SPEAKER_01 0:14

Welcome to the Pan Am Podcast, brought to you by the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York. This podcast and our museum are dedicated to celebrating the legacy of the world's most iconic airlock, Pan American World Airways. My name is Tom Betty, and I'm the host of this program. Thank you for joining us. This program is sponsored by the generous support of Mr. Adam Aaron, the CEO of AMC Entertainment Holdings, Incorporated. The Pan Am Museum Foundation is a nonprofit organization. Please visit our website for more information at the Pan Ammuseum.org. Again, our website is the Panamuseum.org. You can find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. If you are using Apple Podcasts, please consider leaving a review. It will help others discover this program. If you're not familiar with Pan Am, welcome. We are honored to have you here, and for you to learn about what we're all about. If you already know of Pan Am, worked for, or flown on the airline, or just love our history, it's good to be with you again. So with that, let's get this episode in the air, so to speak. Welcome aboard your Pan American jet clipper. We'll be joined by guests Philip Keene, a Pan Am veteran flight attendant and collector, and Meg Williams of the company Stick No Bills, which restores and recreates high-quality travel posters in stunning detail with rich and vibrant colors. But first, a few updates on this podcast. This is the 30th episode of this program. That means there's around 50 hours of Pan Am content people around the world can listen to. Someone recently told me that I have a great voice and it helps them fall asleep at night. Not exactly what I was going for, but whatever works, I'm good with it. A quick shout-out to some of our podcast super fans that I recently met while visiting New York. Rob Evans, Christopher Terry, and Kate Carley. I really appreciated their kind words and support. With the exception of Pan Am Commercials during our breaks, we want to keep this podcast commercial free with none of those annoying ads. If you like what we're doing on this program, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to the Pan Am Museum Foundation to support our mission of preserving our airline's incredible history. On a more personal note, I serve on the board of the museum, and this podcast is a passion project for me. And believe it or not, my work is all 100% volunteer. So if you like what we're doing, consider a donation in whatever amount you can afford. We are fortunate the podcast is sponsored by Mr. Adam Aaron, the CEO and chairman of AMC Entertainment, who is also the president of our sister organization, the Pan Am Historical Foundation. His sponsorship allows us to cover related costs with the publishing of this program and institutional fees associated with obtaining some of the archival news clips we use from academic sources. We thank Adam for his support and respectfully ask for your consideration of donations to preserve the legacy of Pan American World Airways for future generations to come. In the style of NPR, you can join me and even make a recurring monthly donation like I do. Please see the episode description for links on where to make a donation. Also, another update there's more training tapes coming on our YouTube channel, so stay tuned. As of this recording, since May 2022, there has been over 1.3 million views on our YouTube channel, which is just incredible. If you have any items or VHS tapes you would like to donate to the museum, please don't hesitate to contact us. Earlier this year, many voted for this podcast in the People's Choice Podcast Awards. We are pleased to say that the Pan Am Podcast was nominated and made it to the final round in the history category. Almost 6 million listeners participated in this year's People's Choice Podcast Awards and selected 300 shows for 30 categories out of many thousands of podcasts. We would like to say congratulations to the History Category winner, a true crime podcast called the Fresh Hell Podcast. The Pan Am Podcast is most honored to be a 2022 People's Choice Podcast Awards nominee, and thank you for taking the time to vote and show your support. In addition, if you've ever wondered what my personal Pan Am story was and how I got connected with the Pan Am Museum, you're in luck. I recently had the honor of being a featured guest on an episode of the Shared History Podcast. I had a great time speaking with hosts Natalie and Cass, where we talked about the legacy of Pan American, our love of the movie Catch Me If You Can, and I shared my own story of being an 11-year-old boy on the upper deck of a 747 crossing the Atlantic Ocean on a family vacation. And that's where my love affair with Pan Am began. Take a listen to the Shared History Podcast. They really do a great job of making history not only informative, but it's a lot of fun to listen to with a dose of comedy. It's one of my favorites. I am featured in episode 88, and there's a link in the episode description, but do listen to more than just my episode. Nat and Cass, you're awesome, and thank you for having me as a guest. It was an honor. Now let's explore the art of travel posters. As the young commercial airplane business began to stretch its wings in the late 1920s, it found itself in direct competition with two other modes of transportation. The first was the tried and true of the Grand Ocean liners crossing the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The other was originally invented as a weapon of war by the Germans in World War I, which then evolved into luxurious passenger airships after the war in the 1920s, most notably the Gruff Zeppelin, which could cross the Atlantic Ocean in three and a half days with clear weather. Keep in mind that during the early and mid-1920s, airplanes were used mainly for stunt attractions and transporting mail faster than rail. Most people used trains for travel, and the elite