Hawaii’s first neurosurgeon was Dr. Ralph Bingham Cloward (1908-2000). He graduated from McKinley High School and began college at the University of Hawaii.

He wanted a red bicycle as a child and worked three jobs to save money for it. Instead, his mother bought him a clarinet. He cried for a week, he said, but later felt it steered his life to a much better path. Here’s his story.

Cloward’s father was a family doctor in Price, Utah, 130 miles southeast of Salt Lake City. “I had three jobs as a pre-teenager,” Cloward wrote. “I shined shoes in a barber shop, I sold newspapers and I worked on a beet farm that paid 30 cents a day.

“For two years I put all the money in the bank for one purpose. In the window of the hardware store was a beautiful red bicycle. I saved my money to buy it.

“Every time I passed the store, I would press my nose up against the window and look at that bicycle and drool with expectation. Finally, when school started in September, Mother took my money out of the bank and went to town, I thought to buy my red bicycle.

“When she returned she had a little black box under her arm. I said, ‘Where is my bicycle?’ She put the black box on the table and said, ‘I bought you something else instead.’

“She opened the box and there was a clarinet. You can imagine the disappointment a little boy felt. I cried for a week.”

The clarinet sat unused in the closet for months. Then a new music teacher came to his school and taught Cloward how to play it. “He gave me lessons, and I gradually became interested in the instrument and eventually became a good musician.”

McKinley High School

Cloward’s parents divorced during World War I, and his father joined the Army. After the war was over, he was posted at Tripler Hospital in Hawaii. Cloward joined his father and attended McKinley High School.

He played clarinet in the McKinley band so well that he was offered a position with the Honolulu Symphony. Silent films needed live music to fit the on-screen action, and Cloward was hired to be in the pit orchestra at the Hawaii Theatre.

“In September 1926 I entered the University of Hawaii. The head of the ROTC asked if anyone could lead a band. I had been a drum major for my high school band, so I put my hand up. I was the only one.

“He said, ‘OK, you lead the band!’ I thought I was going to be a drum major, but he had chosen me to be the director of the university band, which made me a member of the university faculty. As a faculty member, my tuition was free!

“I directed the school pep band, played at all football games and was drum major at all parades.”

Royal Hawaiian Hotel

When the Royal Hawaiian Hotel held its grand opening in Waikiki on the night of Feb. 2, 1927, Cloward and 13 other musicians were hired to play. He was paid $90 (in 2024 dollars).

The silent-film era was ending by 1928. “Talkies,” as they were called, had an audio channel with speech and music. The theater orchestra members lost their jobs. Cloward had been leaning toward a career in music but decided to shift to medicine instead.

Aloha shirts in Utah

“During my two years in Hawaii, I had nine musical jobs,” Cloward recounted. “I saved enough money for college and medical school. Before returning to Salt Lake City, I visited Musashiya, a shirt maker down on River Street in Chinatown. He had started making colorful shirts from kimono cloth. This was the beginning of aloha shirts. I took a half-dozen of these shirts back to Utah.

“At the University of Utah, I organized a five-piece jazz band, which played for a Thursday afternoon dance. My boys wore the colorful aloha shirts, which had never been seen in Utah, and probably the USA!

“I first met my wife, Florence — ‘Flossie’ — at one such dance. Thus began our dancing together for the next 62 years (1928 to 1990).”

Cloward earned his medical degree, and in 1938 he and Flossie sailed to Hawaii on the Lurline. He joined his father, who had co-founded The Clinic with George Straub and several other doctors, before opening his own practice.

Pearl Harbor

Three years later Japanese planes bombed Pearl Harbor and other Oahu bases.

“It was a peaceful Sunday morning in Manoa Valley,” Cloward recalled. “I was mowing my lawn when a neighbor pointed out bursts of black smoke over Waikiki. Previous Army practices used artificial ammunition, which had white smoke.

“My wife screamed from the kitchen, ‘The radio is reporting that the Japanese are bombing Pearl Harbor, and ordered doctors come to Tripler Hospital immediately!’ Tripler was a small, 250-bed hospital located at Fort Shafter at the time.

“All of Pearl Harbor was covered with a black cloud of smoke and flames. As I arrived at the hospital and got out of my car, I almost stepped into a large pool of blood. I remember thinking, this is the first time in history that American blood has been spilled on American soil by a foreign enemy.

“Being the only neurosurgeon, they gave me a small room, 14 by 18 feet, in the maternity ward to do brain surgery with my nurse, Edith Yoshioka. We operated around the clock, 24 hours a day for 3-1/2 days, stopping only for a bite to eat or a short break to prepare the next patient.

“When we stopped operating on the evening of the fourth day, I had performed more than 40 operations.”

Several high schools were converted to hospitals. “We were issued gas masks and required to dig bomb shelters in our yards. For the next three weeks, I drove from hospital to hospital seeing patients with head and spine injuries.”

Cloward worked seven days a week, 18 hours a day operating on soldiers and civilians for the next four years. “I received no compensation for all this work. It was my contribution to the war effort.”

Epilogue

Cloward went on to become one of the premier neurosurgeons in the world. He operated and lectured in many countries, his daughter Kathleen Cloward Sattler told me. He pioneered new surgical techniques and invented over 150 instruments for spine surgery that are still in use today.

He made headlines around the world in 1965 when he successfully operated on a 16-year-old Polish girl with a tumor in her neck. The Rotary Club of Honolulu raised the funds to fly her to Hawaii. Cloward, Queen’s Hospital and the Moana Hotel all donated their services.

“He was the one man in the world who could do it,” said the girl’s mother, Maria Downarowicz. “He had perfected the technique.”

Cloward owned a home on the beach at Diamond Head. It was at a party there in 1950 that actress Shirley Temple met her future husband, Charles Black. They were married 53 years.

The surgeon was one of the founders of KCCN 1420 AM radio in 1966. The “CCN” are the initials of Cloward, Perry Carle and Jerry Neville.

If Cloward’s middle name, Bingham, caught your eye, it’s because he was a distant cousin of Hiram Bingham I, who founded Kawaiaha‘o Church and Punahou School, and his grandson Hiram Bingham III, who “discovered the Lost City of the Incas,” Machu Picchu.

So, if your child wants a bicycle, should you buy him a musical instrument instead? Cloward might have advised it.

“I have thanked my mother a thousand times for buying me a clarinet instead of a bicycle,” Cloward said. “Incidentally, I have never owned a bicycle!”

Bob Sigall is the author of the five “The Companies We Keep” books. Contact him at Sigall@Yahoo.com or sign up for his free email newsletter at RearviewMirrorInsider.com.