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FROM THE HISTORIAN
Ed Gouldener

Our airline is gone and now exists only in our memories but what memories of 1939 when we were young and eager. Some of us were still in grade or high school or college or perhaps the service but the Great Silver Fleet in that Spring of 60 years ago had just been awarded the National Safety Council Award for the third consecutive year! The only major air transport company to have received as many as three commendations for a distinctive record of safe operation!

And how many of us can or will remember that an Eastern Silverliner DC-3 landed in Mexico City on April 6, 1939 with Captain Eddie aboard and with Larry Pabst and Sid Shannon in the cockpit? Plus a cabin full of distinguished guests from New York, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Corpus Christi and Brownsville aboard, The inaugural flight commemorating the opening of Eastern's new international service to Brownsville, Texas making it possible for our passengers to board a Silverliner in New York after dinner and arrive in Mexico City via Pan American the following day in time for lunch!

The flight took off from Newark the evening of April 5 landing in AG-NO-HU-CR and arrived at JI the following morning. (For our younger members those were the two letter symbols that preceded the current three letter designators now in use.) After lunch at the El Jardin Hotel hosted by the Brownsville Kiwanis Club the flight took off at 2:10 PM enroute to Mexico City and landed at 5:00 PM to be met by the Hon, Josephus Daniels, American Ambassador to Mexico as well as high-ranking officials of the Mexican government and Pan American executives. That evening and for the next two days activities included cocktail parties, dinners and tours, the placing of a wreath at the monument to the Heros of the Mexican Independence by Captain Rickenbacker and his receiving, figuratively, the keys to the city. Back home in Atlanta after the return flight the executive editor of the Atlanta Constitution, Ralph McGill, finished his personal column "One Word More" with these words - " Was it Easter Sunday morning at noon our plane took off at Mexico City's airport and landed us, just 10 hours and 20 minutes later, in Atlanta so we might go home and be in bed asleep in much less than 12 hours after leaving Mexico City.

Our more senior pilots will recall that a short time later we were servicing the New York-Brownsville route with our DST Silversleepers and the AG-JI crews on this leg would overnight at that same famous El Jardin Hotel now closed and abandoned. Riding from and to the airport in and with "Bess"Robinson in her taxi - at twenty five or fifty cents I forget which. 

Northbound out of Brownsville on April 6, 1939 the inaugural "Mexico Flyer" took off with 6 passengers, 178 pounds of mail or about 5,000 letters and up front in the cockpit our old friends, Captains Gene Brown and Neil McMillan sitting on his self described "tail piece" in order to reach eye level above the panel and back in the cabin Flight Steward "Buzz" Beatty.

And it was in 1939 that the first Air Express round-the-world was flown in two small suitcases dispatched by Eastern, American, Pan American, Air France, K.L.M., Imperial Airways, United, TWA, and C&S. Both bags contained among other articles a copy of Captain Eddie's book "Fighting the Flying Circus". Routed in opposite

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