Globe-Girdlers

The Pan American clipper America, which had flown off 13 days and 3 hours earlier from LaGuardia Field into the east, returned from the west last week. It had flown around the world, inaugurating the first round-the-world air service. Pan Am will operate two regular flights a week--one west from San Francisco, one east from New York. Domestic airlines will complete the transcontinental gap in the circle. Globe-girdling fare: $1,700.

Among the 22 passengers on the initial flight, publicity-wise Pan Am had included 15 bigwig publishers and editors. They had taken tea with Prime Minister Clement Attlee, dined with China's Generalissimo, supped with General Douglas MacArthur. With lesser luminaries, they wined & dined in Istanbul, Calcutta, Manila and Honolulu.

Their "bird's-eye view of the world," as the Houston Post's Oveta Gulp Hobby termed it, made varying impressions on the globe-girdlers. Thomas H. Beck, president of the Crowell-Collier Publishing Co., had left prophesying war in three years; he returned "more convinced than ever that it is true." Scripps-Howard's dapper Roy Wilson Howard saw "palms up everywhere around the world," found everyone fearful of "the menace of Communism."

Everywhere they sensed the world's deep economic agony. In one day in Shanghai, the rate on the dollar changed from 40,000 Chinese dollars to 46,000. For Gardner Cowles of the Des Moines Register and Tribune the trip was old-hat; he had done it before with the late Wendell Willkie. Then he had come back hopeful. This time he sensed a worldwide feeling that peace "had been fumbled." The U.S., he feared, would not be able to "pick up all the checks."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.