Vintage 1950s 1970s Pan Am Stock Certificate 📜 Red Pan American World Airways 100 Shares American Icon

What Did It Mean to Own a Piece of Pan Am? ✈️ A Red Pan American World Airways Stock Certificate, 1950s-1970s

Size: 12" x 8"

For a lot of us, Pan Am was the airline - the blue globe on the tail, the Clippers, the feeling that if anybody had flown somewhere first, it was them. This is a 100-share capital stock certificate of Pan American World Airways, Inc., engraved by the American Bank Note Company with a rose-red border, and every one of these was really issued and then cancelled when its shares changed hands.

✈️ What's on the certificate

Across the top runs PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS, INC., with big 100s in the corners, CAPITAL STOCK, and ONE HUNDRED FULLY PAID AND NON-ASSESSABLE SHARES. The vignette is a bald eagle with an olive branch spread over twin globes, the two hemispheres, with a seated classical figure on either side, one holding a torch and the other a caduceus. It says INCORPORATED UNDER THE LAWS OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK and TRANSFERABLE IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK OR IN SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., with a red CERTIFICATE OF STOCK underprint and the red corporate seal: PAN AMERICAN WORLD AIRWAYS, INC., CORPORATE SEAL, 1927, NEW YORK. The back carries the transfer form, with the Uniform Gifts to Minors Act abbreviations and a line asking for the new owner's Social Security number.

That 1927 is the year Pan American Airways, Inc. was founded, on March 14, 1927 - it's printed on every one of these and isn't the date the sheet was issued. The World Airways name came in 1950, so no sheet of this design is older than that, and the ones that turn up were issued from the 1960s into the late 1970s.

🌎 Juan Trippe's airline

Pan American Airways was founded in 1927 by three Army Air Corps officers, Henry "Hap" Arnold, Carl Spaatz and John Jouett, worried about a German-owned airline flying out of Colombia. Pan Am started out flying the mail. Control passed early to Juan Terry Trippe, a young former Navy aviator who had a mail contract between Key West and Havana, and he ran the airline for more than four decades. The airline built its legend on a string of firsts, and under him it became the flag carrier of American aviation in everything but name: Charles Lindbergh as technical adviser scouting its routes, the China Clipper's first transpacific airmail flight in November 1935, scheduled flying-boat service across the Atlantic in 1939, the first round-the-world service in 1947, the Boeing 707 that brought America into the jet age in 1958, and in 1966 a $525 million order that made Pan Am the launch customer for the Boeing 747.

In the mid-1960s Pan Am called itself The World's Most Experienced Airline, carrying 6.7 million passengers a year with about 150 jets to 86 countries over more than 81,000 miles of routes, and the Pan Am Building rose over Grand Central Terminal in midtown Manhattan. Trippe retired in 1968, and Najeeb Halaby, who had run the Federal Aviation Administration, took over the top job.

The later years were hard ones. Pan Am bought National Airlines in 1980 to get domestic routes, became part of a holding company, Pan Am Corporation, in 1984, and sold off pieces of itself to stay aloft; the bombing of Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988 killed 243 passengers and 16 crew, and on December 4, 1991 Pan American World Airways stopped flying. When it folded, its trademark was said to be the second-most recognized in the world, and for a lot of Americans that was the end of the golden age of air travel.

🖋️ The engravers in the Bronx

American Bank Note engraved this in New York, and in these decades its Hunts Point plant in the Bronx was running on a huge scale, handling millions of pieces of security paper a day and printing a big share of the certificates traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Old-timers in the printing trade still talk about how much engraving talent was packed into that one Bronx plant, where the steel dies for currency, stamps and stock certificates for companies all over the world were cut. The building is a New York City landmark today.

📋 About these certificates

My pictures seriously don't do it justice. They printed these on heavy paper, a lot like a dollar bill but stiffer, which is why the red stays so bright. Every one was really issued - made out, registered, signed and later cancelled - so expect the marks of a working document: the CANCELLED stamp, punch holes, agent stamps and endorsements. That's normal for these and part of their story. The registrar changed over the years, too - Chemical Bank New York Trust, Harris Trust, Morgan Guaranty and others turn up on different sheets. Dates, share registrations, numbers, signatures and stamps change from sheet to sheet, so the photos show the type rather than the exact certificate you'll get.

Paper stock certificates are a finite supply. The first one came from the Dutch East India Company in 1606, Disney issued one of the last paper certificates from a major corporation in 2013, and nobody prints them anymore - once they've gone into museums and collections, they'll be very difficult to acquire. A Pan Am certificate looks great framed in an office, a den, or next to an old travel poster, and it's a natural gift for anybody who ever flew Pan Am or worked in aviation.