Readers last week might recall our last Friday’s Diary feature (6.13.08 [1]) about my old friend Bob Schulenberg and his sketchbook/diaries from the early 1960s. This week we wanted to run some more of the drawings from the same book dated May 10 to July 20, 1962 France. Searching from New York sequences, I found a series of sketches from Bob’s first trip to Europe in July 1962.
He’d been living in New York for two years. The trip was intended to be a month in Paris and then go to Rome to visit his UCLA friend (filmmaker) Paul Bartel who was in school at the Centro Sperimentale for film in Rome. He ended up staying in Paris for two years and giving up his Gramercy Park apartment, thinking he’d be remaining in Paris forever.
This series of sketches began at Idlewild International Airport, (renamed JFK after the death of President Kennedy), waiting to board his flight bound for Luxembourg with a stop for re-fueling in Reykjavik.
The entire flight to Luxembourg was approximately 23 hours, almost twelve hours less than it took Charles Lindbergh in his record-setting Atlantic flight thirty-five years earlier in 1927.
These magnificent flight records were rendered irrelevant four years before when jet-service and the Boeing 707 were introduced by Pan Am. However, Icelandic Airways, his carrier was, he says, “the Jet Blue of its day.” It was cheaper because it didn’t land in Paris and travelers had to take the train from Luxembourg to Paris, another few hours of travel. Not exactly deluxe for the 28-year Los Angeleno who’d recently moved to Manhattan. The plane was a four-engine turbo-prop, once a great advancement in long distance travel; now an antique. |
