“Nightline” anchor Cynthia McFadden reports:

I am not a big nostalgia person. I like the present. And the future. But spending time on the set of ABC’s new show “Pan Am” this week — set in 1963 — was a completely delightful experience.

I must have been in what — the second grade — during the year in question and remember the white gloves and pill box hats from church on Sunday mornings with my mother. In fact as the completely engaging costume designer Ane Crabtree showed me through the show’s wardrobe closet I spied a hat I swore I wore one Easter Sunday.

'Nightline's' Cynthia McFadden with 'Pan Am' costume designer, Ane Crabtree. Credit: Cynthia McFadden/ABC News

Airplane travel was out of my family’s reach in those days, but I remember clearly how glamorous the Pan Am stewardesses seemed in the pages of Life Magazine.

Height, weight and girdle requirements aside, those “girls” got to travel the world and see all the sights I could only see in our dog-eared subscription to “National Geographic!”

On the set of ABC's "Pan Am." Credit: Cynthia McFadden/ABC News

From the floor of my bedroom in Auburn, Maine the exotic life of the Pan Am stewardess seemed like a dream. And many years later, I found another way to see the world and tell stories … but being in the “Pan Am” wardrobe room gave me a fun romp in the world that might have been.

'Nightline's' Cynthia McFadden with 'Pan Am' executive producer Nancy Hult Ganis. Credit: Cynthia McFadden/ABC News

Watch Cynthia McFadden’s interview with “Pan Am” actress Christina Ricci and the show’s executive producer, Nancy Hult Ganis, a former Pan Am stewardess herself, on “ Nightline” tonight at 11:35 p.m. ET