SPEAKER_06 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. 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. This podcast is sponsored by the generous personal support of Mr. Adam Aaron, the CEO and chairman of AMC Theaters. He is also president of our sister organization, the Pan Am Historical Foundation. 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. Also joining us is his son, Dr. Don DeVito, a renowned musical educator. The senior DeVito will share stories working for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s and being hired by the Pan Am Board in the early 1960s to work with all the board of directors and founder Juan T. Tripp. He was actually on a first-name basis with Mr. Tripp and coordinated all of the materials and presentations for the board members, such as aviation legend Charles Lindbergh and banker James Rockefeller, among others. His hiring by Panam was tied to his cryptography training in the United States Air Force and the Central Intelligence Agency, where he served in the 1950s during the Cold War in Rangoon, the Philippines, and Libya. Don't son, the junior Dr. Don DeVito, will share his memories of traveling around the world as a Pan Am kid and how that shaped his career in education. Dr. Don is a music educator at the Rawlings Elementary Center for Fine Arts since 2018 and is an adjunct instructor in the University of Florida online Masters in Education program. From 2001 to 2018, he was the music director and special education teacher at the Sydney Lanaire Center, a public school in Gainesville, Florida, for students with disabilities between the ages of 3 and 22. The music programs are global in scope and linked online with universities and music programs internationally through research, cooperative music making, and professional music education organizations. Don was named the 2011 National Teacher of the Year by the Council for Exceptional Children. Let's listen to a three-minute news clip about his work from WCJB Channel 20 in Gainesville, Florida.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

Learning to play music can be difficult for students with special needs. It's even more challenging.

SPEAKER_01 4:31

Paige, last week Illumina County teacher Don DeVito got a call from the CEC or Council for Exceptional Children saying he had been chosen as their national teacher of the year. DeVito attributes the honor to his students and to teachers around the world. The music coming out of this classroom is just as special as the students making it. But don't underestimate these artists. Their feats are being heard around the world. Music teacher Don DeVito teaches at Sydney Lanier in Gainesville, a public school that serves students with disabilities. His curriculum is almost entirely online.

SPEAKER_07 5:21

Our students learn world music, they learn to recognize different styles and composers from the stores.

SPEAKER_01 5:26

Every day, DeVito students interact with musicians from around the world, learning the jambawana from a Kenyan. I miss you or a Brazilian melody. And DeVito's classmates include a group of visually impaired students from Pakistan. A gift that DeVito says cost 30 bucks for the computer camera, but one that keeps on giving.

SPEAKER_06 6:27

They even have a rescue horse that lives on their farm, affectionately named Clipper, in honor of Pan Am. Now on to our interview. And what I'm going to do for this episode is the elder Don DeVito, I'm going to refer to him as Mr. DeVito, and the younger son I'm going to refer to as Dr. Don, so you know who I'm directing the questions to. So, gentlemen, thank you very much for joining the Pan Am podcast.

unknown 7:15

Thank you. Me too.

SPEAKER_06 7:16

Mr. DeVito, let's start with you. Let's talk a little bit about your life. Where did you grow up? And tell us a little bit about your childhood and your parents.

SPEAKER_04 7:25

I grew up in Norfolk, New Jersey. My parents, my father was an immigrant.

SPEAKER_06 7:30

Where did he immigrate from?

SPEAKER_04 7:31

Well, actually, it's strange from Scotland. And the reason was because the quotes for Midley were full. So they had to go to Scotland. I forgot the name of the town and live one month. And that's where the name change happened there, between Scotland and New York. They took the De Vito and put a D it used to be D-E-V-I-T-I, I think.

SPEAKER_05 7:58

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 7:59

Yeah. So they changed, they made a change there. So I wasn't who I really was in the manifest.

SPEAKER_06 8:05

As a fellow Italian, where did your father come from in Italy?

SPEAKER_04 8:10

He came from uh Casalattico was the name of the town. I asked my grandmother once, uh, how'd you meet him? She says, Oh, he just showed up one day in town. You know, you know, something like that. I said, Oh, I like to go back to you. She says, Please don't go back and run away. She told me. I do have a lot of relatives on my father's side in Ireland. Most of them immigrated to Ireland because it was easy if you start a business or they wouldn't let you in and take a job away from a foreigner. Where you were going in Ireland. And that's the way it was. So most of them win their business, ice cream business, whatever. For me, I grew up in an immigrant neighborhood and I was assimilated by high school, by going to school. That's how the assimilation took place in those days. I read later just how important that was to me and how it changed me a lot. I like that I had that experience. I was the guy who went to the German butcher, I was the guy who went to the Irish butcher, I was the guy that went to the Polish butcher, you know, not to speak the languages, but they were ready for me, you know. A lot of the Italian immigrants, uh, you know, they stuck in these clothes pockets, you know. I used to go to some mere bad, my grandfather used to take me to some bad meetings. They talk about Mussolini or something. You have somebody in the family in the service, and if it's just crazy, but it's different. What I thought was very imperial. I'm not, I don't want to change the subject of us, is that if you're on the West Coast and you're Japanese, you were put in a camp. If you're on the east coast and you're American, you you became naturalized. And I always felt the injustice there. How they would feel. Hey, we're Japanese, why can't they treat us like they treat the Italian the guys who are you know familiar or whatever, you know? But I grew up in a in a neighborhood, and I'm glad I got a lot of experience in life from that.

