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Businessman, writer and rail opponent Cliff Slater dies at 91

PHOTO COURTESY RANDY ROTH
                                Cliff Slater

PHOTO COURTESY RANDY ROTH

Cliff Slater

Cliff Slater — businessman, newspaper columnist, author, photographer and community activist most visible in recent years for his steadfast opposition to Oahu’s controversial $10 billion rail project — died Jan. 20, with his wife and children beside him, at his home in Honolulu. He was 91.

Honolulu attorney Randall “Randy” Roth, professor emeritus of law at the University of Hawaii and one of Slater’s closest colleagues in questioning the financial projections that were made to sell voters on rail, remembered him as an author and scholar on the history of transit.

“Cliff and I formed a close friendship long before he got me involved in opposing heavy rail on Oahu,” Roth said. “He was probably the best-read person I’ve ever met. That — combined with an exceptionally open mind and wonderfully dry English wit — made every conversation with Cliff both interesting and delightful. Our discussions always included whatever books we were reading at the time.”

“Cliff authored scholarly articles and a book, ‘Transit,’ about the history of transit in America. These articles did not focus on the Oahu rail fiasco. Instead, they traced the history of transit in ways that let readers decide what they thought made sense and what did not.”

Another longtime friend, Ken Schoolland, associate professor of economics at Hawaii Pacific University, said Slater believed in offering well-reasoned, better alternatives to policies and proposals he found troubling.

“I first met Cliff in the mid-1970s when we were all in the Libertarian Party of Hawaii,” Schoolland said. “He actually founded an organization called the Jefferson Society to bring in a lot of speakers from the mainland who gave very free-market messages about alternatives or ways to shape public policy, and so he was at the forefront of that.”

“He was quite a well-known foe of the rail project because of the problems that they subsequently discovered. He was the one who foresaw a lot of those problems before they were discovered, and he was also eager to offer alternatives. It wasn’t just that he was opposed to it. I really liked the fact that he was always exploring better alternatives that would be more efficient, more effective and more cost-effective. I always liked his positive, constructive approach.”

Slater was born and raised in London. His mother died when he was 3. His father was a Scotland Yard detective, and a member of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s security detail at the time of the Munich Agreement in 1938. Two years later young Cliff was one of the thousands of Eng­lish children who were sent out of London to live in the countryside during the Blitz; despite the bombing and other wartime privations, he was occasionally able to return to London for visits with his father.

War over, Slater decided he wanted to be a Royal Air Force pilot. Told he would have to be at least 17-1/2 years old to enlist, he reported to an RAF recruiter almost exactly six months to the day after his 17th birthday.

Bobbie Slater said that joining the RAF changed the course of her husband’s life.

“He told me that when he was first an officer in the RAF, he heard the other officers talking about the book ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray,’ and he heard them discussing classical music,” she said. “He thought they probably went to ‘posh’ schools, and he decided he needed to be better educated, so he started reading. Eventually, he became the best-educated man I have ever known, especially in history.”

Slater had hoped to serve as a pilot, but the RAF found him best suited for the equally demanding assignment of navigator. For three years of his 7-1/2 years as an officer in the RAF, Slater was based in East Asia and navigated numerous flights over North Korea. Many of the flights over North Korea were designed to attract enemy radar so the location of the radar stations could be pinpointed for attacks by other aircraft (“Cliff described these assignments as a bit like putting bait on a hook,” Roth said). The RAF did not have reliable maps of North Korea, so Slater also navigated nocturnal mapping missions flown low and slow only 50 feet above the ocean surface.

Back in civilian life, Slater spent several years working in Italy, learned how to sail by reading a book, and then fell into a job as a skipper for hire. Hawaii wasn’t in his plans until he was sailing a client’s boat to New Zealand and had to divert to Hawaii for repairs.

“He didn’t want to come to Hawaii because he knew that it would be too commercial, (but) by the time the boat was ready, he was totally committed to Hawaii and the boat left without him,” Bobbie Slater said. “I think his first night he was here on New Year’s Eve, and they were invited to some house up on, maybe, Sierra Drive somewhere, and they looked down and they saw the fireworks. It was incredible in those days. And he just immediately took to Hawaii.”

Slater’s first job ashore was washing dishes in Waikiki. From there he became involved with Ala Wai Marine, the maritime services yard that stood for many years at the Ewa end of the Ala Wai Boat Harbor. He eventually put together a group of investors that bought it; he served for several years as president of the company.

Slater’s biggest undertaking as a businessman was Maui Divers. The company had begun as a business that provided scuba diving experiences for tourists; with the discovery of black coral beds, it began manufacturing black coral jewelry as well. In 1962, Slater became the head of the company’s jewelry division and grew it until it had eclipsed the diving division. In 1983 he switched from wholesale to retail and opened Maui Divers Jewelry’s first retail jewelry store.

“It’s one of the very few local manufacturing companies to survive the ups and downs of our economy over the past 60-plus years. Its employees are incredibly loyal,” Roth said.

One of those employees became Slater’s mother-in-law.

“I was home for two weeks, just to see my parents, and I went to pick up my mother at work,” Bobbie Slater said. “I was moving to the Azores. I was going to be teaching there. I went to pick up my mom and met Cliff. I never went to the Azores.”

Maui Divers Jewelry was Cliff Slater’s anchor in the business community, but he was also an accomplished photographer whose subjects included bears and bald eagles in Alaska, wildlife in Kenya, wildlife in the Galapagos Islands and scenic locales in Hawaii and elsewhere. Slater’s photography was the subject of an exhibition at the Pegge Hopper Gallery in 2015.

And he was active in community affairs as a member of the Hawaiian Libertarian Party and the Jefferson Society, as an op-ed columnist for the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and The Honolulu Advertiser, and as a leader in challenging the controversial reign of the Bishop Estate trustees in the mid-1990s, and the proponents of what has become Oahu’s $10 billion dollar rail project.

“Some of the many columns he wrote for the (Hono­lulu) Advertiser were brilliant at the time and equally brilliant in hindsight,” Roth said. “Cliff was a dependably interesting guest on my ‘Price of Paradise’ radio show. One featured him with the Democratic Party chair discussing welfare in Hawaii, and another had him and another businessman discussing small business in Hawaii. These shows are as relevant today as they were then.”

Slater is also survived by his son, Maui Divers Jewelry CEO Cole Slater, and daughter, Jessica Snyder Najdek.

A celebration of life will be held March 8 at the Waikiki Yacht Club.

Correction: Cliff Slater’s survivors include his son Cole Slater An earlier version of this story misidentified him as Clint Slater.
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