used ocean liners, and the ultra-elite booked passage on the German Zeppelins. Also during the mid-1920s, most believed that the Zeppelins would be the way people would travel the world in the future. Architects of this era even envisioned Zeppelin ports on the top of skyscrapers. However, the Zeppelins never came to Pan Am, even though the airline's founder Juan Tripp, who later took a voyage on the Hindenburg with his wife Betty in 1936, served on the board of the Pacific Zeppelin Transport Company, and important Pan Am stockholders had shares in that company. So all of this sets up the stage for the art of airline travel posters. As the commercial airline industry was in its infancy in the late 1920s when Pan Am was founded, the Young Airlines had some serious competition with Grand Oceanliners and especially the German Graf Zeppelin. Pan Am had to make their presence known to the elite traveling public, and they saw travel posters as the perfect vehicle to introduce their airline. While offering a similar luxury travel product their competitors had, airlines needed to engage a public, possibly wary of the new mode of transportation in an aeroplane. By focusing their marketing and advertising campaigns on speed, comfort, and technological innovations, the airlines strived to assure potential travelers airplanes was the future of passenger travel. Enter the travel poster. Debuting during the Art Deco period, Airlines secured the services of many top artists of the day to lure and reassure new customers. Full-color images of romantic, exotic destinations filled the frame, each featuring a myrid of at least one iconic sight: Christ the Redeemer in Rio, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Alps in Switzerland, Germany, and France, tempting elites with winter and summer sports. Now there really was a fastboat to China, the flying clipper ships of Pan American Airways. As the 1930s came to an end, along with the end of the Zeppelins as the world was plunged into World War II, travel poster themes shifted as airlines were keen to let the public know that they were doing their part for the Allied effort. Posters gave witness to once luxurious civilian aircraft being drafted into service, supplying troops, and helping secure victory with innovations that would lift aviation even higher in terms of speed and security. Radar, enhanced navigation, and pressurized cabins became the norm. Flying above the weather became a popular refrain, along with the promise to fly ever more swiftly to one's destination. At the end of World War II, posters confidently proclaimed the dawn of a whole new world for passengers has begun. The postwar years included the everyday traveler and encouraged them to get up and go, as was the tagline in a late 1960s Pan Am campaign. Advertising pushed the introduction of lower fares, transforming the dream of adventure into an accessible journey through the skies. Some airlines really moved their tails for you and declared that they were the only way to fly. The look of advertising began to change radically with the deregulation of the late 1970s and democratization of the airline business. Gone were most of the hand-drawn fantasy art replaced with photographic images of locales, oftentimes focusing on a single image to represent a place and its people. Flying became the only truly modern route for the long-distance traveler. The period artwork illustrating airlines on the walls and windows of travel agencies were pasted over or regulated to history's round file. Some, however, have been appreciated as much for the dreamy backward glance at the past as they are for outstanding and collectible works from some of the world's greatest artists, both renowned and anonymous. Now on to our interview with Pan Am collector Philip Keene and Meg Williams of the company Stickno Bills. The website of Stickno Bills is sticknobillsonline.com. There is a link in the episode description. His wife, Meg Gage Williams, is a former intelligence and security risk analyst that provided threat alerting in conflict zones. She was greatly inspired by her great-great-uncle, David Mackenzie Ogilvie, CBE, the so-called father of advertising, to make a career change from counterintelligence to the graphic art world with her husband. The British husband and wife team founded Sticknobilles in Sri Lanka shortly after the war ended there with the objective of, in Meg's word, quote, cheering everyone up and giving intrepid visitors to the recovering island a vibrant memory of their travels. End quote. They did this by producing spectacular vintage-style poster art and fine art prints exclusively licensed, and via which the International Enterprise fundraises for humanitarian, conservation, and reforestation projects underway within the iconic places championed in their images. Ten years on, Sticknobils has grown rapidly both online and in art galleries, fashion and travel markets, and is now widely regarded as the world's leading licensed poster art specialists, creating safe harbor, remastering, printing, and the retail center of excellence for historic vintage poster art collections. Check out their website at StickNobillzonline.com. Their posters range from affordable to exclusive, but all are the highest of quality and color vibrancy. For listeners of the Pan Am Podcast, StickNobills is providing a special discount with any purchase from their online store. By using the promo code Pan AmPodcast at checkout, you will receive a free 24 by 36 inch lithograph of one of their best-selling proprietary Mallorca or Salon travel posters with their Pan Am prints. Again, the promo code is Pan Am Podcast with no spaces. This code is also in the episode notes for your convenience. Welcome back to the Pan Am Podcast, Philip, and welcome Meg Williams to the podcast. Today we're going to be talking about the art of travel posters. Philip, why don't you give us a little talk about the importance of this artwork?

