since she played adventure traveler as a kid. There wasn’t even a swizzle stick left, let alone Pan Am plastic place mats; coasters; flight bags; towels; playing cards; booties; cuff links; pens; high-ball/juice glasses; a leather jewelry box; luggage cosmetic kit; toiletry bags; and posters from Latin America, to name just a few items. (When donating the plates, Miss Jo also let go an inch-long Pan Am radio.)

It’s strange going to SFO without travel plans. Ken picked Miss Jo up at the museum in the international terminal for a quick drive to an airplane hangar where museum archives are stored for exhibits, like an upcoming one on the legacy of Pan Am’s fleet of Clipper planes, starting with the flying boats that used to land in the 1930s in San Francisco Bay.

As Ken prepared the paperwork for the plate donation—and IRS write-off— Miss Jo wandered among the warehouse-size aisles and shelves.

There were several Pan Am flight bags— including the striped hobo, over-the-shoulder tote she used to carry in 1970 whenever she wore her yellow patent leather go-go boots. There was a huge tray of pilot wing pins. Captain hats and crew uniforms were meticulously stored. A table gleamed with airplane ashtrays like one with a Pan Am jet that her father used for spare change.

With her plates being tucked safely into the airport museum, Miss Jo suddenly felt relieved. Her Pan Am tschokes were being elevated to historical artifact. However, more awesome was that her Pan Am sentimentality seemed to be intact, ready to be taken out another day—- along with this post, before she flies again on a bring-your-own-food flight and curses the passenger next to her for dining on excessively smelly chow at 40,000 feet.