Recalling Maui’s near and distant past, compiled from Honolulu Star-Advertiser archives:
30 years ago …
Maui County liquor commissioners staved off a lawsuit by narrowly approving a hostess bar license for Eun Soon “Patty” Cude.
Cude’s Patty’s Place bar in Wailuku will be the sixth hostess bar authorized in Maui County, ending an informal 10-year-old limit of only five such bars. It took more than a year and one bout in 2nd Circuit Court for Cude to win the right to have her “girls” sit with customers in the bar.
The Maui Liquor Commission set an informal limit on the number of hostess bars in 1979 when Mayor Hannibal Tavares sought to have the hostess operations banned completely. The commission decided to license only the five that were then in existence. But the commission never established a formal rule setting the limit.
Judge E. John McConnell ruled the commission did not have adequate grounds for refusing to grant Cude a hostess bar license, and ordered the panel to reconsider her application.
50 years ago …
Dillingham Corp. is planning a statewide interisland ferry system. The company has informed Fujio Matsuda, state transportation director, that its system is intended to begin operation next year among the three islands of Maui County. The system would be extended to the Big Island in a second phase and to Kauai in a third.
Dillingham said the service would begin next year with a 130-foot vessel able to carry 200 passengers and 40 cars, or a lesser number of roll-on, roll-off freight containers, trailers or vans.
A company letter asks Matsuda’s help in getting “expedient legislative” action this session for landing sites on Lanai, Molokai and Maui, but particularly on Maui. It wants a temporary landing at Lahaina for use until the new deep-water harbor is developed at Maalaea.
60 years ago …
Hawaii’s senior postmaster is a tiny, gray-haired grandmother. She is Virginia L. Mathias, who has been postmaster at the third-class Waiakoa Post Office on Haleakala’s slopes since 1917, a total of 44 years of public service.
The Postmaster’s Gazette has been conducting a campaign to find the longest-serving postmaster in any state.
Mathias received her appointment from President Woodrow Wilson’s postmaster when she was 18. Since then she has served under Presidents Harding, Coolidge, Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower.
100 years ago …
Notwithstanding the fact that Maui health records show more than 450 cases of influenza in the past two weeks, there is some indication that the peak of the epidemic may have been reached, as least as far as the Wailuku district is concerned.
As was expected, the malady is spreading from Wailuku to other districts, but not very rapidly. There have been in all about 15 deaths. Puunene has begun to report cases at a fairly lively rate, mostly from Camp 1, from whence 46 cases have been diagnosed and reported by physicians.