SPEAKER_02 15:43

Well, for me, um, it's not just that they're they're pretty. Uh for me as an amateur historian, one of my degrees is in history. Uh it it tells a story of what's going on in the world. Uh, we if you look at these early travel posters, I think what they were what they're getting across is speed and safety. We're talking about the 1920s and 1930s. Uh more moreover, in the 1930s, they're in competition with with uh the Graft Zeppelin, it was very expensive, as was uh typical air air airfares uh on airplanes. But their main competition were the steamships and the ocean liners, not to be confused with today's cruise ships, which are a completely different animal, uh, which would take weeks or even a month, depending on on the distance of travel, whereas the airplanes could get you there in days, and they had to compete a little bit with uh the Zeppelin and the ocean liners in in luxury. And I think they had the same sort of client base at the time, which were the very wealthy and the uh well connected in royalty. So they were in competition with one another to provide amenities uh that they could find on on uh similar modes of transportation. And I think there were the posters at this time reflected all that. So they're uh depicting these far-off destinations where the uh the pre-jet set would travel to and uh showing what amenities and in and goodies they could find on board, and it all looked very glamorous. Uh safety was not something we're promoting at the time because it was not as uh as safe as it is today. So I think the main emphasis at the on the beginning was the um the the time that it would take to get you to one of these places. And they're using a lot of illustrations from different artists, um and making the the aircraft look speedier than they actually are. This is in the day of the four jets when most of the airplanes were taking off on on water. Um so this it's that kind of thing in the beginning. Um most of the crews on a lot of these things were exclusively male. Uh there were some carriers that they did hire female flight attendants uh or stewardesses as they were known at the time, because if a woman was on the plane, uh thinking was at the time, then it had to be had to be relatively safe, you know. Um also seeing a woman on board the aircraft would typically calm the nervous passengers' nerves. Um and you had to think at the time that this was not a an endeavor for the the weak hearted or for the ones with a delicate stomach, because they were not flying above the weather. They were flying only thousands of feet above the ocean or above the land, so they're subject to all the the the wind and and rain and the noise and the cold. Uh so it wasn't as as glamorous as we may make it out to be, but um, it was still uh an interesting way to travel and Meg, before we talk about the exotic nature of a lot of these posters and the adventure that it was telling a story.

SPEAKER_01 18:57

Let's talk a little bit about your company, Stickno Bills. Let's start with the name.

SPEAKER_00 19:03

Thank you very much, Tom. And uh Philip, lovely to be really connected with you again, having been together. And you too. Yeah, it was so fantastic uh to all be at the gala together in New York just a couple of weeks ago. That was um a fantastic experience for me. Very I felt very privileged to be there and in amongst so many uh fascinating people, you know, all uh part of the Pan Am community. And um to start with the name, the name Sticknobills is um provocative and ironic um because, better known as postnobils, uh on the walls of powerhouses all over the United States, the instruction is to not put up posters. Our absolute passion is upholding posters. Uh, our mission is to uh really carve out the space that they deserve in the art market as a genre of art and within that niche, within that space, for us to be the market leaders championing the very finest travel poster art that has been created over approximately 120-year span, which uh we start in the 1880s when um Toulouse Latrec and the other great artists of uh Paris in their day uh worked out how to do colour lithography for the first time. What Stigma Bills is all about is really charting the whole history of the advent of poster art as it's played out and as it was innovated by different iconic production entities over the last 120 years. So, for uh my husband Philip, who's uh creative director of Stigmobiles, um, when we established our company 12 years ago, we very much had Pan Am in mind as a source of inspiration for us. Um, because we were pretty far flung ourselves at that point. We were uh based in Sri Lanka. The war was was just ending there, and we were both looking to retool and do something more positive and colourful than what we had been doing historically, which was more oriented in my part around uh security and counter-terrorism. Phil's part, he was um he was an ad man at uh the Financial Times in London, and we found ourselves in this very uh I use the word exotic uh inverted commas, but a very far-flung part of the world um where my grandparents had passed through their twenties just after they married, where my aunt was born on a tea plantation and where the British Air Force had actually established a base on a lake called Cogola, which is in the southern province of Sri Lanka, that it's it's actually a lagoon, it's connected to the ocean. And we lived on that lake. And that lake was a pit stop for the um a refueling point for the uh clipper. Neptunes of the sky that were flying all the way from Perth to Sri Lanka and then from Sri Lanka, which was then known as Ceylon, on to Europe. So it was just this sort of twist of fate that we ended up living at this location, which had a very romantic resonance to it in the history of aviation. I believe it was Pontus's uh Australian Air Force predecessors who made the first 26-hour flight from Perth to Coggola. And when you landed at Coggola on that clipper seaplane, I believe you were awarded an order of the double sunrise uh badge of honor for having seen the sunrise or set, depending on which way you were going, twice during that at that time. I think that was the longest haul uh flight. So all of that history we um we tried to crystallize into an image that we designed. And it's sort of a very elegant uh young um, I think she's sort of imagined that she's like a British Army officer's wife or an Air Force officer's wife, and she's sitting with her luggage waiting uh to board the Clipper seaplane, and the luggage is being passed up into the plane. And uh yeah, I mean, that was just uh how we began, really, was designing travel posters that were aviation themed. And then realizing that over time there was only so much fresh creation and design we could do when both of us knew that the great past masters of this art were we could never touch them in terms of the talent uh that was applied in the 40s and 50s by the greatest artists of their time in quite healthy competition commissioned by the the airlines of the time to depict in imagery these places to which Pan Am was really pioneering, connecting these places and making them accessible destinations. And so the greatest artists of their time were commissioned to do these illustrations. They hold such resonance to this day, um, and I think become all the more important the further into the 21st century we go. Because what we discovered through having our own private collection, like Philip does, of original vintage posters, is that many of them, these lithographs that were produced in the early 20th century, um, now that we're in the 100 years on, many of them are literally disintegrating as we speak. So for us, we realized it was a kind of preservation mission for our own private collection, but also for the purpose of the history of art, really, to identify the most iconic of these images and then track down the originals and then go through the process of uh scanning them at a museum level of the highest quality scans we could, and then digitizing them and then restoring them to their full former glory as digital images, and then printing them with techniques and tools that are far advanced on what the first editions were printed on, and therefore ensuring that for future generations these images are still going to be out there in circulation and produced on materials that are designed to last, to not fade, to not discolor over time. And within that context, for us, Pan Am was absolutely at the pinnacle of this kind of kaleidoscopic odyssey, if you like, of place-centric poster art that was designed in the mid-20th century. And for our customers who come to us from all over the world, to our galleries in Sri Lanka, in Mallorca, uh Palma de Mallorca, where I am right now in Sweden, and uh, I hope very soon in the United States and England. They absolutely love the Pan Am brand. And a lot of them, before we even featured Pan Am as our licensed source of images in the galleries, they would walk into the gallery and say, Oh my goodness, this reminds me of Pan Am. You know, so it's uh it's the greatest honor for us to now be in this bizarre position of actually having the privilege of being globally officially appointed by the airline that in its, you know, that really was our original source of inspiration for for the proprietary designs that we have in our in our collections for Asia and Europe and and America.