SPEAKER_06 10:12

After high school, tell us about your life after that.

SPEAKER_04 10:15

After high school, I graduated. And I joined those times the Korean War was on, and I didn't want to go into the military, so I joined the Air Force. And from there, my career took off. Started off, I had no further education than my high school graduation. That was it. And from there, the way everything happened, everything fell into place for me all the time. And I started getting the CIA, and uh I did all this just on a high school education. That's the only thing I can tell you. But the circumstances always changed it for me, and it was approvement, always a step up, you know?

SPEAKER_06 10:57

Tell us about your time in the Air Force and then how you ended up being in the CIA.

SPEAKER_04 11:04

Okay. I was in the Air Force, and the Air Force trained me to be a cryptographer. So now I'm a cryptographer. And when I got discharged, I applied to the CIA.

SPEAKER_06 11:18

And what year is this, sir? 1950s?

SPEAKER_04 11:21

56. I applied for the CIA and uh and they took me for an interview in New York just for a second. Funny thing is that my mother, who never wanted me to leave anyway, and those days, you mean you're leaving your family alone and you're going out of, you know, going away again. But I heard her talk to my father in the kitchen. The cryptographer, needed. She says, Isn't this what Don did? And he says, Yeah. And she got the phone number. I called New York City, made an appointment. They were in New York at that time. They moved from Newark to New York, you know, they were recruiting. And there's where I got hired by the CIA there. It's an apartment house, apartment building in New York City.

SPEAKER_06 12:06

Interesting. So you were seeing a girl at the time that you were about to go into the CIA. Tell us a little bit about her and also tell us a little bit about what happened uh when you left that job to go to the CIA.

SPEAKER_04 12:22

Okay. Well, she was a nutritionist. She worked for nutrition for animal, for uh to feed animals. They come from all over South America and everything. And then she worked for another new nutritionist company, senior reformers, how to type formula.

SPEAKER_06 12:39

And what was her name?

SPEAKER_04 12:40

Laura.

SPEAKER_06 12:42

Laura. So you're dating Laura, who will become your future wife, but that's a story for a little bit later. So you're dating Laura, and you tell her what about your new job?

SPEAKER_04 12:57

I said, I'm going to work for the CIA, but don't tell nobody.

SPEAKER_06 13:03

And then what happened? She told everybody. Let's talk about your time in the CIA. Tell us a little bit about what you did for the Central Intelligence Agency starting in the mid-1950s, the height of the Cold War.

SPEAKER_04 13:18

And I apply fit with the CIA and I got the job. Two and a half years to get that job. And if you psychiatrists, you have no idea how thorough they are. You tell them the truth, and you're God with them. You're part of them. That's the best thing why I can put it there. And that was my uh whole life with them like that. I was one of the first that see they indeed. I was the first involved with computers. There was no tapes then or nothing. So I was the first ones that were inputting information into computer systems with the with the key punch cards.

SPEAKER_06 13:54

And this is 1950s, so these computers were huge, right? They took up like the whole floor of buildings. That was later. Oh, that was later.

SPEAKER_04 14:05

Yeah, that time they didn't get to that point yet.

SPEAKER_06 14:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 14:07

It was just strictly the company brought a had a computer, and they put the from their business, they would take the uh the key punch guards. That just started. That was just before military and everybody. They were they were ahead. Companies did that. And so what happened was Western Union sent me down there. The company must have asked, I don't know how it happened. They asked Western Union if they can hire me, and Western Union said, okay. And I I started working uh for them.

SPEAKER_06 14:42

The Central Intelligence Agency, correct?

SPEAKER_04 14:44

Yeah. In those days they had different, I assigned traffic, they had radio RCA, radio something or something. And I was dealing in directly with these companies. I made a lot of contacts there too, but uh and in those days it was strange. I got on a flight in Burma and I'm sitting there in the asteroidist, the pay name storage. Do you want a drink, sir? You know, I said, no, thank you. And I heard her saying the dad, he must be CIA or something like that, you know. So that's the way it was. You know, I live in foreign countries, I met different cultures or in the homes. Oh, unbelievable.

SPEAKER_06 15:32

So when you were working for the Central Intelligence Agency, you were traveling the world on Pan Am. Can you tell us a little bit about some of your adventures?

SPEAKER_04 15:43

Well, those days we already were briefed, and they says uh be careful because the uh Russians were hiring, getting girls hired by the CA in these certain countries because they knew the language. And they told me to be careful. They says, because they're dying to get one of these girls married to an official, you know. And like I said, I traveled that night, you know what I mean. And the girl invited me to fly down to Miami and stay with her. Well, I turned her in. No, I I was really aware of her, you know. And there they were shocked.

SPEAKER_06 16:24

So I think the spy term for that is honey trap, right?

SPEAKER_04 16:27

That's right.

SPEAKER_06 16:28

So when did you marry your your wife?

SPEAKER_04 16:31

When I came back, I was on my way back to the States. I send her a uh car, yeah, I told her I'd give her a call, I send a card or something. And when I come back, uh I got associated with her, you know, again, and I married her. But I had a the CIA, I had no problem, but the CIA says uh all the CIA careers told me that I can't marry a foreigner. I would have to resign. And uh actually that's what I did. I just I left them and I mean Laura got married and it was that, you know.

