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In this episode, we are joined by Admiral William O. Studeman, United States Navy, retired, and his wife Diane, former Pan Am stewardess and one of the most gracious ambassadors the airline ever had.

Their connection to Pan Am runs deeper than most. Diane grew up in Milford-on-Sea in Hampshire, England. The navy and aviation were not just a backdrop to her childhood but its very fabric. She joined Pan Am as a stewardess in the early 1960s, at what many would argue was the cultural apex of the Jet Age, when the uniform was a statement and the Clipper was a promise of something larger than the ordinary.

Bill is, in the truest sense, a Pan Am kid. His father, Oliver J. Studeman, joined Pan Am's Western Division at Brownsville, Texas in 1933, flying mail-carrying tri-motored Fokkers from Texas through Mexico to Panama and across the north coast of South America. He was known professionally as O.J. and had the nickname of "Stude" by his friends and colleagues. Over four decades, O.J. rose from Chief Pilot of the Western Division to Operations Manager of the Alaska, Pacific, and Latin American divisions, to Assistant Vice President of Pan Am's Guided Missile Range Division at Cape Canaveral, to Vice President of the Metropolitan Air Facilities Division at Teterboro, New Jersey, where he retired in 1972. His uncle, on his mother's side, also worked for the airline. Bill was born in Brownsville in January 1940. Pan Am, for him, was not just a company. It was a family inheritance.

Bill and Diane met in the summer of 1962 at London's Heathrow Airport, where Bill was working the Pan Am ticket counter and Diane was working the TWA desk. She joined Pan Am shortly after. He entered Officer Candidate School in 1963 and spent the next 32 years in the United States Navy as a naval intelligence officer. At his Senate confirmation hearing, Senator Frank Murkowski said Bill had "mastered, as few others have, the intricate and arcane world of signals intelligence." He served as Director of Naval Intelligence, Director of the National Security Agency, and Deputy Director of Central at CIA, twice serving as its acting director of the agency across two presidential administrations. Diane hung up her wings to become a Navy wife and mother. They settled eventually in Annapolis.

Before the interview, this episode explores three places that rarely appear in the standard Pan Am narrative: Brownsville, Texas, where the airline learned to fly in the clouds and where O.J. "Stude" Studeman first fell in love with the sky; Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, the man-made island built to launch the Boeing B-314 Flying Boats toward Asia, whose art deco terminal still stands today; and Teterboro Airport in New Jersey, the oldest operating commercial airport in the New York metropolitan area, and the place where O.J. Studeman's remarkable Pan Am career came to a close.

Bill and Diane's son, Rear Admiral Mike Studeman (ret.), recently published a book on leadership called Might of the Chain: Forging Leaders of Iron Integrity now available in bookstores and as an audiobook. 

This is Episode 65 of The Pan Am Podcast, and the final full episode with Tom Betti as host in the history and humanities format that has defined this program since its first season. Episode 66, the season finale and Tom's final episode, will be a five-year retrospective with special guests.

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A very special thanks to Mr. Adam Aron, Chairman and CEO of AMC and president of the Pan Am Historical Foundation and  Pan Am Brands for their continued and unwavering support!