That was a little bit trickier, but I thought that was going to be impossible when I realised you had to have the ID card and I saw how sophisticated they looked. And I went back to my hotel and I happened to notice the yellow pages for New York City sitting up there, and I pulled down this huge book and I opened it, and I looked under the word ‘Identification’, and there were three or four pages of companies who made convention badges, metal badges, plastic badges, police badges, so I started to call around, and finally one company said, ‘Listen, most of those airline ID cards are made by Kodak, by Polaroid, by the 3M company, you need to call one of them.’ So I finally got the 3M company on the phone in New York, and they said, ‘Yes, we manufacture Pan Am’s identification system, how come?’ I said, ‘I’m a Purchasing Officer for a major airline, but I’m in New York just for the day. We’re getting ready to expand our routes, hire a lot of new employees and we’re going to go to a formal ID card.’ And I said, ‘I wondered if I could come down to your office this afternoon just briefly to discuss quantity and price.’ He said, ‘By all means come on down.’
So I went down and after we talked a while I said, ‘Is there a way that I could get a sample to bring back?’ And at first he brought me out a coloured piece of paper with a picture of an ID card in the middle of it, kind of blown up with a name John Doe, and then someone else’s picture and in bold red ink across the front ‘This is a sample only’, and I said, ‘No, don’t you have the actual card?’ And I said, ‘By the way, what’s all this equipment on the floor?’ He said, ‘Well we don’t just sell this card, we sell the system, camera, laminator.’ ‘Oh, we’d have to buy all of this?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Well I tell you what, since we have to buy it all, why don’t you just demonstrate how it works, and use me?’ So I sat down, he made up the card with my picture.
When I was going down the elevator I noticed that this plastic card that was much like a credit card, though it had the colours of Pan Am, it had no logo, no name, nothing that mentioned it was Pan Am’s card. And I was pretty discouraged because it was a plastic card, you couldn’t type on it, you couldn’t write on it, and I was walking back to the hotel and I noticed I passed a hobby shop. So I walked in and said, ‘Do you sell models of planes?’ and he said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you have model planes of commercial jetliners?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ And I bought a model of a Pan Am 707 cargo jet for about $2.40, got back to my room, took all the parts out and there at the bottom of the box were the decals that went on the model, and I took the little Pan Am logo that would have went on the tail and put it right on the top of the card, and the word ‘Pan Am’ in the special styling of graphics that would have went on the fuselage, I just put it across the top of the card and it the clear decal made a perfect identification card.
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