SPEAKER_06 17:09

When did you leave the CIA and when did you join Pan Am?

SPEAKER_02 17:13

1960? Yeah, 1960. Yeah.

SPEAKER_06 17:18

That's the the height of Pan Am success, the jet age, the 1960s. Pan Am could the the only place that Pan Am hasn't uh flown to is the moon at that point. So you were there in a very pivotal time where Pan Am was extremely successful. Tell us a little bit about working for that company.

SPEAKER_04 17:41

I left the CIA and I applied Pan Am. The board hired me, really. There was one step in between, but the board hired me. I worked for the board, period. Strictly for the boardroom. At that point, I did every communications function in that boardroom at that point. I knew everybody. Montreal, I mean, I knew I knew everybody and uh stayed that way. I did every communications function at the boardroom completely. I was there at every time. Board meetings were every other m every other month, I think. And you and in those days you couldn't make mistakes because there's no time to uh to correct it. So you had to work hard, like with the senior director of finance. I worked with him. And oh, I learned they I was so I was uh they were treating me so good. I knew the stocks market. I learned one thing, uh you just tell the truth and you're always gonna be okay. It was something like even with one trip sometime in the boardroom at night. I could see he was comfortable with me.

SPEAKER_02 18:56

And I so I used to think, I said, see, you know, why was he so comfortable with me?

SPEAKER_04 19:01

Because he knew within the boardroom that I knew the functions what to do. And the the biographer came to interview him and everything. And I could see he was very happy I was there because I can go to the they used they used the he came, he used to come down with this big reel of old Sikorsky kids, and there was the family attachments, and nobody could see them, and uh, he kept me there, and uh so uh I don't want you to think he wanted me every time he went to boardroom, no, only when I had to deal with something that involved that I could do remotely, you know, and stuff, which I did. But uh we became on a one-on-one person with Juan, and the wonderful man, I'll keep up praises. I got think of him now once in a while. He's always in the dream once in a while, you know. Wonderful man, that's all I can say. I want to praise him.

SPEAKER_06 19:56

So let's talk about your family. So you you have a new wife, and how was that living in the 1960s in this time, working for Pan Am and raising a family?

SPEAKER_04 20:06

Yeah, I have two boys, Anthony and Donald. Well that's a minute. What else uh can I how can I praise that?

SPEAKER_05 20:16

Sure.

SPEAKER_08 20:17

My my brother was born in 1968, and I was born in 1970. But you were traveling with the mom when she was pregnant. Wasn't she in Libya at some point when she was pregnant?

SPEAKER_04 20:27

Yeah, you know, yes, I took her to Lebanon. Lebanon right after the war. So fortunately we don't you remember the uh the uh hotel chain?

SPEAKER_06 20:37

Yeah, intercontinental hotels, yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:39

Well, that goes way back to Roosevelt, you know. He wanted not only he wanted a nice hotel we stop and everything, and uh I left him with a driver in a hotel. Nice guy, and I went by myself to Baalbeck. Now Baobek was right next to the Syrian border, um knowing to me the terrorists were already moving in there. But I was undercover of a French tourist group. I went with a French tourist group, but I didn't know all this until later how you know what I would what I did, you know. You went with Mond and all these things are happening, you had no idea. Yeah, we do these tour sites and everything that was.

SPEAKER_06 21:33

So, were you working for the CIA when you were working for Pan Ann? That's the real question.

SPEAKER_04 21:38

Yeah, it gave that impression. It gave her that impression. It was me. All the CIA told me was make sure we know every place you go when you leave the country. Working for an earlier, what am I gonna do? Call them up every weekend or something. You know what I'm talking about. So I just dropped that. I had a you know, we had fake houses for me. And I had a hell of a time remembering a phone number unless I used it. Okay? So what I used to do is against they told me never write it down, remember. I can't learn without I had to write it down. And I did. Well if something ever happens, I'll just swallow it. But I always had money in my pocket and I always had uh uh protection, safe house protection. When I went to Lebanon, it was just me. Um I liked the adventure, you know. I didn't know how close I was with with the terrorists already there. I didn't know that a French group gave me cover. I went with a French cover group.

SPEAKER_06 22:49

So, Mr. DeVito and Dr. Don, let's talk, let's have a conversation about you growing up, Dr. Don, and uh traveling the world with your family. Uh, what are some of the trips that really stand out to you in your childhood?

