PanAm fanatic Anthony Toth redefines brand loyalty with scaled replica of PanAm cabin
To say 42-year-old Anthony Toth is a fan of defunct airline Pan Am is an irresponsible understatement.
Toth has drawn media attention for his lovingly detailed reconstruction of a PanAm cabin in his garage, and the Wall Street Journal profiled Toth’s long descent into madness decades-long love for the airline. The fixation started early on, and by his 10th birthday, he was requesting subscriptions to airline timetables and meticulously chronicling flight interiors on family trips. By the age of 12, Toth had already tried his hand at mocking up a PanAm cabin in his family’s basement, fashioning seats out of wood and employing collected items discarded by others on his PanAm flights like cardboard coasters and paper tray linings.
When Toth was house-hunting two years ago, he had the ambitious reconstruction project in mind and selected a home with an unusually large garage. Now he hosts fellow Pan Am fans and friends in the cabin, serving meals on Pan Am china and watching in-flight movies on an admittedly anachronistic flat-screen TV.
Pan Am was, at a time, symbolic of high-class international travel, but the company’s fortunes reversed with high fuel prices in the 70s and declined for good with the bombing of a flight over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988.
[Source: WSJ]
