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Romancing the Clipper: America's Technological Coming of Age in Children's Literature - Page 8

Another source of clipper exposure for girls came through the keen interest in film stars.  Magazines were the primary means fro tracking the careers of youth’s favorite star.  They were also the primary means of acquiring pictures which could either be placed on walls or kept in a scrapbook.  Movie star scrapbooks were quite popular in the 1940s before the advent of readily available poster art.  Movie stars, their agents, and the studios were quick to realize this.  The landings and the departures of clippers, each announced in the New York Times for instance, afforded flashbulb opportunities.  Since only the wealthy or the famous could afford to fly, the Pan Am terminals were natural water holes for the press.  Many entertainers on U.S.O. tours flew clippers to reach the troops.

One widely reported story involved the destruction of the Yankee Clipper when it crashed and sank in the Tagus River near Lisbon on February 22, 1943.  On board were seven U.S.O. entertainment stars and war correspondent Ben Robertson, Jr., of the New York Harald Tribune.  Twenty-four of the thirty-nine passengers and crew were killed, including Robertson and Tamara Drasin, who introduced the popular song, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes.”  The fourth pilot officer, Johnny Burns, rescued injured singing star Jane Froman, and, in a story right out of Hollywood, later they were married.  Paralyzed by injuries, Froman sang onstage in a wheelchair and toured with the U.S.O. to become even more popular as a star for young women to emulate (Brock 191).  Good scrapbook material.  This story contained everything from romance to high drama and hinted that the flying boat was sabotaged.  This rumor was later dispelled, but again the clipper was a source of intrigue.

Youth magazines exposed both sexes to the joys of stamp collecting via clipper.  The clippers, after all, were primarily mail carriers.  Passengers were of secondary importance.  U.S. mail contracts paid the bills.  Clipper accomplishments were used by the U.S. Post Office Department as special philatelic occasions.  Clipper stamps and first flight covers were issued as clipper routes were extended across both the Pacific and Atlantic.  Stamp companies advertised clipper stamps, and philatelic editors kept readers abreast of collecting opportunities.  Not even Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis could touch the clipper for sheer number of times it appeared in a stamp design.

Stamp designs invited youth to assume a new world view.  The U.S. transpacific air mail stamps showed the China Clipper flying straight at the viewer over a Pacific Ocean bounded on one side by a Chinese junk and on the other by a modern ocean liner.  Between them sailed a clipper sailing ship and a nineteenth century steamer.  There was an implied progression and cultural comment to the water craft.  The ships became more primitive as one approached the west or left side of the stamp.  Behind the clipper was a sunburst rising sun like something out of Tora, Tora, Tora.  The rays of light were reminiscent of manifest destiny sunbeams guiding wagon trains into the West in nineteenth century American landscape paintings.  The Post Office Department and magazines were not unaware of this connection to the American West.  When the first official transpacific mail was placed aboard a clipper in 1935, a stagecoach delivered the mail to dockside by way of Pony Express.  This photograph was so popular that it served as the basis of the recent fiftieth anniversary clipper postage stamp.

The clipper stamp’s expansive, dynamic setting contrasting to the rather insular 1935 stamp topics:  the Boulder Dam, the Michigan State Seal, the Charter Oak, the Federal Building in Chicago, the National Recovery Act, Whistler’s Mother, and the dead heads of various past presidents, to name a few.  The clipper pushed west as the United States extended.  It did not preserve the past; instead, the stamp was printed prior to the event it celebrated:  the difference between dead history and live history.  Children responded. 


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