SPEAKER_01 26:31

I love this story. And to our listeners, uh, and I'm sure Philip can can back me up on this, these posters are stunning in person, just the vibrancy of the colors, absolutely stunning. We had one on display at our gala, and it was just stunning. I was speechless. And I thought to myself, I need to put that in my place. And then I asked how much it was, and it was it was over $10,000. So I quickly said, Well, I guess that's not going in my place.

SPEAKER_02 27:03

But having having seen it, having seen it, I have to say it's well worth it. And the framing was beautiful and the crispness of the colors and what you've done to adding uh the gold foil and the silver leaf and things like that. It's it's they truly are remarkable pieces of art that you have out that you have created. I just yeah, beautiful, Meg.

SPEAKER_01 27:22

Just beautiful work. Thank you so much for saying that. I would like to pause for a second and we'll come back to the travel posters in a moment. But you said something that our listeners will would would probably say, okay, if Tom doesn't ask this question, how could he not? And you said you did counter-terrorism. I'm sure you can't tell us more than that, but I did want to follow up on that.

SPEAKER_00 27:49

Yeah, no, I I I was my own employer, uh, so to speak. I was always private sector, Tom. Um, but my my focus was um, well, this is why I was talking about wanting to do something a bit more cheerful and colourful. Um, before 9-11, I started uh nerding on a guy called Osama bin Laden, building a research capability in London um around Al-Jihad and then Al-Qaeda. Uh when 9-11 happened, we were suddenly extremely busy and uh uh went on to develop a capability that covered um, I think 60 conflict zones at its peak. We set up a 24-7 control center and we worked kind of inter-agency between different international government organizations, governmental and private sector. And really it was quite simple. We were just trying to stop people from being uh needlessly um uh killed, working in high-risk environments through providing threat assessment and risk analysis and uh don't go down that road kind of information. I wrote a book on kidnapping in Iraq with um a gentleman called Brian Jenkins from uh Rand. Um and actually I was in in touch with him just yesterday because funnily enough, his focus was on um hijackings in the 60s and 70s, and he documented every single case study that there was. And I just came upon it yesterday, um, just his, you know, what he wrote in 1974. And by 1974, Pan Am had been involved in 11 incidents already at that stage. So, you know, maybe it's another reason why I'm drawn to the brand because I feel very personally um uh the pain that Pan Am's been through um over the years, um, being sort of uh you know inadvertently um on the front line, so to speak, of um asymmetric types of warfare. Yeah, so really it was it was a 10-year career. It was uh fascinating. Um, but then I met my husband who gave me a surfboard and told me to stop speaking in acronyms and uh you know to um uh really sort of focus. Um, well, together we just decided to do something more creative and more positive. But we still fundraise for um organizations that we admire wholeheartedly that are making uh tremendous impact uh on a humanitarian level in the conflict zones where where I used to work.

SPEAKER_01 30:23

Very admirable. This is a volunteer job for me, you know, doing this podcast, but it's one of the best jobs I've had because I get to interview and talk to fascinating people, and everybody has a story, and it's it's just really, really interesting. So I I thank you for sharing your background. Philip, let's get back to travel posters. So you have one of the best collection. There's only a few people in the world that can rival Mr. Keene's collection of Pan Am. Can you tell us a little bit about how popular these Pan Am travel posters are? And then afterwards we can go back to Meg and she can tell us more about her company and uh what they have to offer.

