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Every now and then I find myself with interesting tidbits that didn’t fit into a previous column or are too short to take up a column of their own. Here are several “leftovers” from the past few months.
Biathlon
Attorney Rick Fried told me a funny story last month. He owns a home at the exclusive Yellowstone Club in Big Sky, Mont., and goes there several times a year.
Recently, the U.S. Olympic biathlon (skiing and shooting) team was there for a demonstration and bit of fundraising. Yellowstone members were encouraged to form teams to try out the sport.
A young man dressed to participate was standing surrounded by a group of people. Fried asked him, “Are you on the Olympic team?” at which point everyone around him laughed.
Fried’s wife, Susie, yanked him by the parka and said, “You are the only person on the planet who doesn’t recognize Mark Zuckerberg!”
Zuckerberg is better known as the founder of Facebook, but I bet he got a chuckle out of being mistaken for an Olympic biathlete.
“BTW,” Fried said, “guess whose team won?”
I told Fried I imagined it was Zuckerberg’s team that won. Yes, Fried agreed. “His was the best team of Yellowstone Club members, but not remotely competitive with the U.S. Olympic Biathlon team.
“The Olympic folks were thrilled that Zuckerberg’s team won as that likely meant he donated a bunch of money,” Fried concluded.
The world of Sammy Amalu
I was talking with Gene Kaneshiro, whose father, Tosh, owned Columbia Inn.
Gene has made it his mission to gather as much info as possible on Okinawan- owned restaurants in Hawaii. Besides Columbia Inn, there were over 350 such eating establishments.
Tosh Kaneshiro was the leading supporter in Hawaii of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Gene told me a cute story about him and Sammy Amalu, who began writing his Honolulu Advertiser column from jail.
Amalu masqueraded as a maharajah in San Francisco. He claimed to be a descendant of King Kamehameha I’s brother, Kaleimamahu. He called himself the Prince of Keawe. He claimed he would have been king if Hawaii still had a monarchy.
He was a penniless prince who had a talent for writing. Unfortunately, the form it took was often bogus checks. He spent over four years in jail.
Amalu’s letters to Punahou classmate and Honolulu Advertiser publisher Thurston Twigg-Smith led to his writing a column in the paper.
Amalu wrote in 1975 that Tosh was “far more than a mere Dodger supporter, he had become a devotee.”
“One day, I happened to walk into the place just as the Dodgers won,” Amalu recounted. “Tosh was so elated that I decided to buy a round of drinks for the house.
“It was then that he asked me if it were possible for me to pay for the drinks with a check instead of cash, as he wanted to frame the check and hang it up on his wall.
“Startled, and also to make certain, I asked him if he really was not going to cash the check.”
Since Amalu had gone to prison for writing bad checks, someone actually wanting his check was the height of irony, he thought.
“He assured me that all he wanted to do was to frame it,” Amalu continued. “Thereupon, I immediately ordered the house a second round of drinks, and paid him with a check.
“And if you think that is not a true mark of success, to accept my checks without a tremor nor even a flicker of the eye, you are indeed badly mistaken. Believe me, it is a long climb up the ladder of success from washing dishes to framing my bum checks. A long, long climb.”
Gene Kaneshiro framed the article Amalu wrote as well as the check and still has them, he told me.
Morley Theaker and Sears
Last month I wrote about Morley Theaker, the general manager of Sears in 1959 who would not move the store from Beretania Street to Ala Moana Center unless he could bring along his peanut vendor, Teru Isomura.
I was reading Jane Marshall Goodsill’s new book, “Voices of Hawaii,” last week, and it looks like Theaker had a few other demands.
Goodsill quotes Alice Flanders Guild, who said, “Morley Theaker was the general manager of Sears, which was between Young and Beretania Streets. There were all these satellite stores around it, such as Slipper House and Crack Seed Center.”
Ala Moana developer Lowell Dillingham approached Morley, asking Sears to be the anchor tenant for Ala Moana.
“At first Morley didn’t want to move, and then he said, ‘Well, if I move Sears, you have to take all the little stores that surround Sears, because they will never survive if Sears moves!’
“He built that into the deal, and that is how all those small shops got into Ala Moana.”
Gabby
Last week I mentioned that Gabby Pahinui met his wife at the Smile Cafe on Kapiolani Boulevard, where he had a gig at 17 in 1937.
I always thought his nickname came from a talkative quality he had. Not so.
“Everybody thought he got the nickname ‘Gabby’ from talking, but it was because everybody called him ‘Gabardine Hair’ when he was a kid in Kakaako,” Sonny Chillingworth, a fellow musician, said. “His hair was kinky, and when he used to go swimming, the water would just roll off ”
His son Cyril said he sometimes wore pants made of gabardine material, as did all the musicians in an orchestra he played in, early in his career.
Gabardine is a tightly woven water-repellent fabric.
His real name was Charles Kapono Kahahawai Jr., but he was renamed Charles Philip Pahinui by his hanai parents. Friends called him “Gabby” or “Pops.”
Slot machines
Hawaii is one of the few states that prohibit all forms of gambling, so when I learned that the Cannon Club at Fort Ruger had slot machines during World War II, I was intrigued.
It turns out most military clubs in Hawaii had slot machines and derived a good deal of income from them. Some civilian clubs had them, too.
In 1947 the Honolulu Liquor Commission ordered the removal of all slot machines from territorial premises licensed to sell liquor.
Four years later President Harry S. Truman signed a bill that banned slot machines from military clubs as well.
Most were disabled and “buried at sea.”
Reader questions
I’ve gotten a number of reader requests recently. If you can answer any of these questions, please send me an email.
>> Which local drive-ins had roller-skating carhops?
>> What are your favorite lunch wagons past and present?
>> What was it like to grow up at Fort Ruger or Fort Kamehameha?
>> Do readers have any spooky or “chicken skin” stories?
>> Does anyone remember a World War II-era field artillery camp in the Woodlawn area of Manoa?
>> How did Kailua change after WWII?
>> Do you remember open-air movie theaters, such as Halawa or Waianae?
>> Does anyone remember the “singing cop,” Joe Ikeole, who tested drivers for their licenses in the 1930s-1950s and often made the driver stop for food?
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Have a question or suggestion? Contact Bob Sigall, author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books, at Sigall@Yahoo.com.
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