SPEAKER_08 23:09

The trips that stand out to me in my childhood. We've been to Rome so many times on like three and four-day weekends in our family that none of us agree how many times we've been to Rome. Yeah, I told my teacher in like third grade, oh, I've been to Rome this many times. I've been to Amsterdam. You know, in Amsterdam, the windmills, and she goes, No, now don't tell fibs you didn't do that. So I came home and got all our boarding passes we saved up. I'm like, here. I told you. Yeah, she apologized. Some of the things that we that were really for me began with England, and this is one of the things about the one trip having the travel for the Pan Am employees, because employees internationally could get to know each other and would visit each other. David and Janet Shanks were very good friends with my father who met through Pan Am, and their home was in Cookham, England, it still is, and um, their home was earlier kind of like like a boarding house. People years before they bought it, people would there's a plaque on the door that says Marconi, historic registry Marconi worked on the radio. He stayed here. Oh, cool, very cool. It's also believed that Graham, who wrote The Wind in the Willows, had been there too. So here I am reading these stories of the wind in the willows, and I'm like, you know, that part over there's a cricket field across the street with a hill. I'm like, you know what? I could see what that would look like, the place of the wind and the willow. And again, no, it very likely, very possibly was. And they had a bookshelf in there with like original copy of The Hobbit, not to change the course, but later on, when I started publishing in Special Ed, I was publishing through traveling with my dad to Ismay, International Society for Music A conferences, and all my work on autism and collaboration, what we could talk about a little later. I would publish an Oxford Handbooks. So when I would go visit them years after my dad worked for Pan Am, just a few years ago, I would put copies of all the books that I had published on their bookshelf in their home. Oh, nice. So the hallway I would run down when I was six with all the books and the Hobbit had my books on special ed that I had published on their thing. So they came to my wedding. They're like, they're more like aunt and uncles than aunt and uncles. There was one time I got asked to fly to Kazakhstan for I was on the board of the International Society for Music. It has members in over 100 countries. And this is because when I started working with students with special needs, my father told me, you know, you need to go international and then work your way back national in what you do. Because mine was on autism and behavior communication. So what we did was we went to an ISMA conference in Tenerife, Spain, based on work I had done on autism. So here I am in a poster session in Tenerife, and I'm meeting people on the organization who also work with underserved populations. So they're like, Well, our next conference is in Singapore and Malaysia. We should you should come out. And my dad's like, oh, well, ever since I was in the Philippines and Burma, I know that area. So we traveled together when I, you know, was working on my doctorate years after Panam ended. We went to Tenerife, Spain together. We went to Singapore together. And then from there, I started connecting because when I one of the things about traveling on Pan Am as a kid is beyond my peer, my peer panda coloring book that I love, was they had this map in all the Clipper magazines of all the routes that Pan Am flew, like you said, everywhere but the moon. And all these little lines would connect. And that concept of networking really stuck with me. And I had a student who was rescued. She was she was born in Haiti with hydrocephalus, and she was born into an orphanage where she needed life-saving surgery. She was taken by Gertrude Bienn Ami, who was brought who brought her to the U.S. for life-saving surgeries from the Notre Mesan orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. She then was adopted and years later was in my music program at Siddhillinaire Center for kids with disabilities. And she was rejected at the hospital and basically left to pass away at birth because they couldn't help her. And Gertrude rescues these children. She gets them from the street with disabilities, you know, children with disabilities. And she has about 45 children now in the orphanage there. So Lena, her name is Lena, she's in my classroom, and we're going to Carnegie Hall. I wanted my kids to go to Carnegie Hall, Down syndrome, autism, cerebral palsy. The high school nearby went and they were bragging about it all year. And my principal goes, Well, where should we take our kids? I'm like, let's go to Carnegie Hall. Why not? I started connecting, like the video you heard in the in the podcast, I started connecting all these international locations. Some I met at Ismay conferences. I would meet these people or um who I would get in contact with people who knew them through Ismay. For instance, the special ed center in Gujarat City, Pakistan, I met at a conference, Arthur Gill. Um, and what would happen is I would ask all the professors too from these universities, like Dr. Magali Kleber at the University of Londrina in Brazil was at the conference. And I said, you know, Dad, if we're going to Singapore, I need to do something more than just present and come home. So I made a flyer saying, if you would like to connect on Skype with my students, let's connect. And we started all over the world: Brazil, China, London, University College of the Arts in London, University of Minneapolis in Duluth, who I'm going to present with. Um, all these places all over the world started Skyping in with my students. And I said, okay, we actually I actually got it to work, Syracuse University with Dr. Emma Rodriguez Suarez, who actually is from Tenerife. And I said, okay, we worked it out. I could get the hall. I'm flying my kids to New York, and they're on the plane. And I I realized right then in that moment, these kids have a autism and downs and cereblaws. And I don't think any of them have been on a plane before besides Lena. How are they gonna react to takeoff? And the engines start revving and they all start yelling, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6. So I thought, okay, we're gonna be fine. But I said, Well, what am I gonna what are we gonna play for three hours? And all those people internationally flew to New York and played all the songs they taught us on Skype in person in New York and Carnegie Hall. Awesome. And that's awesome. And we called it Discovering Abilities. And uh, and but that was all the networking through Pan Am. So we would take the universities, the centers internationally, um, with even a group called Group Lang E in Kanaku Guinea, West Africa. And what we would do is take these programs and people, practitioners who work with these children with disabilities and connect them online networking with universities who I had collaborated with, who are now collaborating with them, and then organizations like Ismay, the Center, uh, the Council for Exceptional Children, where I was their national teacher of the year. That's the organization for all things special ed. Um, SEMPRI, the Society for Education, Music, and Psychological Research. Dr. Graham Welch, who um is lead professor at University College of the Arts in London, um, was on the board of Isme. And when I went back, I met Arthur Gale from Pakistan at having coffee. And my friend Dr. Phil Moen, who coordinated a lot of these things with me, um, who is a community musician. That means they work with people with underserved populations and coordinate. Um, so he introduced me to Arthur Gale. And Arthur and I started Skyping together, and I said, Arthur, let's write grants together. So we wrote these grants together, and Sempri funded 50,000 British pounds for his program with children with disabilities. Years later, he I was on the board of his mate, and him and Gertrude received awards for what they did, and they were flown to the conference in Glasgow. So here's Gertrude and Arthur. Arthur, from all our work together, put in for a work visa in addition to the travel visa and got it. Stayed in the UK, and years later, a few years later, he brought his whole family from Pakistan and everything they were dealing with there to be citizens in the United Kingdom. And I was writing support letters to the British Embassy in Islamabad. As you know, I pull out my what I call it, we pull out the hug card because the hug award is the International Teacher of the Year for Special Ed. So we say we pull out the hug card because he didn't get the visa the first time through. So I wrote a letter to the embassy in Islamabad and pulled out the hug card saying I was International Teacher of the Year in the US for special education and we do all these things together. And he got it, they gave it to him in the second round. And also letters from, I mean, the guys in Pakistan in Gujarat City, he's getting support letters from the university in London and College of the Arts, right? And they flew him to the United Kingdom because I was supposed to go there. Sepri was going to fly me there to see his program, but then bin Laden was taken out and he got Arthur's like, no, this just is not going to be safe now. So he contacted Sepri and said, Is there something else we can do? And Sepri said, we'll fly you to England. They had a thing called um Sounds of Intent, which is a program for a new benchmark of way of looking at how children would communicate with disabilities through the arts, through music. And he goes, Well, we're gonna send you to all these different schools to visit for a week or two in the United Kingdom. And he out, I was copied on the email. He emails back, what about Don? And I'm thinking, What about Don? And they go, Yeah, Don could come too. So now Arthur and I are traveling in the United Kingdom all to all these different schools in Oxford, back together again when we were only on Skype before. So my father, my father, to bring it back to my father, telling me to go international first, brought back all the networking and all the things that I had learned as a child, traveling on PM and meeting people, and brought it into my field of special education. And basically things were changed in the world through it. And I think about Gertrude, Gertrude, when she had to get a visa to go to Glasgow, Scotland, it was held at the Royal Conservatory in Glasgow, and she had to get an academic visa. And she's like, How am I gonna get an academic visa to the UK as a woman in Haiti in an orphanage where you know in her area the sanitation pickup doesn't exist? All the chat, you know, the challenges in Haiti. They have been continuous for her, but she she's so empowered. And so, anyway, everything I had published together with all these people, they're co-authors. They have high school degrees, right? Some of them have a bachelor's, but they I co-author with them. So Gertrude has been co-authored in Oxford Handbook. Wow. So all the things we published together, she had this whole resume, just you know, and she got her academic visa. And when I when I when she was going up there, Janet's sister lived in Scotland, right? My aunt, my proverbial aunt in in England. And she picked us up, she worked for a university and brought us to the Ross Priory. It's not a priory anymore, it's uh for the professors there. They use it for meetings, and it's right on Loch Loman, and it's it's gorgeous. And she gets off the plane, she's having tea and scones in what looks like a castle on Loch Aloman. So my father wants to jump in here.

