Pilot Gustave Julius Ekstrom flew with Pan American for many years. Ekstrom was born August 18, 1895. When he was 19, he went to a Curtiss flying school that charged a dollar a minute. He went on to join a flying circus. During World War I, he instructed pilots in Princeton, N.J., and then served with an AEF infantry division in France. Ekstrom did more barnstorming in the early 1920s. In 1925, in Daytona Beach, he flew for the small East Coast Airways and wrote for the Morning Journal and the Daytona Beach News. In 1928 Ekstrom was official pilot for Senator Arthur G. Spear of Portland, Maine. Also that year, Ekstrom helped Curtiss open Miami