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TI: Okay, so after the military, what happened next? Where did you, what did you do?

RM: I started working for, I went to school first. GI Bill, a hundred and twelve bucks a month we got for that. I earned it. First thing I ever earned, first thing I ever did that left me some residual value. And then, of course, I had the educational allowance and that's where I was pickin' up, but of course it wasn't a whole lot of money, even back in those days. And I was drivin' by that time, you got to buy gas, make sure you, you and your friends got beer and all that stuff, so hundred twenty bucks goes very rapidly. And of course there was nobody around to organize what I was doing, so by the end of the month I'd be broke again, waitin' for that damn hundred and twelve bucks. Learned how to drink. Course, I knew how to drink from before then, but even more at UH. And we drank this wine that was called Vino da Tavola, good Italian wine, table wine. And you'd sling that gallon jug over your shoulder and, and you have the cork open, right, you could drink it like that. [Laughs] Wasn't a, wasn't a wonderful life, but we were havin' a good time. And we, we thought we were learnin' stuff, but by the end of two years I realized I hadn't learned anything at all, so we had a good time. [Laughs] I went for, went to look for work and, of course, the first place I went was Hawaiian Airlines, and I'd have to get there early in the morning, like three-thirty or something like that, then the newspaper trucks would come in and they'd leave flats. Flats are stacks of newspapers that have straps. Might be like forty pounds each, maybe, and then you start loading hundreds of these things up on what they call a Hovair, it's a belt, belt that you put stuff on and it rolls up to the top where there's another guy, another guy like you that doesn't have enough education to get a better job that's stacking it in the airplane. [Laughs] So just hundreds of hundreds of pounds of newspaper flats we'd stack every morning. By seven o'clock we were wiped out, and we'd done our exercise for the day. Then we'd load bags on regular airplanes after that. But those newspaper flats were just murder.

TI: And then eventually you got to United. I think you went from Hawaiian to...

RM: Yes. Japan Airlines.

TI: Japan Airlines, and then to United?

RM: And then to United.

TI: And then you, again, worked kind of --

RM: But of course, I was, I didn't have to do any muscle work at United. I was a clerk. And that's when I ran into Farrington guys that I, that I described to you.

TI: Right. And then you became a flight attendant after that?

RM: I became a passenger agent and then a flight attendant, when the job opened up. And at first I knew my mother wouldn't like it. It was servile. We were not something that somebody who went to Punahou and came from a family like ours would be doing. You're serving people, so she really didn't like that. But it was definitely the best job I've ever had in my life. Every week was an adventure, and I'd fly, usually with the seniority we had, that is, the length of service that you have within a certain group, and we were at the, pretty much the top of it because of the growth in the airlines. When I went in they hired only, I think, about four or five of us, and during the next summer they started hiring, like, classes of twenty and thirty, forty even, I think, and this group that numbered eight people when it started became two hundred, two hundred local guys. Think only had one haole in that group, Wade Quinn. [Laughs]

TI: And so you had a lot of seniority, so you got to really choose the routes that you would fly?

RM: We not only got the choice of routes to fly, but we also got the choice of whether we wanted to work on the front of the airplane in first class or the back in the coach. And we also got, of course, the option of bidding for the direction you were going. Eventually it ended up being Japan and, and Bangkok and even Australia and New Zealand we went to, and of course it went, going East, of course they started going into all the old Pan Am routes, to Paris and London and Frankfurt. And all of a sudden we had the whole, whole world in front of us, just based on seniority.

TI: And that was back when jet travel was a really exciting business?

RM: I became a flight attendant just at that point when 747s came in. 'Course, United didn't buy 747s; it bought DC-8s, so we were workin' DC-8s. And I would do some interesting flights, like I would fly a trip from here to New York, JFK, and then Hong Kong from there.

TI: Over, over the Pole, or how would you go from Hong...

RM: Oh yeah, got to go over, a polar route because, Great Circle is what it is, the shortest distance is the Great Circle. And it would take, like, to Hong Kong from JFK was often over eleven hours and we'd do it in a Pan Am, what they call a SP, special performance, 747.

TI: Wow.

<End Segment 23> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.