SPEAKER_04 34:11

Pan M. When we started flying into uh Russia, Pan Am was sent to set up the communication.

SPEAKER_03 34:21

Yeah, David October was sent to Russia to set up the communication. For PNM for PNA. It was nothing expiring about it, it just happened that way. You know, you know what I'm saying?

SPEAKER_04 34:33

But they sent after Lockerbie, they sent David to. He set up the communications for them.

SPEAKER_08 34:39

Yeah, and uh, and he also was an investigator for for Lockerbie. David, David was David.

SPEAKER_06 34:46

How did being a Pantiam kid, Dr. Don, shape your life?

SPEAKER_08 34:51

It it shaped my life because we lived in Sayorville, New Jersey, and we would always, my mother and I would always go to church. We would go to the library, the library was like there was that was it's not like it was today. There was a library, there was a movie theater with two screens and a park, Laurel Park. And other than church and the library, there wasn't a lot to do. But it never mattered because I was seeing the world, and seeing the world and having those experiences, you know, were the kinds of things that got me to think globally. And I got to put that energy and a little bit of being precocious, you could maybe you could say, and to put all that in in a in a way that I could see the world and apply it. And I, you know, and the ideas of doing these things was partly was Pan Am went under. We wanted to get that travel back. And it was that idea of seeing the world, and then these organizations, as many and the others, were were avenues to be able to share then what I did professionally in those locations. And it's interesting because I had mentioned before going to Kazakhstan and the West Bank. Every time I remember we were on Pan Am, we got to Rome, they would make an announcement. Anybody going on to Brussels or Constantinople or Istanbul or you know, these other things that seemed very exotic to me were sounded like, no, I don't want to go there. I don't know those places. I know Rome, I know England, I know, you know, and I was kind of like, no, I'm glad we're going to Rome. But then later on, when I was older, you know, I had that previous experience to go further to the West Bank, to Kazakhstan, to Hung Xiao China, where I met the professor of the Conservatory of Music in China, who then flew me and Dr. Phil Moen over to do the first inclusive music performance in the China Conservatory.

