How Holiday Mart was named

A few weeks ago I wrote about Holiday City, a subdivision in Pearl City, and the Holiday Mart stores in town, Kailua and Pearl City. I wondered where the “Holiday” name came from.

Don Anderson from my Rotary Club told me he talked to August Yee, who’s 95 years old, and asked him about the Holiday Mart name. He and his brother, Eddie, developed the stores and the subdivision.

Yee said they were looking for a name that would be competitive in the marketplace, and an employee said, “I like the name Holiday.”

August and Eddie liked it, too, and that’s how it came about, Anderson told me. The Holiday City name derived from Holiday Mart.

Alvin Yee, who is not related to them, asked about several companies whose names begin with Holiday, such as Holiday Motors, Homes, Jewelers, Travel, Appliance, etc.

They owned Holiday Theaters (Kailua, Laie and Nanakuli), August Yee said, but none of the other Holiday companies.

He told me a funny story about Holiday Mart. They had a creative marketing person in 1964 who came up with a publicity stunt to boost Thanksgiving sales for the company’s new store on Kaheka Street.

The company ordered 24 turkeys from Parker Ranch and flew them to Oahu. A truck was sent to the airport to pick them up. The driver, Curtis Iaukea, put them under a tarp on the truck bed.

Then the driver was instructed to have a “breakdown” at the corner of King and Bishop streets. Bank of Hawaii was, at the time, situated on the mauka/Ewa side of the street.

The driver was to lift the tarp, Yee said, and let a bunch of the turkeys “escape.” A huge crowd gathered. It was quite a scene, and one turkey flew into an open window of the Bank of Hawaii and caused a ruckus.

Conveniently, the press was informed ahead of time, and reporters and photographers were there waiting. They captured the whole thing. Great photos appeared in the papers that week, and hundreds of shoppers came to see the gobbling turkeys on display at the store.

It drove many shoppers to the store, Yee said. It worked beautifully.

KAPIOLANI WATER FEATURE

In Rearview Mirror last week, Cynthia J. Larson asked about the sculpture and water feature in the triangle between South and King streets and Kapiolani Boulevard.

Is the rock feature an homage to a stream that once flowed in that area? she asked. Two sources I recall described underground streams in the region, but none I found were above ground.

The Mayor’s Office of Culture & the Arts says the fountain features a bronze sculpture called “Hawaiian Net Mender — Ka Mea Kui Upena (Person Who Stitches the Net).” It was made in 1989 by Charles Watson and depicts a seated male figure with a net draped across his outstretched legs.

His arms extend over the net, as he is in the act of mending it with a tool in his right hand. The figure sits on a boulder which is placed in a man-made pool. There are waterfalls behind the figure.

Charles Watson (1915-2002) was a former president of Hawaiian Dredging Construction Co., which built Aloha Stadium, Ala Moana Center, the Ilikai Hotel and many other structures.

I talked to Wade Shirkey, who was a reporter at The Honolulu Advertiser for 40 years. His office looked out at the juncture of those three streets.

The intersection was different 40 years ago, Shirkey recalls. Kapiolani Boulevard now begins/ends at South Street, but 40 years ago it continued through Civic Center, between what is now the Fasi Municipal Building and the Kalanimoku Building, all the way to Beretania Street.

There are walking paths about where Kapiolani Boulevard and Hotel Street once ran through Civic Center.

The Honolulu Advertiser city editor, George Chaplin, at the time had a corner office that overlooked the verdant grass triangle between the three streets, Shirkey recalls. One day it occurred to him that it would look even better with a fountain on the site.

Chaplin spoke to Mayor Neal Blaisdell and brought it up as a suggestion. Blaisdell was positive about the idea, but nothing happened for a long time.

Then one day, Chaplin noticed, workers showed up with pipes and equipment and began digging. Chaplin was happy he had shared his vision with the mayor, and it validated his idea that citizens could influence government.

In no time the workers were done, and to his dismay, Chaplin discovered they had built a drinking water fountain — not the elaborate water feature he had envisioned. He hadn’t been specific enough, Shirkey muses.

Forty or so years ago, the Advertiser building had an open-air courtyard with a small waterfall, similar to the one at Kawaiaha‘o Church a block away. The courtyard had beautiful flowers, such as ginger and orchids, Shirkey recalls.

Workers on the second floor could open their windows and hear the pleasant sound of the water gurgling below.

Shirkey says his editor, Sandy Zalberg, had one such window. “If I turned in a story — on paper in those days — that Zalberg didn’t like, he would crumple it up and throw it out his window into the courtyard. He wanted us to write stories we were proud to see in print. If we weren’t proud of a story, don’t turn it in, he would say.”

When Thurston Twigg-Smith became publisher in 1961, the courtyard was enclosed and converted into an art gallery called the Contemporary Arts Center. It later moved to Makiki Heights.

Spanky Drive Inn

Edwin Chu asked about the drive-in that preceded Asahi Grill at 515 Ward Ave. and Kawaiahao Street.

It was Spanky Drive Inn, JoAnne Yamamoto told me. Records show that George Obata was president and Herbert Tom was vice president. Spanky was there from about 1966 to 1989.

“It was next to the Kanai Tofu Factory, owned by the Kaneda Family. Kaneda used to have a deli/catering business in Nuuanu at one time,” Yamamoto says.

TORTOISES

Last month I wrote about three tortoises that lived in Hawaii. One was brought from the Galapagos Islands by Una Walker and donated to the Honolulu Zoo. I learned more about them.

Her grandson Michael Lilly told me the zoo says it is still alive and might be 80 years old. But they had no record of how it came to the zoo and were pleased to learn its origin.

Mary Foster had a pet tortoise, as did her good friend Queen Lili‘uokalani.

Rianna Williams, whose book “Queen Liliuokalani, the Dominis Family, and Washington Place, Their Home,” mentions the tortoise. It was large enough for children to ride, and students at St. Andrew’s Priory School were particularly fond of it.

Sea captain John Meek had brought several tortoises to Hawaii. One may have been given to Kamehameha III, then owned by Queen Kapiolani, who gave it Lili‘uokalani. Princess Ka‘iulani, the queen’s niece, had another at her home in Waikiki.

Lili‘uokalani sent hers to England in 1915, and it died in 1917.

NEW READER REQUESTS

Joan L. Collins inquired about a past Honolulu resident, Carl Miller, who died in 1979.

He was an actor and artist as well as the men’s department manager at Liberty House (later Macy’s), Collins says.

“I am currently trying to find individuals who knew Mr. Miller, and/or his wife Emma Rose, and have information or recollections about him.”

Dennis Ching is looking for information about a “Strawberry Land” farm in Nuuanu around 1895.

His grandfather worked there, where the cool valley temperatures were conducive to their cultivation.

Readers, do you know anything?

Bob Sigall’s “The Companies We Keep 5” book contains stories from the last three years of Rearview Mirror. “The Companies We Keep 1 and 2” are also back in print. Email Sigall at Sigall@yahoo.com.