Master electricians Juichi Tokioka and Alejandro Navarez were "the Mutt and Jeff of Hickam Air Force Base, except that everyone knew them as ‘Toki and Ando,’" recalls Ron Arata, also an electrician at the base. "They were the guys who could solve anything electrical."

Tokioka and Navarez also have a legacy that brightens every December at Hickam, and Arata, their friend for years, wants to make sure everyone knows about it. 

The two men built and designed one of Hawaii’s tallest Christmas trees, the complex lights transforming the 171-foot water tower on the base parade ground.

He’s not sure of the date, but Arata believes the tower’s Christmas lighting was created around 1965. It’s an example of Toki and Ando’s thrift and imagination.

"Hickam received a shipment of around a thousand water heaters for the base housing, but they were wired with three-phase contactors, which is industrial wiring," said Arata, in electrician-speak. "So they changed them all to single-phase contactors and wound up with a big pile of three-phase contactors."

The pair brainstormed a use for the surplus contactors, which are essentially electrically controlled switching devices. They could be used as the "brains" of a complex Christmas lighting system, and the most obvious place for it was the octagonal water tower, built in 1938 and now known as Freedom Tower.

They salvaged an electrical motor from an airplane and machined large aluminum discs with coglike indentions of various depths that were fitted with spring-steel fingers. As the motor slowly turned, the fingers would make contact, on and off, creating electrical pathways that were precise and timed, like the roll of a player piano.

They rigged 48 steel cables to support something like 6,000 red, white, blue, yellow and green bulbs and thousands of feet of wire. The circuits were connected to the brain-wheel apparatus inside the tower, and a complete cycle program would take about a half-hour to run. Navarez handled the grunt work of getting the lights into position on the outside of the tower, Arata said, "working way up by the tower eagles" that adorn the balcony, while Tokioka connected them to the brain-wheel inside.

And what programs! Every year the two would devise a new contactor brain-wheel that would do something different. The lights could twinkle. They could turn on and off in color sequences. They could spiral up and down. The only time they had to redo it was when they devised a pattern that whooshed upward, recalled Arata.

"The base commander thought it looked like a rocket taking off, which wasn’t good for Christmas," he said. "So they slowed it down and in reverse, so it looked like snowflakes settling."

Tokioka and Navarez’s masterful wirings of the light sequences were mind-numbingly complex, so much so they were about the only ones who could figure it out.

"When Mayor Eileen Anderson saw how beautiful the lights were and how animated, she tried to hire them away to do the City Hall lights," Arata said. "They said, ‘No thanks, we’re Air Force all the way.’ And to this day the City Hall lights are pretty simple."

About a decade ago both Tokioka and Navarez retired after 42 years of service at Hickam. Arata followed sometime later. The annual ceremony of switching on the lights is a Hickam tradition, and Tokioka and Navarez’s elaborate switching apparatus has gradually been replaced by off-the-shelf components.

Outside the holiday season, the strings of lights and equipment are stored in a room above the tank that was formerly used as a radio transmitter facility.

Arata finds it ironic that although the pair "took great pride in planning, preparing and running the Hickam Tower light show," they never got to see the magical moment when the lights were switched on. The two men were always inside the tower, making sure everything would go smoothly.

Alejandro Lianos "Ando" Navarez Sr. died Nov. 15 at age 83. Juichi "Toki" Tokioka died soon after, on Nov. 24. He was 84.

The lights on the Hickam water tower were turned on last week.

Visiting their graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific at Punchbowl, Arata, their friend, discovered that Toki and Ando lie less than 100 feet apart.

There is probably a current running between them.