As I grew up on Maui, I have many memories of United 747's.
The first time I saw one was at Hilo Airport in 1973. A couple months later, I rode 747's from Honolulu to Boston via San Francisco (we had to change planes at SFO due to an engine reverser problem). At that time, there was a coach lounge on the planes with couches, and I spent much of the flights there. Boston was fogged-in, and we made several attempts at landing before diverting to New York.
The flight attendants wore muu-muus or aloha shirts, and served macadamia nuts in little tetra-packages. Movies were projected on a screen at the front of the cabin, and earphones were plastic tubes that transmitted sound from speakers in the arm rests. There was always a "Half Way to Hawaii" sweepstakes on board, where passengers tried to guess the time the halfway point was reached to win a bottle of champagne.
Although I don't smoke, I like the smell of cigarettes and used to always sit in the smoking section on the plane. On one 747 to Hawaii, the woman sitting next to me dropped a burning butt and it landed on a fur coat that a passenger had stashed under her seat. The coat started to smolder, and a flight attendant quickly remedied the situation. A few moments later, another person (I was told this was probably a Boeing engineer and not a flight crew member) came and started pulling off wall and floor panels to look for sparks. It was somewhat disconcerting to see how fragile the plane was under the thin interior veneer.
My first (late) wife's daughter was a United Flight Attendant based in Honolulu, and she knew many of the crew for flight 811 shown in DA's post above. Because I had United travel privileges, I usually flew smaller planes directly in and out of Maui. I never flew first-class on a 747.