A moment with Elvis tops list of celebrity sightings

By her own admission, 70-year-old Pearl Murata loves to talk. It’s part of what makes her such a popular figure among patients and staff at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women & Children, where she works.

But when the gab turns to Murata’s personal life, suddenly she’s a cop at a crime scene: Move along, people, nothing to see here.

"There’s nothing interesting about me," she says. "I’m boring!"

But prod hard enough and Murata might tell about how she and singer Neil Sedaka became pals or about that time in Waikiki when she ran into Elvis Presley — literally. Pry further and she might even talk about her encounters with original teen pop sensations Bobby Rydell and Eddie Cochran, or baseball legends Mickey Mantle and Juan Marichal.

Murata was born on the Big Island and raised in Honolulu. Never married — "I must be a witch," she jokes — she and her sister share a home on the same Ninth Avenue lot in Kaimuki their parents bought in 1955.

As a girl, Murata frequented the old Honolulu Stadium, where she watched the likes of Mantle, Marichal and Joe DiMaggio. Her love of baseball would continue as she followed the Hawaii Islanders minor league team.

In the Islanders’ final go-around before relocating to Colorado Springs, Murata made sure that every player and coach on every visiting team got a handmade lei.

Murata was just as passionate about music. In 1958 she heard Sedaka’s debut single, "The Diary," and asked her friends about the rising young star. Hapa, they said, mistaking his anglicized Turkish surname for Japanese. "So I wrote him a letter asking if he was Japanese," she says.

Sedaka wrote back, and when he later visited Hawaii on tour, Murata hung out with him and his mother. They remain good friends.

A few years later, Murata and her friends heard that Presley was staying at the Hilton Hawaiian Village. They spent several nights keeping watch by the hotel pool until they finally saw Presley and his entourage. Murata gave chase.

At some point Presley stopped. But Murata was looking at her feet, trying not to trip over her heels, and didn’t see him. "I ran right into him. He just stood there. But he turned out to be very nice, a real Southern gentleman — and so handsome!"

Friends insist it isn’t Murata’s celebrity encounters that make her interesting, but rather her warmth and humor (not to mention her custom birthday cards and gourmet Jell-O) that draw others to her.

"I love to meet people and I love to talk," she says. "I guess those are my bad habits."

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.