SPEAKER_02 31:10

The pu the posters are really, really popular in the sense that they are becoming rarer and rarer as time goes on, as Meg has told us, because of the age of these things and because they're their temporary nature of them, they're only meant to be put up and then eventually discarded for new and better ones, uh depending on the locations and destinations. Uh so finding them in really good condition is is is um is very lucky. And when I do, I'm very happy about it. And sometimes they need a bit of restoration. I found a place in uh California that does an amazing work, uh paper restoration. It can all be reversed if necessary, but and then they're mounted on linen for for preservation's sake. And I am attempting to this is this is a long-term goal to collect every single one that Pan Am has ever issued. And I'm well on my way. I think I've got about 200 so far, and I know that many, many hundreds more are out there, but I am I'm still on the hunt for them. I have some duplicates of some and and am willing to trade if anybody else has something that they want to trade that I'm interested in. So uh there's there's that aspect of it. And the earliest one that I have, I think, is from the late 1930s, and it's featuring this young, almost humble kind of uh hummel figurine couple in Bavaria, uh, against a cartoon background of the mountains. And the latest one I have is from the 1990s when they all went to almost pure photographic images. Um but the ones that are my favorite are really from the mid-century period, uh, more cartoony, uh, if you will, and hand-drawn, beautiful, rich colors and and really clever imagery um on them.

SPEAKER_01 32:50

What is your favorite, Philip? Of all the the travel posters out there, what's your favorite?

SPEAKER_02 32:56

Well, there's one I'm looking at right now. It is uh advertising England, and it is a woman who would not be a stranger on Carnaby Street in the mid-1960s with a bright red and pink bob, uh cute little red lips, and the irises of her eyes are actually the Union Jack. She's got blue eyeshadow on, and a beauty mark just below the the left side of her mouth, which is the Pan Am logo.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

It's a very clever illustration.

SPEAKER_02 33:25

Yeah, it's it's so evocative of the time, and you know exactly where you are when you look at this. Uh, so many of them are that way. You may not, it may, they may not even have the name of the destination on them, but the imagery on there tells you all you need to know. There's one here that's advertising France, but it's more specifically Paris because you can see in the background the the Garnier Opera House, and you've got a French waiter in his white apron and a uh French policeman in his little cap sharing a glass of red wine uh across the cityscape.

SPEAKER_01 33:57

Meg, do you have a favorite Pan Am travel poster?

SPEAKER_00 34:01

Oh God, it's a it's a bit of a uh difficult question, I know. No, there's so many, but um yeah, I have to say I I completely agree with Philip that for me it's the pre-photographic era that's the most fascinating. And when, you know, these hand-drawn, uh, you know, hand-painted uh illustrations were you know that the artists really had to think and do it once and well, you know, come up with an image that encapsulated all of the kind of the most sort of uh iconic uh aspects of the destination that was being advertised. And so I think for me that the poor George Lawler um collection within the Pan Am chronology that you know dates from 1927 right through to the uh early 90s. Poor George Lawler was commissioned right in the early days to do uh the the destination marketing for um Rio and Hawaii and New York. And those three particular images, they just blow me away. Um, and I can't wait to uh have the privilege of you know permitted by Pan Am being able to at the pixel at the microscopic level remaster them so that we can print them 40 by 60 inches and really uh bring bring back the the colours and uh just the the the quality of the illustration is incredible, the detail. Um there's one for the South Seas as well, which I absolutely love. And unfortunately, because it's so beautiful and so evocative, it is also one of the most pirated images of the Pan Am collection. And I I think that's another um thing that's been really interesting about this sort of six-year process, really, of coming to this point of launching, is that we've been trying, like Philip, to treasure hunt um and to join the dots and to build a collection that's um uh as comprehensive as possible. And uh yeah, just some just slipped between the gaps and you know went out of circulation without um anyone, it seems, archiving them. And occasionally you come upon something that's completely, you know, undiscovered for 50 years, and that's a moment of real excitement for us. But I think for me, the the the images that are marketing the places that I want to go to the most are also the ones that I love the most. So I've never been to Nassau, I'd love to go. The posters for for Nassau are stunning. Um, I'm yet to go to Hawaii, um, and I absolutely would love to go there. And my goodness, Pan Am has so much to do with that because there must be um at least 10 very strong Hawaii um images that Pan Am produced over the years. Jamaica, uh Calcutta. I think the image for Calcutta is incredible. Um, it's of the Temple of the James, which is just a stunning piece of architecture, very, very you know, extraordinary. Interesting as well, that the emphasis is on Calcutta. Uh, when you're looking at an image like that from a you know 21st century perspective, you realize how the whole way in which the advent of commercial aviation panned out and you know different places came to the fore as um as refueling stops and as destinations in themselves. Um, you know, Calcutta today is just not a tourist destination, you know, whereas other places in India have have risen uh to take that place. I also love the ones that don't uh advertise the country, they advertise the city because from my own sort of personal perspective, I I just I'm not here to sort of wave any national flags. Um that's not my intention. You know, um Stigno Bills is all about celebrating the love of travel and the whole like evolution of style and fashion and art through travel posters. And that's the project, really, rather than sort of in danger of being caught up in any um sort of nationalist uh agendas. But that said, there are then some fantastic ones that are country posters. There's one series that was done in the just as they were on the uh beginning of the photographic era called Woman of the World, which I think from a gender identity point of view is absolutely worth. I would love to do an exhibition just of those, because um, it really time stamps stereotypes of women from different countries, but in a very innocent and lovely way. So for Sweden, it's a very uh beautiful uh blonde wearing a red roll neck jumper, and for England it's a girl who looks a bit like Mary Queen of Scots. Um for Tahiti, it's a woman holding out a uh a flower, you know, sort of looking incredibly um sweet and seductive. And go on, every single uh country depicted through this one character. Um, it says a lot about gender identity and um, you know, stereotypes of of men and women over the over the years, really. And I think, yeah, just culminating. I mean, some of the latter-day Brazil posters uh that Pan Am did really, really do are testimony to sort of I would say like sort of uh sexual emancipation over the 60s and 70s. There's this kind of uh uh freedom about them, which uh um is very much of their time. Um, so yeah.

