A flight attendant is landing in the Guinness World Records book after spending
63 years moving about the cabin.
Ron Akana, 83, worked his last route
over the weekend on a United Airlines flight from Denver to Kauai, ending his
career in the state where it began.
Hawaii, however, wasn't his final
stop. His destination was retirement in Boulder, Colo., where he has been living
since 2002 to be closer to his grandchildren. He spent his first few days of
retirement writing thank-you notes to well-wishers.
"I wasn't expecting
this much attention," he said Tuesday.
Akana joined the airline while a
student at the University of Hawaii in 1949, when friends spotted a newspaper
ad. "We didn't even know what a flight steward was," he recalled. "But it meant
getting to the mainland, which was a huge deal in those days.
"It seemed
pretty exciting and it proved to be more than that," he said.
And so he
became one of United's first male flight attendants. "We just liked working with
girls," he said.
The Korean War took him away from his job for two years
when he was drafted in 1951. Akana said his most memorable moments included
meeting the cast of the 1953 movie "From Here to Eternity," -- mentioning Frank
Sinatra and Deborah Kerr by name - and going from propeller planes to jets,
which cut travel time in half.
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