A Special East Hampton Trippe

It makes perfect sense that ABC would call its new television series about the golden age of airline travel “Pan Am.”

In its positive review of the show, the New York Times opined that “practically every scene is shot in lush, golden light. The series is a paean to a more prosperous and confident era; even an airline terminal looks like a movie dream sequence about 1960s heaven.” But why is Pan Am the featured flyer and not some other carrier? Because Pan Am was the pioneer that became the most prominent symbol of an American industry that for a time ruled international flight. Its founder was Juan Trippe, who spent much of his life (when not in the air) in East Hampton.

In a quest for information on Mr.

Trippe, this writer reasoned that material could easily be found in one or more full-scale biographies. Incredibly, one does not exist about the man who arguably was the single most important figure in the creation of a major industry and whose efforts directly led to the global transportation system of today. Instead, this story was pieced together with the help of Hugh King, Averill Geus, Paul Brennan, and Robert Hefner and Richard Barons at the East Hampton Historical Society. (Also, full disclosure: The writer’s godmother was a Pan Am stewardess in the Swinging ’60s.)

While Mr. Trippe first came to East Hampton as a child, he was born in Sea Bright, New Jersey in 1899. His father was a successful businessman in New York and he and his wife owned a house on Dunemere Lane, where Juan spent many summers and weekends. Despite his first name, the family was not Spanish but could trace its ancestry back to English settlers who landed in Maryland in 1698. Mr. Trippe was named for Juanita Terry, the Venezuelan wife of a great-uncle. A great-great-grandfather was John Trippe, who commanded the United State Navy ship Vixen.

Mr. Trippe attended elite schools, including Yale University. He left there to join the Navy during World War I. He became an aviator, and when the war ended he returned to Yale and graduated in 1921. Two years later, he raised money from former Yale classmates, bought seven surplus U.S. Navy planes and refitted them, and founded Long Island Airlines, with one of its services being ferrying people between New York city and the Hamptons.

In 1927, Mr. Trippe and several investors formed the Pan American Airways Corporation. One of its first hires was Charles Lindbergh, fresh off his record-breaking flight across the Atlantic.

With every decade, Pan Am grew bigger as its operations expanded overseas and as Mr. Trippe bought airlines servicing countries in Europe, South America and Asia. During its peak years, Pan Am was a global network of 80,000 miles that connected the U.S. to 85 countries. When Mr. Trippe handed over the reins of Pan Am in 1968, the company had assets of more than $1 billion.

While there are differences of opinion about how sharp a businessman Mr. Trippe was, there is a consensus that he was a visionary and innovator during his 41 years as head of Pan Am. He created a more affordable airfare structure by offering tourist class in addition to first-class tickets, as well as a system that allowed tickets to be purchased on installment plans.

In a tribute to him in Time Magazine in 1998, the airline magnate Richard Branson wrote, “Before anyone else, he believed in airline travel as something to be enjoyed by ordinary mortals, not just a globe-trotting elite.”

During World War II, using a secret base in Bermuda, Mr. Trippe’s planes flew millions of pieces of mail between the States and cities and military bases around the world. In the 1950s, he was the first to acquire and fly passenger jets. And Pan Am was the first airline to order the large Boeing 747s, greatly expanding the industry’s capacity.

Sometime during the 1930s, Mr. Trippe and his wife, Elizabeth, sister of one-time Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, bought property in East Hampton. They would eventually own three lots, two fronting the Atlantic and the third on Georgica Pond.

It was here and in Manhattan the couple raised three sons and a daughter. Two of the sons survive, living elsewhere in the U.S., and their daughter, Betsy DeVecchio, was involved in East Hampton community affairs, including the LVIS and Garden Club. She died at 77 in 2009 at the Dunemere estate once owned by her grandparents.

The Trippe estate was, according to neighbors and family members, the foundation of family life in East Hampton and provided many fond memories for the Trippes’s 12 grandchildren. It is believed that the original house on West End Road was built for the Newton family in the 1890s by the noted architect Joseph Greenleaf Thorp, and the Trippes expanded and updated it and other structures when they owned the properties.

“I remember the incredible dew walking barefoot in the morning on the path to the boathouse, and the sandy clearings under the craggy pines, and the hypnotic light at night coming from the airport across the pond,” said one of Mr. Trippe’s grandchildren, artist Jim Trippe, via a telephone interview from his home in Florida. “I can still see the buried ‘Model-T’ cars supporting the dunes. My grandmother taught me how to catch blue crabs with a piece of string. One time, in the early ’80s, a man walked right through the yard. I told him he was on private property. He lowered his mirrored sunglasses and smiled. I then realized I had just thrown Paul Newman off the property.”

Mr. Trippe was very involved in the Maidstone Club and was its president in the 1940s. When he stepped down, the presidency went to a good friend, Dr. Howard Dean, father of the former governor of Vermont and presidential candidate.

Stories persist that in the 1960s, Mr. Trippe used his political clout to persuade the Army Corps of Engineers to construct three groins, or jetties, in the ocean adjacent to his two lots there. The structures helped to protect his property but supposedly caused heavy erosion over the years to beachfront properties to the west. However, a judge ruled in 2008 in a lawsuit seeking to have the groins removed that the worst erosion had taken place well before their construction.

Despite the stories about the groins, he was well thought of by his friends and neighbors.

“Mr. Trippe had the reputation of being a friendly man and good neighbor,” said Anne Gerli of East Hampton. “My uncle became a good friend of his. Mr. Trippe kept telling him to buy shares in Pan Am but my grandfather wouldn’t allow it because he believed in trains, not planes.”

According to the ABC website, “Pan Am,” the television show is about “passion, adventure and espionage ... They do it all, and they do it at 30,000 feet. The style of the 1960s, the energy and excitement of the Jet Age and a drama full of sexy entanglements deliciously mesh in a thrilling and highly original new series.”

Incredibly, Mr. Trippe’s name is not listed in the cast of characters for the show. But he has received some credit on the big screen: in the Martin Scorsese film, “The Aviator,” he is portrayed by Amagansett resident Alec Baldwin.

The founder of Pan Am died at his Manhattan apartment in 1981, and obituaries appeared in major city dailies all over the world. Six years later, his son Charles sold the Trippe estate and lots to Calvin and Kelly Klein. When the couple split, Kelly Klein kept the property, and is its owner to this day.