SPEAKER_02 39:36

I have that one right in front of me now, that one of the three samba dancers in the in their high heels, yes. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 39:44

Um but yeah, so I mean each um each and every one is an absolute treasure, and there's so many different levels of stories that unfold behind each image. Um, so first of all, about the illustrator that that was commissioned to do them, um, but then also about the provenance of of the um production of the poster, of where the posters, the first editions were printed, um, therefore how they wet how they've weathered over time. For example, it was quite interesting to see Branif uh that was uh competition with Pan Am in the 40s in the 40s, 50s, 60s, they were producing their posters in South America um on paper that they were sourcing locally down there and actually using illustrators in South America to depict America. And that's fascinating because you know you think of kind of colonialism and post-colonialism and all the sensitivities around the way in which um uh countries outside of um uh Europe and uh the United States are depicted and how there can be charges of them being reductive or, you know, in some way sort of injurious to the people. But it's really fascinating to see the way that South American illustrators were depicting um uh sort of oil tycoons of Texas, for example, in their illustrations. There's a lot of uh tease going on there as well.

SPEAKER_01 41:11

We're gonna take a short break with a commercial from the late 1960s.

SPEAKER_04 41:21

Hey, I think I've got it. It's a townhouse in New York, hmm?

SPEAKER_05 41:24

No. It was more like a chic new lounge.

SPEAKER_04 41:27

Uh uh. It looks more like an ocean liner to me.

SPEAKER_05 41:31

That was more like some grand hotel.

SPEAKER_04 41:35

Oh, maybe one of those restaurants that looks down on everything.

SPEAKER_05 41:42

Maybe it's some kind of movie theater.

SPEAKER_04 41:44

Or some secluded rendezvous.

SPEAKER_03 41:52

Pan Am introduces the incredible, the plane that's a ship, the ship that's a plane, the Boeing 747 Superjet. First takeoff December 1969, on the world's most experienced airline.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

One of the things to our listeners, and Philip, I don't know if you know this. So, Meg Williams, our guest for this episode, is the owner of the BOAC trademark. So, Meg, please tell us more about that.

SPEAKER_00 42:33

It's technically it's the trademarking of British Overseas Air Corporation that we wanted to make sure that, you know, was unassailable in the posters as we brought them back on behalf of British Airways. Um, the graphic for BOAC had been trademarked uh over the years, um, but the actual uh words connected and put together had not. So we're a little bit obsessed with making sure that we and our licensors are on very safe ground when we go about uh putting these um 21st century editions into production. Um, and so it was for that reason that we felt it necessary to, on behalf of British Airways, uh add that uh trademark registration in as part of the process that led up to us launching the BOAC collection in in September, which, you know, really uh being British, I guess it it made sense as well to start at home, as far as I understand it, and Philip, probably you can speak more to this than you too, Tom. Um I think BOAC shared a lot of roots with Pan Am, but Pan Am provided most of the muscle and most of the um the actual assets for those routes, um, and quite rapidly far exceeding uh BOAC in terms of its reach and the amount of flights it had up in the air at any one time. So, yeah, I think uh with them and uh our other licensor Lufthansa, we are. Really on a mission to build a safe harbour and a center of excellence for all of our esteemed licensors in the aviation industry so that we can build under the brand name Stickno Bills one rock solid collection that is you know comprehensive for our customers so that they can uh you know come onto our website and choose whichever um airline and whichever destination they're interested in, and up will come uh these beautiful posters.