SPEAKER_04 36:40

Donald was asked by a Norwegian travel group. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_08 36:48

Yeah. Um, so what he's referring to is my my colleague Dr. Phil Moen, who has done from he's from Ireland, who was who works with other populations, you know, a collaborator from Carnegie Home to everything else. He got a grant and through an organization based in Norway, they wanted to put music education in the schools in the West Bank. And the Palestinian Education Council through him did this um conference. And we were there, and um, this is what my father was kind of transitioning to in the end of this in the discussion. And so, you know, so there we are in Jericho in Bethlehem, and I'm going to a school for children with profound hearing impairment doing music. I'm present and I'm presenting on a Skype approach that we did. So I'm training in the West Bank. Um, the the education there said if you're gonna put music education in the schools or use it in that way, um, here's how we connect it with the world, here's how we connect the organizations together to help children with special needs and to help children have music education, no matter who it was, to have music education. And that was presented there, all that Pan Am Legacy was presented there as well. And it was really pretty amazing. My wife, Wendy, and I, you know, we don't have children, but I teach now at Rawlings Elementary Center for Fine Arts. It's a 99% minority Title I school. And I asked my students one time, you know, and this is a 99% minority school, and we started doing the same zooming and Skyping all over the world. And then the students have to write and compare and contrast. Our students, and I'll play, I'll give you an example to play. Our students have a song we call 3500 Northeast 15th Street. That's our school address. And we say, and it's from all the rhythms and riffs that they bring in from the community into school, and we arranged it. And we say, Duke Ellington had the A-Train, Boys to Men had Motown Philly in the 90s. We have 3500 Northeast 15th. And when we zoom all over the world, we play our community music, they play their music from their country of their community, and then they write about it, comparing and contrasting. And it's trying to keep as best I can that idea of travel and world communication. My father had his form of communications. I'm trying to bring communications into teaching, and it's being able to share the world with them because we were sharing with Dr. David Acambo, who's from Kenya, he's a professor, and uh and they were asking him, are there homes, are there houses in Africa? And it's like they don't really know what it's like. So that communication and that sharing of culture um is really important. And that's how I'm trying to bring what Panam did to another generation.

SPEAKER_06 39:34

Can we take a quick break and play that song? Sure. All right. So our listeners are in for a treat. Uh, tell us again uh about the song.

SPEAKER_08 39:45

So the song has our students are always tapping on desks, like all the time. They're always telling them stop tapping on desks, stop tapping on the walls. But we take them, those rhythms, because they're their neighborhood rhythms. They come from playing on the sidewalk, on the steps of their apartments. Um, and we arrange them on drum kit, bass guitar, um, xylofoam, marimba, and we arrange them into these very sophisticated pieces of music. And then we called it, we named it after our school address because a lot of the kids live across the street or live within walking distance of the school. And uh, and then we share it internationally. So that's why we call it 3500 Northeast 15th. It's a variety of instrumentation, and they arrange it and compose it themselves, and it's their world. Fantastic. That we're trying to bring to other places.

SPEAKER_06 40:29

All right. Well, let's take a listen. Back to our interview with CIA veteran Don DeVito, who worked for the Pan Am Board from the early 1960s to 1991, and his son, former Pan Am kid and now musical educator, Dr. Don DeVito.

SPEAKER_08 44:16

I just want to share one of the things again about that school of Rawlings Elementary. You know, we're currently what they call a turnaround school. We're where rating is a D academically. So part of what we were doing was comparing and contrasting the world around them, then gets the students to have a relevant way of writing and putting together sentence structure and writing about things that are relative to them. And one time we were communicating with Dr. Nina Rao from she's she teaches, she's a professor in the US, but she has um a program for children with disabilities in India. She was in India at the time in Habarabad, and she zoomed into our kids. I connected us with um Westminster Choir College and with the University of Massachusetts in Lowell. And we made our school a lab school where we're the lab portion for this university. Because a lot of universities, when they train teachers, have K-12 high school program at the school. That's a high school where they do research. They have a basically a school on campus. We have that in Gainesville. We have it in Florida. We call it PK Young. And people try to get in there, it's hard to get into, it's a lottery-based thing. So I said, Well, we're on the east side of town where we do not have the same types of opportunities. So I said, Well, we're going to be a lab school now for UMass and a lab school for Westminster Choir College. So we brought their interns who taught my students online together with all these international collaborations. And when we did it, they made boarding passes for the kids and they would have to document each country live we were going to. We went to Haiti, we went to Brazil, we went to India on Zoom, and the room was filled with Pan Am memorabilia to set the mood. So there were like Pan Am blankets, 747 posters all around the room to set the mood. We had food that related to the cultures we were visiting. And these kids were filling out the boarding passes of each place they went to and sharing and asking questions and sharing culture. So, you know, I just wanted to add that one kind of last point of really bringing what Pan Am at one trip did and my father did into the classroom.

SPEAKER_06 46:24

So, Dr. Don, looking back at your life and where you are today and all of the children that you've touched and all of the good stuff that you've done. How do you look at the Pan Am legacy and why this history is important to be preserved?

SPEAKER_08 46:45

The history is important to be preserved of Pan Am, not just for the employees who work together and the people who work there, but like I'm an example of that. It's it's it's the you know, it's it's a legacy and and it needs to be preserved because of all the innovative things Pan Am did. It brought the world together. You know, we talked about Marconi and the radio. Well, it's one trip and flight. It's one trip and travel. And and the travel we have today, a lot of that is because of people like Juan Tripp. And they should know the history. They should know the history of the technologies that they're gonna go into. If you're gonna go work for an airline, if you're gonna go work in flight, if you're gonna be an engineer, if you're gonna be anything having to do with anything Pan Am had been affiliated with, you should know about the history that goes with the craft that you're doing, whether you're going to work on an engine or whether you're gonna go work in aerodynamics, or even if you're just gonna go work in math or science, you should know about all the things that, you know, it's almost like when you watch the beginning of the Big Bang Theory and they give you the 60-second technology of how we got here, you know, um, Pan Am should be in there, you know, and it's that kind of thing where they need to know the progress of civilization. And Pan Am really did have an impact on that. It's an area that you don't look at because it's just like um, you know, it's just like the sailing ships, and then Pan Am for flight was the same thing. That's why it was a clipper, that's why they use the clipper. It's it's as most important as the clipper was to sailing as Pan Am Airlines was to flight, and and that is an important part of history, and people should know it.

