Phone cable installation shut down Hanauma Bay

When I interviewed Lex Brodie about 10 years ago, he told me that when he was a Boy Scout on Oahu around 1930, his troop hiked from the end of the paved road at Kahala to Hanauma Bay. It took about two days but the Scouts were rewarded with one of the more spectacular sights on Earth: an extinct volcano filled with water. They camped out at the bay, sharing it with just a few fishermen.

Recently, Honolulu Star-Advertiser Editor Frank Bridgewater shared with me this photo of a blast at Hanauma Bay that he received from the serviceman who took it. Apparently, in 1956, Hanauma Bay was closed for more than a month to create a 200-foot channel for an undersea telephone cable from California to come ashore.

In October 1956, trucks, barges, bulldozers and dynamiters descended on the bay. One blast shot coral and water more than 60 feet into the air. Tons of coral was piled on the beach, awaiting removal by Hawaiian Dredging workers. The water was filled with silt and covered in oil.

The bay didn’t reopen until late November.

After removing the coral, a trench was dug for twin 1-inch cables, which were laid in late October, and the trench was filled in. It took more than 10 days for the water to clear.

The cable ran 2 miles out to sea, where special ships from San Francisco spliced onto the cable and connected it to Northern California. Hawaiian Telephone paid $50 million (in today’s dollars) of the cost and American Telephone and Telegraph paid $266 million.

The twin cables were the longest submarine telephone cables in the world. The Pacific sea bottom was largely a mystery and had to be charted for the best routes. Laying the cables took two ships all summer in 1957.

In these days of satellite communications to nearly anywhere in the world, it’s hard to imagine that, in the early 1950s, there were only 50,000 landlinephones in Hawaii. That would be one for every five people.

Many homes could not afford a separate phone line and shared what was called a "party line." You might pick up the phone and find a neighbor talking to someone, and would have to apologize and wait until he or she was done.

It was a "toll call" when someone in Honolulu talked to someone on the windward side. Per minute surcharges, above and beyond the monthly fee, for calls from one part of Oahu to another were not eliminated until the late 1950s.

Calls to the mainland were carried over radio waves starting in 1931 at a cost I calculate to be more than $50 per minute in today’s dollars to the West Coast and twice that to the East Coast. Mutual Telephone, as Hawaiian Telcom was called then, had a capacity of just 14 long-distance calls at a time in 1956.

Henry Walker Jr., who was president of Amfac from 1967 to 1982, said, "A telephone conversation by shortwave radio was not an easy thing because static would come and go, the call would fade or drift and sometimes be lost completely. It was quite an affair and tremendously expensive."

Subordinates who needed to relay a message to the mainland would have to get a succinct, written memo on the president’s desk an hour before the call was placed. "I’d look at these various notes and if there was anything important, would include it in the conversation," Walker recalled.

On Oct. 8, 1957, 125 guests assembled in the Throne Room at Iolani Palace where loudspeakers allowed them to hear Gov. William Quinn place the first phone call on the new cable.

Business, government and top military officials in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, London, New York and Ketchikan, Alaska, spoke together over 18,000 miles of joined cable.

Richard Higa, who worked for the phone company at Hanauma Bay, said the California-to-Hawaii Cable No. 1 allowed 48 simultaneous calls. The military leased about a third of those channels at a cost of $25,000 a month per channel.

The greater capacity also allowed the cost per call to drop, initially by about a third, to about $33 a minute. By the time Higa retired in 1985, the cost was less than $1 a minute.

Cable No. 1 was supplemented by Cable No. 2, which came ashore in Makaha in 1964. It could handle 130 calls at a time and eventually was linked all the way to Thailand by the military.

Cable No. 1 served about 20 years before it was abandoned due to high maintenance costs.

Hawaiian Telcom is celebrating its 130th anniversary this year. In a future column, I’ll look at some other interesting things about Hanauma Bay.