SPEAKER_01 44:30

That's fantastic. Philip, let's talk about Peter Max and some of the other famous artists that did posters for Pan Am and other airlines. Can we talk a little bit about the famous Peter Max 747 early 1970s poster?

SPEAKER_02 44:46

Sure. I've only ever seen that in a uh poster book format. I've never seen an actual uh full-size version of it. I've had a couple of those over the years, and I think they're really interesting, but I I'd love to get my hands on one of those. But it's it's the iconic image of the 747 uh flying against a what I want to call a sergeant pepper sort of background, uh with stars and and um the trailing edges kind of making up the whole background of it in this wild psychedelic colors. And I uh it's very 1960s to me, although the 747 didn't take flight uh commercially until 1970. But I think leading up to that, of course, all the artwork was being produced, and and uh at the time, I think it was 69, Panama started taking reservations to the moon. So all of that spaciness and in all its aspects, whether it be uh psychedelics or actual trips to the moon, I think were pretty prevalent at that time, you know, during uh uh production of these travel posters.

SPEAKER_01 45:48

Yeah, it's just stunning. Um, so so you have a very interesting background, Meg. And now you're doing obviously, I mean, we can hear it, you know, through this interview, something that you just love. And and you and your husband are are have built this wonderful company. How does this all make you feel when you see your poster now being uh you know displayed in prominent places?

SPEAKER_00 46:15

Oh well, I mean, it's not they're not our posters, you know. We really feel that we're we're we're we're providing a service here to Pan Am and and for our customers, um, of you know, for the first time. Um uh I think Bryce Cooper is creative director for for Pan Am. And um he it's very interesting what he said. He said, you know, of all of Pan Am's treasures, um, all of their artifacts, the thing that's the most potent and powerful of all is the poster art. And yet, ironically enough, it's the aspect of the artifact artifacts that's been leveraged the least until now, um, until Stechno Bills came along and put our hand in the ear and said, let us take care of this for you on a global level. Because for 12 years, our business has grown exponentially, despite, you know, we've we've had uh unfortunately um very close shades with terrorism ourselves in Sri Lanka, um, you know, pandemic, there's been all sorts of challenges like everyone on the planet's been going through recently, um, that could have pulled us asunder. But the demand for the appetite for vintage posters um just completely, you know, just it's it's a trend that is not going away, it's growing stronger. And within that trend, the demand for iconic aviation uh poster art specifically has grown to has really come to the fore. Um and I would say of all the different types of poster art, it's the it's the most popular today.

SPEAKER_01 47:47

Philip, anything you'd like to add to our listeners about the art of travel posters?

SPEAKER_02 47:54

I I I don't really know what else to add except to say that it's it's something that has really um piqued my interest over the years. And and it's it's something that I, you know, unless you have a really big space, I don't think you can fully appreciate all of the images that you can gather. But it's it's really uh a wonderful thing that I think a lot of people can afford uh rather than maybe some other original pieces of artwork, and they're so evocative, and I just I love the the style of them and the imagery. And I've learned a lot from you too, Meg, to on tonight's uh on tonight's call. So I appreciate that. There's a lot more information that that I need to be better versed in. Um so thank you for that. And I just gonna continue to collect and to share these things, and um I'm I'm hoping other people appreciate as much as I do.

SPEAKER_01 48:45

And I will say to our listeners, Philip Keene is one of the most generous people I've ever met. And all of his collection, he uh is very generous with it for the purposes of the museum, the Pana Museum, and our mission. So I did want to recognize you, Philip, for that. And thank you.

SPEAKER_02 49:03

Well, thank you. And also wanted to say to Meg, thank you so much for being such a wonderful person and a stand-up company and and producing such beautiful pieces of artwork.

SPEAKER_00 49:13

Oh, Philip, what it the pleasure is all mine. I mean, I have to I just need your listeners to know that we don't sell all of our prints at $10,000, okay? When we when we uh generate a new uh when we bring an image back to life or we design a new image, uh we start with a master edition. And that's a one over one. There will never be another one, and we make it singular not only through the highest caliber printing and conservation framing that goes into producing it as a as a complete piece. Um, but we also have um the British uh Royal Yacht Guilder, Julian, who lives here on the island of Mallorca, come in and he applies 24 karat gold to the letters on it. And normally we're emblazoning the the letters of the name of the place, so Mallorca or New York or Tokyo. But in the case of the one that we donated to Pan Am Museum uh for the purposes of auctioning, for you know, fundraising for the for the foundation and all its important work, we actually emblazoned the words Pan Am. Uh so we took the the beautiful um the beautiful logo of Pan Am and we um we applied 24 karat gold to it. And it and it just felt like absolutely the right thing to do at the point of entering the the US market with our formula to start with um this particular um incredible trademark and uh incredible collection of art. And um I really think the future is very, very bright for the Pan Am Historical Foundation, the museum, and um and the brand in general. I really do foresee that you know there's good forces are going to converge in terms of uh bringing to fruition, I hope, in one space, uh a sort of experiential, you know, journey back through time into a kind of Pan Am world. And that's something that we would love to to play a part in with uh with the poster art that we're generating.

