Roots and wings

The Renshaw-Pan Am merger

Downer's career with Pan Am ran from 1940 to 1975.  Because of that, the history of the Mary Kay and Downer Renshaw family ran parallel with the history of Pan Am - including glory days, thrills of many aviation firsts, gutting through political turmoil and riding the waves economic ups and downs. 

Mary Kay and Downer were a perfect pair to take advantage of all that a Pan Am career could offer.   Downer had an absolute love of flying.   He told me many years later that "the take off of my last flight was as exciting as the take off of my first flight", 36 years earlier.   

He also had a natural affinity for change and travel.   Downer often volunteered for many of the assignments and concocted many last minute trips that have resulted in our rich family history.  But he could only do that because Mary Kay's spirit of adventure, natural optimism  and flexible nature made it work for the rest of the family.    I still live by the motto she developed in the many years of traveling stand-by:  "There's always room for one more!"

It's a point of great pride that I am a daughter of a Pan Am family.   So, every once in a while, I'll add in some Pan Am history and perspective to round out our story.      

Pan Am - and Downer - go to War

Downer flew military cargo air transport during World War II - flying out of Miami and Barranquilla, Columbia to North Africa and Teheran.

I've always described his assignment fairly benignly as:  "flying supplies to Africa and Europe. " Mary Kay reminded me recently that his return trips included flying home our wounded and dead soldiers. 

From:  The War Years, George Burns, Pan Am Historical Foundation. 

When the United States exploded into World War II, the world's only aircraft that could carry payloads across an ocean were nine Pan Am Boeing 314 flying Clippers and three that Pan Am had sold to Britain. The U.S. government promptly took over all of Pan Am's over-ocean aircraft, crews and operations.

Pan Am, its people and its aircraft, went to war as part of the U.S. military. Officially.

However, covertly Pan Am was already deeply involved in the world conflict. For many months, under a secret War Department contract, it had been building and equipping airfields along the Atlantic coasts of Central and South America; then from Accra, on Africa's West coast, to Khartoum, the jumping-off point to air-supply the war raging in North Africa. Soon, when the U.S. entered the war, Pan Am crews were ferrying bombers and airlifting cargo over these South Atlantic, trans-Africa routes; and ferrying fighter planes, shipped by sea and assembled in West Africa, to Khartoum.

In seven months of 1942, 1,445 war planes, plus tons of supplies and ammunition, were delivered to the British army being pushed toward Suez. At El Alamein, these planes and supplies helped reverse the tide of the campaign. Pan Am then extended its wartime ferry and supply routes, flying fighters and bombers for Russia to Teheran, and hauling cargo to India. Its DC-3s flew The Hump over the Himalayas, bringing fuel and ammunition to the Flying Tigers and supplies to Chiang Kai-shek in China. They evacuated 3,564 women, children and wounded soldiers from Burma as it was about to be overrun.