period homes and interiors magazine
i flew pan am when i was five years old and today i've actually built a replica of the airplane that i love so much as a child. my name is anthony toth and i work for a major airline. i've been in love with aviation since i was a little boy and i started building airplane models when i was about 10 years old. my uncle who had a table saw cut all these little wood pieces.
but little did i know at this point that this was just the beginning of many models to come in my life. when i was about 16 years old i acquired my first set of airline seats. in my mid-thirties i had a small aircraft cabin in the living room of my house. by the time i was in my forties i had actually reconstructed my garage look like a vintage airplane.
but at some point, everybody runs out of garage space. and now the coolest thing i've ever made is my nineteen seventies pan am 747 cabin. this particular aircraft is 60 feet long and 22 feet high. from buying aircraft in mojave desert, trucking it here and building it costs a hundred thousand dollars. it was totally worth it though. just imagine coming up to this entrance door
back in the seventies. and you're standing right now inside the first-class cabin of that aircraft. pan am called this a slumberette seat. by today's standards it's actually quite nice. i found all these pan am seat in a warehouse in hollister california. they were sitting in my living room for a couple years cause i had nowhere to put them.
i love everything about the airline. everything from the carpet to the seat fabric, reading the in-flight magazine, listening to and watching the video screen. i actually wired all 18 seats in the first-class cabin so you can plug in a real pan am headset and actually listen to the video and the audio.
this is actually the lav of the 747 and while i have all the parts in here none of them actually work. so i actually have to remind my friends and people that are in the airplane not to use it! so up this spiral staircase is the 747 first-class lounge. none of these pieces of furniture exist anymore any airplane that i could find,
so i have to go to great lengths to actually recreate the seats, the tables, even things like the sidewall partition etched in glass. just back here is the pan am clipper class cabin. this would have been the very first version of what business class ultimately became, and right behind this curtain is unfortunately were i ran out of money
and i hope one day to actually bore this wall out and build the entire coach cabin. so you can see here this platform that i built is the casing that actually holds the 747 together. this is the vintage ticket counter lobby and it's part of the experience that makes it seem really real to me having the actual boards that designate the flight destinations,
luggage tags and computers that would have been used during the seventies. while this airplane was primarily my hobby, you know, a place for me to hang out with my friends, i've been renting it to hollywood productions for the last few years now. there was a period where my parents like "you spend all your money on memorabilia,
you need to buy a house you know you just save money for your retirement." but now that i'm actually making a little bit of money on this it's it's changed everyone's opinion of my collection over my lifetime. this nineteen seventies pan am 747 cabin is the "coolest thing i've ever made".