SPEAKER_01 51:19

Excellent. Well, we can't thank you enough for your support and all of your work in in bringing these posters back to life. And I mean, really, you have to see them to believe them because the colors are just so vibrant and and stunning. Uh I I I know I I've said that several times on this program, but it's it's the only two words that come to mind is vibrant and stunning. Um and I'm I'm a little speechless over it. So Sticknote Bills has Pan Am and B O A C and the Orion Express, correct?

SPEAKER_00 51:56

Oh, the Orion Express. Well, with the Belmont group, yeah, we're we're that's a that's a work in progress. But uh yeah, trains, planes, and aeroplanes. But I think planes, planes and uh Pan Am uh we are absolutely uh super excited about. And just to explain, like or to you know ease any sort of panic about pricing amongst your um listeners as well. Um we have this fantastic uh global print fulfillment partner that is American and founded by a gentleman who specialized in fine art printing in the 1980s in Los Angeles before his company grew to become you know global in its uh uh well, he has factories on every continent. So any of your customers, uh sorry, any of your listeners anywhere, wherever they are, if they're in Melbourne, for example, and they order a Pan Am poster, it's gonna be printed in Melbourne. It's gonna be printed on archival quality paper, um, and it's gonna be shipped to their door from a factory that's you know 20, 40 kilometers max away. Um, and that's for us so important because we're all about sustainability and trying to cut down carbon emissions and speed up uh the pace at which customers can get access to the prints that we produce. And um, this American gentleman who founded our global print fulfillment partner, he's an amazing guy. And actually, they have their own forests. So they're producing their own trees, they're planting three for every one that they that they cut down uh for paper and frame production. Um and they use Swiss technology and machinery. Um, they've got facilities all over the United States. So I'm delighted to say it's off the back of you know quite a few years of behind the scenes prep. Um, but if anyone wants to order online now for as little as $30, we can we can get a poster to them that's super high quality.

SPEAKER_02 53:54

I can attest to that. They're beautiful images, and I've I've seen the ones you're talking about, and they're gorgeous.

SPEAKER_01 54:00

Thank you. Well, I well, I think uh some redecorating is in my future, in my place.

SPEAKER_02 54:09

Well, when you come visit Palm Springs, Tom, I'll show you the rest of the collection.

SPEAKER_01 54:14

All right, sounds good. Anything else uh either of you would like to add about uh travel posters and uh Pan Am posters and stick no bills. Meg?

SPEAKER_00 54:29

Well, no, I just think there's one thing you you interviewed Frank Abagnell, is that how I said um the other Abingnale. Yeah, Abignell. And there was one thing that he said that's just really stuck in my mind. It was the day that he put on a Pan Am uniform was the day that he realized he could get away with almost anything. And that really uh has stuck with me because um, you know, the power of the Pan Am brand is sort of summed up in a maverick way in that statement. Um, you know, this brand that um you know came into being out of uh um the Air Force and the Navy, but was you know very much a nimble and fast-moving, you know, commercial brand, but had this stylistic uh you know quality and and edge to it that um you know very much is the romance of Pan Am, I think, is that kind of uh um you know, that mix of uh the brand and it's what it projects being uh um you know both glamour, uh, but at the same time the sense of uh being highly trusted and experienced um and you know very well run, which um I think uh yeah is pretty unsurpassed in that context.

SPEAKER_02 55:49

Having worn the uniform, I can attest to that. You can get away with almost anything.

SPEAKER_01 55:55

Well, that's another episode of the Pan Am podcast where Philip Keene will share all his secrets. Uh for our listeners, I do need to point out that uh Pan Am Brands is the holder of the copyright and logo of Pan Am. Well, thank you both uh for your time. And uh I just can't can't say it enough. Uh go to StickNobille's website, it will be in the episode description and check out all their beautiful artwork. Uh, you guys have just done a wonderful job of restoring and preserving uh travel posters and travel artwork for future generations to come. And uh and and and both and you, Philip, uh the two of you are are really making a dent in the universe uh and you know saving all this wonderful artwork for future generations. So thank you both for your time. Well, Tom, thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_00 56:59

Yeah, yeah, you do a great service for Pan Am as well. They're very lucky to have you.

SPEAKER_01 57:05

Thank you. That legacy lives on at the Pan Am Museum in Garden City, New York, where you can explore the rich history of the aircraft and individuals at the heart of the company known as the world's most experienced airline. For more information about the Pan Am Museum, check out our website at www.thepan Amuseum.org. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. As was once a tagline in one of our commercials, we would greatly appreciate your support to help the Pan Am Museum continue making the going great. You can also support the museum by shopping on our online store for all things Pan Am accessories, apparel, jewelry, books, models, and posters. We want to hear from you. If you have a question for us or want to share your story, our email address is podcast at the Pan Am Museum dot org. As flight crews once said to passengers departing for their destinations around the world, thank you for flying, Pan Am