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New Dealing James M. Landis, ex-chairman of CAB and of SEC, who has had many dealings with Trippe, says: "Juan Trippe is thinking about the next decade ... If anybody ever flies to the moon, the very next day Trippe will ask CAB to authorize regular service."
Stay-at-Home. At home, with his handsome wife Elizabeth (a sister of ex-Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius***), Trippe is a relaxed and placid parent, a two-Scotches-before-dinner man who likes to hear all about his four children's day in school. The Trippes see little of Manhattan's night life. They usually spend Trippe's off hours at home in their big apartment on fashionable Gracie Square, a stone's pitch from Mayor O'Dwyer's mansion and the tooting tugs on the East River. (A deafening blast once startled a telephoner into asking Mrs. Trippe: "Madame, do you live on a barge?")
What entertaining they do is largely confined to aviation people or representatives of nations with which Pan American has air agreements. Adaptable Mrs. Trippe has had to learn to chat intelligently about everything from "chosen instruments" to wing loadings. She learned from the start the importance of the air. On their wedding day in June 1928, while friends gathered on Long Island for the ceremony, Trippe put in a brisk morning's work at the office. He barely made it on time. Said a friend: "Juan's idea of relaxing is to sit up till 2 a.m. talking aviation." Even so, he bounds out of bed at 7, can get along on five hours' sleep.
The Trippes weekend at an eight-room French Provincial-style house in a patch of woods near Greenwich, Conn., hard by the Round Hill Club where "Tripper," as some golf partners call him, plays up to 36 holes a day, usually shooting in the low 80s. In the summers the Trippes take their 16-year-old daughter, Betty, and three young sons, Charles, John and Edward, to a rambling, grey-shingled house on the ocean's edge at East Hampton, L.I., where Trippe likes to swim and surffish with the boys, exercising hard to work off tension. In winter the whole family occasionally goes skiing in a body.
As airline executive, Juan Trippe gets a salary of $23,050 a year. His fortune stems from what he has been able to make on Pan American stock, of which he owns or controls some 69,000 shares (now worth 1,000), only 1.1% of Pan Am's 6,145,082 shares. Said one friend: "Trippe doesn't care about making money. He's thinking in terms of domination of the air."
Pink of Condition. In 1949, the network that Juan Trippe built is one of the healthiest in the industry. Last week, releasing its 1948 financial report, Pan American estimated its net income at $4,590,000 (nearly 50% above its 1947 net), on $145,216,000 worth of business, including $32 million in mail pay.
Pan American's 152 land planes (the flying boats have been retired) fly 61,038 route miles. The line's safety record is one of the best, thanks in great part to Vice President André Priester, 57, a brilliant engineer who for 22 years has been in charge of Pan Am's planes, maintenance, traffic guides, etc., and is fondly called "our Steinmetz" by Pan Am men.