Touran Cheraghi Seifabad Kroon, an Iranian with a PhD in Chemistry, runs a skin care business in Switzerland. She talked to me about taking the last Pan Am flight out of Iran in 1978, crossing cultural divides, and life as a working mom.
Q: Tell me about where you grew up in Iran.
A: I am the oldest of five (three boys and two girls). I grew up in a Bakhtiari family in the State of Khuzestan, in the southern part of the country. As you might know, Iran is a melting pot of people from different ethnic backgrounds. My father worked for the Iranian Oil Company and my mother was a housewife. Because of my father’s job, we moved around a lot, living in different cities and islands in the Persian Gulf. Education was key in my upbringing, so when I was fifteen, my parents decided to send me and my younger brother to Esfahan to live with my grandparents, as the city had higher quality private schools.
Q: Can you tell me about being on the last flight out of Iran during the revolution in the 1970s?
A: I got a scholarship from the Ministry of Higher Education to study in the U.S. My parents were liberal and willing to send me to study abroad. I left on the last Pan Am flight on Nov. 5, 1978. They were difficult times—it was chaos, the airport was a big mess, and we had to carry our own bags to the plane. I was very nervous, and was not sure if the plane would be allowed to leave Iran. During the whole flight, I was thinking about my family in Tehran and what to expect from my life in the U.S.
I arrived in a small town in the Midwest. It was hard. My dreams of America were shattered, as I was expecting big cities, modern and sophisticated like in the movies. Here I was in a small town (only 200,000 compared to Tehran’s four million), one main street, no traffic, no chaos. Everything was so quiet. I cried for the first three months, couldn’t eat the food, and didn’t like the fashion. I was always over-dressed compared to other students.
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