SPEAKER_04 48:26

Her navigator, a panel.

SPEAKER_08 48:29

Yeah, do you remember that? The navigator for Earhart, even um on her flight when she was traveling around the world, was a former Pan Am navigator because we saw that on the Pan Am documentary, yeah. So even in areas outside of commercial flight, Pan Am had relevancy, you know, and uh and like my brother says, you know, my my brother tells me for him with traveling was the fact that we had to wear suits, we had to get dressed up, and we were very much like when we would go to an airport and we would see people wearing jeans, we're like, oh, really? Like, no, um, and he said, But my brother is um an executive for a global payment company. And he said, the thing with Pan Am was that he learned how to present himself. He learned how to be an ambassador as a child, like a child ambassador. And I think that maybe ties back to what children should learn is that that aspect of it is even though you're a child and you're young, you're an ambassador for your family, you're an ambassador for your community, and you're an ambassador one time, hopefully, for the world. And we had that opportunity for the world to travel and to be that ambassador.

SPEAKER_04 49:32

Panam was some airline, man. No other line. If you we went one time, we were coming back. I was with Anthony, we were coming back from Caracas. They had the shuttle only with a small amount of men they hope. Pan Am sent up a 747 just to get a few people, passengers, and you know, and then take them back down again. It was unbelievable that early. I just it just was they were just unbelievable.

SPEAKER_08 50:02

Those days it was only Pan Am or Coca-Cola, and that's why students in school today should learn about Pan Am because of its icon of who it was. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_04 50:16

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. A Pan Am storist on the on the flight told me she says those boys are wonderful. They're they're welcome first class, you know, travel first class. She said we have no problem with them.

SPEAKER_08 50:29

Just to give you the experience, you know. I'm sitting in the upstairs, we're in first class, and you know, uh, Liza Manelli is sitting next to me, you know, and I'm looking at Liza. She asked me for something, you know, the little cordial chocolate thing. I'm like, uh Milton Burl's on the plane. One of the characters from um officer and a gentleman, like Richard Gere is on the plane, and I'm just like sitting there in first class with them. And then we're flying home from London to kind of give you the little pan and brett part of it, because we talked about how they love having us in first class and all that, you know, here's the other part. We're waiting on standby in Heathrow, and we didn't get first class because we were on standby, my father's to the level. So we actually said to my dad, we were upset, can we wait for the next flight? Let's wait for the next flight. Maybe we'll get first class, you know. Um, my high school graduation, we flew to Caracas. You my dad was talking about Caracas. We flew to Caracas, you know, we had standby one time flying out of Nice, and there was a mechanical with the plane. So my brother and my mother flew home, and my dad and I stayed overnight.

SPEAKER_05 51:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_08 51:30

So you always had mom hold his wallet and stuff. So here we are overnight on this mechanical flight in Nice. We're in this little hotel. We go to this little kind of pub. There's a huge dog in the doorway. And like we're having this spontaneous kind of father-son overnight in Nice, France on the way back, and uh he only had the money that he had in his shoe because he had given it happened quick. And okay, well, this next we have two seats available to go home on this other flight. So we sent my mother and my brother, and uh, and then my father had you so your mother had all the money. Yeah, she had all the money with her because she was holding his wallet, and this was a quick thing. So, so we're you know, so Pan Am put us in a hotel because it was mechanical, but he only had the cash in his sock, you know, that he would keep in his shoe. And here we are overnight in Nice. And Nice is not the kind of time then or now where you just go with whatever you got and there's money in your socket and function.

SPEAKER_04 52:25

Panam engineers come down from Germany, I think it was, and fix the uh the problem. And but you couldn't they and you had it for the plane again, but you couldn't take paying passengers back. So we got on the plane, uh the same seat we had, because they couldn't take all the pay and we went back home, and then they had friends. A lot of guys commuting too, uh, from Pan Am when we were in Rock League. We had because we had 12-hour shifts. So if I didn't get on a flight to make my ship change, he would the guy that was there would stay the extra time, and then I would reciprocate another way. So we had it made, you know. I know I've never late, I never lost a day.

SPEAKER_06 53:18

So, Mr. DeVito, you worked for the board of Pan American World Airways. Looking back all of these years, you were part of history in the making. How does that make you feel looking back?

