“Tell the story about how Duke Kahanamoku taught you how to swim.” His family loves this story.

“Well, he didn’t really teach me to swim,” Angelo Pagliotti said. He’s not a man who overstates things. But when he does tell the story, simply and without hyperbole, it’s another magical scene in a life filled with great adventures.

Pagliotti, 84, spent his childhood on Coconut Island, the 28-acre bit of land that rises up in Kaneohe Bay. His father was a caretaker for Christian Holmes, the heir to the Fleischmann’s Yeast fortune who bought the island in the mid-1930s and developed it into a private resort. Holmes doubled the size of the island by dredging up sand and building all sorts of fancy things like a zoo and a saltwater swimming pool.

The Pagliotti family, parents Mike and Julie and their children, lived on Coconut Island from 1939 to 1946. Before that, Mike Pagliotti, an Italian immigrant, worked as a ranch hand on two of Holmes’ estates, Feather Ranch and Linden Lodge, in California. When a forest fire destroyed Linden Lodge in 1939, Holmes told the Pagliottis he wasn’t going to rebuild, but that he had a little island in Hawaii where he could use their help.

Julie Pagliotti didn’t like that idea. “That’s in the middle of the ocean!”

But Holmes told Mike to go see it for himself and report back to his family.

“My father went on the Lurline, on that beautiful luxury liner. When he came back, he told us, ‘I’ve never seen a place so beautiful in my life. The weather is always the same there.’”

The family packed their suitcases with what little hadn’t been lost in the fire and headed to Hawaii.

Pagliotti’s childhood on Coconut Island was idyllic. He took a boat to get to school, landing in Kaneohe and then walking two miles to Benjamin Parker Elementary. The island had a movie theater, a shooting gallery, a bowling area and a skeet range. They lived in a caretaker’s house near the swimming pool and learned to make spear guns, dive, and fish from one of the other workers on the island.

Holmes liked to throw lavish parties on his island, though often he wouldn’t attend. During one party, young Pagliotti was standing near the swimming pool when a tall man came up and asked if he lived in the nearby house.

“You must swim every day,” the man said.

“Oh, no. I don’t swim,” Pagliotti answered.

“I’ll teach you how to swim,” the man said.

“He took me down to the water. I was just hoping it would all be over quickly. He told me to kick my feet and move my arms. When he turned me loose, I started to sink.”

It was not an auspicious meeting. Pagliotti was terrified.

“Afterward, he told me, ‘You go to the shallow end every day and you practice and practice. He left, and I ran like hell. I was so scared.”

Later someone told him, “‘That was Duke Kahanamoku. He’s an Olympian.’”

“When I got older, I could appreciate it,” Pagliotti said. “Funny thing, I did practice and practice and I learned how to swim.”

The day Pearl Harbor was bombed, Pagliotti heard a commotion and went scrambling up to the gazebo at the highest point of Coconut Island. “I saw all these airplanes coming around, again and again until they ran out of ammunition. Under wings, we could see actual bombs. I could see the pilots’ faces. Before we knew it, they were gone and it was over.”

The fear lasted much longer, and Pagliotti remembered having to prepare the island with blackout curtains and bomb shelters and having to carry a gas mask to school.

There are other stories — about the huge schooner anchored at the island for party guests to play on, a girl name Nani who lived on the Kaneohe shore, the scary apes Holmes would take for walks on the island, how the boys were paid 10 cents for the tail of every rat they caught — big adventures in a little boy’s life.

But the man who created the island paradise was a troubled soul. Despite his fortune and creative vision, Holmes could not keep away from pills and alcohol. He was just 47 years old when he died of an overdose. Holmes was in New York and on the phone with Pagliotti’s mother when it happened. He had been trying to persuade her to come to New York to take care of him.

Despite his raging paranoia, Julie was one person he trusted. He wanted her to come cook for him because she was such a great cook. He called her “Mama.”

Holmes’ ashes were brought back to Hawaii and scattered by the sandbar off Coconut Island.

After Holmes’ death, his three children put the island up for sale.

“My dad said, ‘It’s not going to be the same,’” Pagliotti recalled.

In 1946, the Pagliotti family left Coconut Island to go back to Santa Barbara. Holmes had left Mike and Julie $10,000 in his will, which was enough to buy a house.

Holmes’ son had an estate in California near Hearst Castle, and asked Mike Pagliotti to work for him out there. Later, Holmes’ daughter asked Pagliotti to work on her property.

Angelo Pagliotti graduated from high school in Santa Barbara and joined the Marine Corps. He later started a landscaping business and got big contracts for places like Motel 6 and Vandenberg Air Force Base. He took a job in landscaping for the University of California, Santa Barbara, and worked for the university for 30 years before retiring.

Pagliotti returned to Hawaii when he was 70. He and wife Barbara live in a house behind their daughter’s home in Waimanalo, where they’ve turned the lanai into a lush tiki bar with a big koi pond and vibrant orchids like the ones his father grew on Coconut Island. They have nine grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren with another on the way, and extended family too numerous to count. He went back to Coconut Island once many years ago, but it was so overgrown he hardly recognized it.

“The shooting gallery was gone, the bowling alley was collapsing, the main house was in ruins,” he said.

He won’t go back again. Pagliotti is losing his sight to macular degeneration. Everything is blurry. But those images of a charmed childhood on Holmes’ little paradise are sharp in his memory. “I had the best time as a kid,” he said.