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TI: Going back to your career, though, it was a long career as a mechanic and as then a supervisor in the airlines business.

MK: United.

TI: And not just airlines, you're talking about 747s, you know, major jets. I mean, these are the, the... and not just big jets but new jets, when they're just coming out.

MK: Yeah, the development.

TI: Right, so how did you get so good at all this?

MK: I don't, I really don't know how I got to recognize. I went to New York and I worked through my own schooling. I had some help from my dad a little while, while I get my foot off the ground 'cause I spent all my money just to travel to New York. But I worked at night to get, pay my tuition, and after I got graduate, I graduated, I worked for United Airlines, because they were the only airline would accept me because I was draftable age. I tried to work for other airline, they wouldn't accept me because of the draft. I hadn't served my two years in the military, so I couldn't, they wouldn't hire me. Second thing was that I knew I had to get some transportation back to Hawaii every so often to see my parents. That was the second thing that made me want to go to United. I worked at United for a year in, two years in New York, then I moved to San Francisco for a year, and then transferred to Los Angeles for two years before I got drafted into the military.

Once I came out of the military, I had come to... let's see, I went in the military, finished up... oh, then all my brothers and sisters -- by this time it was 1960 -- my brothers and sisters decided that they all want to come up here to the mainland to live, so that left my mom and dad alone in Hawaii. And now come back to the responsibility of the firstborn, I had to come back. I felt that I had to come back to be with my parents, to take care of them. They weren't, they didn't need care at that time, but I figured I had to be aware that this responsibility was gonna eventually fall on my, fall on me. So that's the reason I came back here. If it wasn't for that I would never have come back. I would have stayed in Los Angeles or a place like Denver, preferably. Then I got married, raised family. Then I became an inspector with United.

Then 1969, when I was inspector, I got, I got to know some people in San Francisco who was in work projects, and I used to do the inspection work. So one day I was asked if I would be interested in going to Boeing to look at how they constructed airplanes. I said yeah, I'd be very interested in seeing the fundamentals of aircraft mechanic. I want to know what... so I went, figured I was going there for about two or three weeks. Went to Boeing and looked at the airplane, and I said, "My God, I don't see how anything like this can fly." Then the two or three weeks turned out to be longer and longer. Then came about two, two months and then the union got up, uptight about a inspector who's a union, union person. Inspector's job is a union job. That the union person was not using his union job but working as a management job by being in Boeing and watching airplanes being built. So they offered me an ultimatum. Come back to Honolulu and be an inspector, or go with management and be a management person. I enjoyed it in Boeing so much, I said, "No, I want to take the Boeing job." So I stayed with United as a Boeing, as a, not as an inspector any longer, but as a, just a technical, technical, just a technical representative until the airplane was completed. The first airplane.

TI: And this is the 747?

MK: 747, the first 747.

TI: Yeah, you look at that and you wonder, how can that thing fly? It's so big.

MK: So that, that's really how I became a technical rep. Then --

TI: I'm curious, did you ever get to go on the early test flights of the 747?

MK: Yes. The initial test flights, the proving runs, we did all that.

TI: So you were, you were on...

MK: On the plane.

TI: Wow, that's a piece of history, aviation history with the 747.

MK: It was a company rep job, so...

TI: That's exciting.

MK: But it was fun. Was eleven months there.

TI: In the Seattle area?

MK: Everett.

TI: Everett, okay. Good, thanks for sharing that.

<End Segment 36> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.