Who were the greatest practical jokers in Hawaii? Many of you might say disc jockey Hal “Aku” Lewis deserves the top spot. He had some great pranks, targeted mostly at everyone.
Today I thought I’d share some of the pranks that the staff at Trade Publishing played on each other and their friends. They were some of the most elaborate and expensive pranks I’ve ever heard of.
Jim Cook, who began working there in the 1970s, told me about 50 of their practical jokes. Here are a few of his favorites.
Background
Trade Publishing collected information for those in the construction, real estate and hospitality fields. It published over 20 different weekly, monthly and annual magazines. Contractors used them to bid on projects.
Top executives were Donald Over and Carl “Link” Lindquist. Other staff included Ted Sturdivant, Carl “Kini Popo” Hebenstreit, Jerry Van Volkenburg and Jerry Beam.
Lindquist said they published “glorified classified newspapers.” Trade Publishing began in the Ala Moana area in 1954 and moved into a large building on Mokauea Street in Kalihi in 1973, where it is today, now named Trade Media Hui.
They were very profitable and had access to all sorts of heavy equipment, which they used to lift boats over fences, setting them down in people’s backyard pools. Or to dangle friends’ cars high in the air above them.
Steamship horn
One prank targeted Over, the company’s president. While he was away on a mainland trip, Lindquist bought a steamship horn, the kind you might find on a big Matson liner.
Lindquist tore the wall apart in Over’s office and installed the ship’s horn behind it. Then he drywalled and painted it so the wall looked undisturbed.
He wired the horn to line two on Over’s desk phone. Over came back from the mainland and was working at his desk. His secretary beeped him from downstairs. “Don, call for you on line two.”
Over pressed line two and the horn bellowed. Everything shook. The deep, bass tone reverberated through the entire building.
“Don was blasted out of his chair and over his desk,” Cook recalled. “After he regained his composure, he thought it was pretty funny. He said he couldn’t wait to use it on someone else.”
In the doghouse
Lindquist pulled a similar office gag on Van Volkenburg, a vice president who was away for a two-week vacation. Lindquist put drywall over his office door and three glass windows.
Pictures were hung and potted plants were installed. If you had never been there before, you wouldn’t know an office space was behind them.
Van Volkenburg returned to work and was bewildered that his office had disappeared. The staff had a good laugh, and he announced he was upset and was going home. He wouldn’t return until the drywall was removed and he could enter his office.
That evening, Lindquist cut a hole in the drywall about 3 feet tall. It looked exactly like the door in a doghouse. A few strokes of paint completed the image.
He called Van Volkenburg and told him everyone was sorry about the office and he could get back into it.
The next day, the staff had another laugh when Van Volkenburg had to get down on his hands and knees to crawl into his doghouse office.
Stolen car
The top executives had breakfast every Monday at the Tahitian Lanai or the Halekulani. Valets parked their cars.
Once, when they were done with their meeting and standing outside, the valet ran up and said, “Mr. Over, I’m really sorry, but your car’s missing.” It was a brand new, green Oldsmobile 442.
“What?!” Over shouted at him.
“Yeah, we think your car’s been stolen. It’s not where we left it, and the key is not on the hook.”
“The police came and wrote up a report but were in on the joke,” Cook continued. “We gave Don a lift back to the company office.
“A week later Don flew over to the Big Island to meet with a client. We always used Budget Rent-a-Car and knew the owner, Harry Ruddle, quite well.”
The Hilo staff brought his rental car around to the front. It was Over’s “stolen” green Oldsmobile 442. “We had shipped it to Hilo, and the staff there had it ready for him to rent,” Cook said. “Don was speechless.”
Torpedo
One long-running gag involved an 8-foot-long practice torpedo found by two local divers at Pearl Harbor. They gave it to Sturdivant, who published the Hawaii Drive Guides. It weighed over 200 pounds.
Sturdivant cleaned it up and put it in a large box with ribbons and a bow and left it under the company Christmas tree with Lindquist’s name on it.
“I went to visit my family in Los Angeles,” Sturdivant said. “The next day, I called Link during the employee party to ask how he liked his present. It was still wrapped. As he opened it, I heard someone say, ‘My God, it’s a bomb!’
“It’s a practice torpedo, I told him. Link asked me what he should do with the torpedo. I told him he could stick it anywhere he wanted and hung up.
“Upon returning several days later, I found a hole had been drilled into the middle of my new, expensive teak office desk. The torpedo was set in the hole and stuck up several feet above it.”
The torpedo was quite a conversation piece as clients wanted to witness the lengths the staff would go for a joke. “I couldn’t sit at my desk to meet people, because we’d be shifting our heads right and left to see each other,” Sturdivant laughed.
After a while, the staff decided that the recipient of the torpedo had to come up with a prank using it on the “next guy.”
When local disc jockey Sam Sanford got married, they arranged for the torpedo to be shipped to the Big Island and placed in his Kona hotel room bed. Blankets covered most of it. The “head,” wearing a blue baby bonnet, lay on a pillow.
No one I talked to seems to know where the torpedo is now.
Free gas
“Another friend of Trade Publishing was George Inamura,” Cook recalled. “He owned the Union 76 gas station on the corner of Ward and Kapiolani from 1955-77 where Jack in the Box is now.
“All of us bought our gas there because George was a character. It was really fun to visit with him.
“Link used to prank Inamura every Dec. 7th. One year, he printed posters and paid kids to put them up all over town. Bold letters said, to celebrate Dec. 7th, and to make up for the bad decision to bomb Pearl Harbor, George Inamura’s gas station was giving away free gas to all comers that day.
“Lots and lots of cars showed up,” Cook remembered. “So many, in fact, that it gridlocked the Ward and Kapiolani area. The police had to help get traffic unsnarled.
“Customers were really upset with Inamura, and he was really upset with Link. He tried to explain how his ‘former’ friends liked to prank people, and he was just as much a victim as they were!
“It fell on deaf ears.”
Last prank?
Don Over died in 1995. The newspapers said he left $100,000 in his will to sponsor pranks after his death. I found nothing to indicate it was ever used.
Former journalist Don Chapman thinks that may have been a prank, too. “It would be like him to announce the fund but not actually leave anything — a final prank on all of us.”
Readers: Did you witness any of their pranks?
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.
