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Romancing the Clipper: America's Technological Coming of Age in Children's Literature - Page 9

The correspondence to soldiers in the Pacific at the time revealed they were under maximum pressure to secure clipper flown stamps and envelopes for cousins, nephews, nieces back home.  Many were the sad letters sent back to the States reporting that maneuvers were called just before the clipper was to arrive.  No first flight stamps or envelopes would be forthcoming because the closest many soldiers came to the clipper was when it roared over the sugar can field in which they crouched.

Juveniles not exposed to family magazines or youth magazines encountered the clipper in other ways.  Pulp magazines such as Flying Aces that advertised balsa wood clipper model kits gave youngsters a chance to hold and own a piece of this new spirit of adventure.  Since the ribs and spars of the model conformed in reduced scale to those of the real thing, model builders were learning vital fabrication skills.  Youngsters could learn how to read simple blueprints or plans, learn terminology, make jigs, and work quickly but patiently.  As with the rising interest in athletic ability in children’s books, the closer the war, the more interest in modeling.

A range of articles in Country Gentleman and Farm Journal depicted the clippers as national emissaries to the world.  Even the farm was going international thanks to this flying boat.  Articles described hybrid chickens flown to Cuba, pest-destroying insects flown around the world to save important crops, milk flown 4,000 miles between Hawaii and Guam on the world’s longest “milk run,” and baby food flown to Pacific island bases.  If boys and girls didn’t read about the clipper, they could see it hanging on the mud room wall.  Clipper or clipper route calendars were fairly common.  Consider a 1947 Central Life Insurance Society calendar distributed by agent Ben H. Tietjens of Teeds Grove, Iowa.  Though no Pan Am clippers were flying in 1947, the calendar showed tiny clippers flying along route lines linking the U.S. with the Far East.  Like the maps in the various Pan Am magazine ads, pictograms represented the raw materials present in each country.  These clipper calendars taught viewers to be aware of the rest of the world and the importance of that world to the United States.  Isolationism was over.

Although this exploration has been limited to children’s literature, the clipper also touched children’s lives through toys, games, tokens, cereal promotions, movies, and other products.  Clippermania multiplied in the adult world of the 1930s and 1940s.  That the Clipper has enjoyed something of a nostalgic revival in the late ‘80s and early 90’s is a tribute to its enduring power to meet a popular cultural need.  The Clipper, now as then, provides a buffer between consciousness of “The World America Lives IN, “ an awareness of accelerated international change, and a patriotic consciousness, a need to see America’s technological and cultural leadership in the development of that change.  The Clipper continues to be a powerful twentiety-century American icon.


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