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To many Americans, Trippe's given name sounds vaguely like some foreigner's; to many Latin Americans, the Juan sounds vaguely like some countryman's. Both notions are wrong, although the second has had its subtle advantages in his diplomacy south of the border. The name came from his Aunt Juanita Terry; he speaks neither Spanish nor Portuguese. He comes from a long line of Marylanders, one of whom fought in the battle of Tripoli.
An erect, well-knit six-footer, Trippe, at 49, still packs the same weight (1961bs.) that he carried in college. He runs his global empire from a barren, middling-sized headquarters on the 58th floor of Manhattan's Chrysler Building. There, he swivels between a clean work table, where he does his conferring, and a rolltop desk (always locked when he is away), where he does his thinking, figuring and secret dreaming. Close at hand are two small globes. (The big three-foot one on which he used to plan his routes and spot his far-flung bases, measuring off the distances with pieces of string, has been placed in the Institute of the Aeronautical Sciences.)
To his staffers he is something of a mystic, inclined to mull over big plans while he puffs on a pipe or a 10¢ cigar. Then, with every detail worked out in his mind, he springs his ideas without warning. Sometimes, when crossed in an argument, he will seem to fumble for words, with a disarming, apologetic smile, a brown-eyed stare, and an Oh-gosh stammer. "That's the time to look out," says a man who has been fencing with him for years. "He's never fumbling for ideas; his mind simply outruns his tongue."
The Captain. Though Trippe is surrounded by crack engineers, and financial and diplomatic experts, he runs Pan Am as a one-man show—and no one ever forgets it. His tight-fisted rule has been shaken more than once, but never broken.
In 1939, Cornelius Vanderbilt ("Sonny") Whitney, a Yale schoolmate, and at the time Pan Am's board chairman, teamed up with some directors against Trippe. They felt that Trippe was spending too much on new planes and routes, instead of on dividends. They shunted Trippe aside and Whitney took over. But Whitney was unable to take over the thousand & one details of Pan Am's far-flung operations which Trippe kept in his head.
After ten months of floundering around, Whitney was glad to step aside and let Trippe take over again. The lesson was plain: Trippe would run things his own way because he had shown that he was the only man who could run them.
Pinfeathers. One reason he could was the fact that he has been living his job all his life. As a ten-year-old, he flew homemade model planes in Manhattan's Central Park. At the Hill School, classmates nicknamed the quiet youth "The Mummy"; but at Yale, Trippe blossomed out, went in for crew, swimming and football. "I was a guard," he grins, "on a very poor football squad—we lost twice to Harvard and twice to Princeton in my two years."