SPEAKER_04 53:31

People asked Don sometime, what'd your father do? You know, he said, and he said he graduated high school. And they said, You mean I did this all just graduating high school degree? No college, no nothing. Certificates along the way, different companies. Pan Am was uh the executive device, they picked me to be to work to bring Pan Am spent a lot of money developing their own system. They wanted a computer system, software. And this one vice president, I knew he wanted me, he know I had to get my old job and go with him. And I with uh this happened in Rockwell International. I knew enough about equipment from the CIA. The problem we were having is keeping the system up. I isolated the faulty equipment, took it right offline, and says, Okay, I said, bring it up. We come up and stay it up. Right? And from then on, uh they bought it pro they were good at the uh programmers. Oh, they come right over, had teams ready to move in, you know. And uh and that's the first time we stayed up. And the vice president of Pan Am uh communications, he went like this to me because they were they couldn't fail, you know what I mean. They lost a lot of money, it would have been a lot of money. And I was happy about that. And when I went back, they rewarded me with a very good salary. They treated me real good, they did. Pan Am did. I stayed there and until Pan Am shut down. They did call me at home if I wanted to know if I wanted to go to Delta. I said no, I couldn't see no reason because Delta didn't have any equipment that I was familiar with. They had a different system. And so I just said, no, no, I'm just gonna retire, and I did. I retired uh a couple of months early, it was hard. I mean, I lost money, but I did it. Maybe I could have gone with Delta, and if it was true, like they saying, well, they weren't gonna keep me anyway, but I was gonna get full travel as management, might have been beneficial. But uh no, I'm glad the way everything turned out.

SPEAKER_06 56:08

So we heard a lot about your dad's incredible wife. How does that make you feel?

SPEAKER_08 56:18

It makes me feel great. Hearing him get to communicate this history, and it's not lost, and it's the perspectives of all the different Pan Am employees that you're doing through the podcast to collect all this and keep it in history. When you say children should learn about these things, that's that's what you're doing, and that's him being able to be a part of it and to communicate it is is just meaningful beyond words. Um, and I did want to add just one thing. Um, you know, we live on six acres in Newberry, Florida. We have a couple of horses. One horse is named Clipper, and uh he has a Pan Am blanket, and uh because I sent you some photos, he has that look on it.

SPEAKER_04 57:01

He had the Clipper had the color. You remember the other the other Pan Am uniform that was like uh a tannish or something? Do you remember?

SPEAKER_06 57:10

Yeah, in the 77th.

SPEAKER_04 57:11

Well, that's what we yeah. Well, Clipper was that color.

SPEAKER_08 57:16

Clipper is that color, and uh so he has that look in his face of that Pan Am 747 at the gate, ready to go. Just that look of the glass of the cockpit and the nose, and the he just has that look. Um, so we need him Clipper, and and I I just want to add, you know, one part of the thing that you're doing with this is that some people in pop culture, I mean, Pan Am is a brand. I mean, you can go buy Pan Am luggage and all these things that you know, Pan Am still is a brand is out there and popular, and and people buy things on the Pan Am Museum, they buy Pan Am um gear and different things just with the logo because the brand is still relevant. But it's the people who work for Pan Am and the generations who pass who hear these stories passed down from the employees and now the generations of children of the employees that keep it alive and keep it relevant. And that's partly why that brand is still recognized, in my opinion, is because it's still out there in in the culture, you know, and that's really important. And and just a final thing to mention from when I was hearing my father talk about Juan Tripp, you know, when you see representation in documentaries, a lot of times you'll see more accurate depictions or what with our bias, we believe are clearly evident accurate depictions because they're they happen, they're documented. But then when you see a movie like The Aviator, who portrays Jupp very differently, and every time I watch that, I cringe because it's like, you know, that's such a that's not one trip, you know, and our yeah, and our clearly in my bias to my father's very clearly experienced opinion, that's not one trip. Yeah, so that's why I'm glad also he's able to share this information with you because I think the other perspectives have to be out there than just a Hollywood perspective of what you know of what that was. Very good point. Very good point.

SPEAKER_06 59:15

All right, gentlemen. Well, thank you very much for joining our program. And uh, is there anything else you'd like to add? You were a part of this history that transformed commercial aviation. You were a part of the beginning of the jet age, you were in the boardroom when the economic financial problems, the oil crisis of the 1970s, terrorism in the 70s and the 80s. You live through all of that. Looking back, how's that make you feel?

SPEAKER_04 59:52

Good. It makes me feel good. I used to get blown my mind when I understand one penny in the fuel that's used in the airline. Uh how can I put that? It was like uh we were using our planes as tankers those days. We were, you know what I mean, we were carrying extra gas with us. We landed it. I don't know. I don't know how to put it all, but uh it's uh I just don't know how to put it. All I care about is that uh the trucer pair of trip is showing as he is in some of his movies that kind of tears you out. Good point.

SPEAKER_06 1:00:35

Dr. Don, any uh closing thoughts?

SPEAKER_08 1:00:39

Um you know, I think I think we really cu communicated a lot of the key themes and ideas of what Pan Am meant to us, how it impacted our lives, and the travel with my father again, we were able to bring it back, you know, and and going to Singapore, Malaysia, and Tenerife. Then that travel went with my wife, and uh, you know, so that kind of transition. But yeah, it's just it's part of your identity, you know. If you experienced it, it's part of your identity. And uh yeah, and just thank you for this opportunity to share it.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:15

Well, thank you both uh for your time and sharing your your personal stories. I greatly appreciate it.

SPEAKER_08 1:01:23

Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:31

Pan Am was a pioneer in air travel and still stands as one of the most iconic and innovative airlines in aviation history. 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 Ammuseum.org. As flight crews once said to passengers departing for their destinations around the world, thank you for flying, Pan Ambassador.