Tiff over removal of a Barbers Point memorial nears an end

The chairman of a Barbers Point stakeholder group is optimistic an airplane memorial that recognized 57 years of fleet service will be returned to the shuttered air base after being unceremoniously removed last March.

D. Kalani Capelouto said his group wants to reinstall the monument — a one-15th-scale fiberglass P-3C Orion mounted on a steel pole and surrounded by a moss rock wall — near the Kalaeloa airport control tower on the former Navy base.

“I think the overall consensus (of the people) that you talk to will say that the memorial needs to be there somewhere on the facility — and I think (the control tower site) is the most appropriate place for it,” said Capelouto, a 22-year Navy veteran who served with multiple P-3 squadrons.

The stakeholder group is asking for public comment through the month at the Facebook page Save Naval Air Station Barbers Point Memorials (facebook.com/SNASBPM).

“I think right now we’re at about 90 percent” progress toward the relocation, Capelouto said.

A backlash in the military community — particularly among those who served at the Navy base during its existence from 1942 to 1999 — followed the monument’s removal without warning last March.

Barbers Point was at one time the largest naval air station in the Pacific. At its height during the Cold War it had about eight sub hunter squadrons and 80 to 100 aircraft, according to historians.

The American Renaissance Academy, a school that leases 17 acres from the Hunt Cos., including the memorial site across from the old Naval Air Station Barbers Point headquarters, got a volunteer group together and removed the airplane and stand one Saturday.

Carl Vincenti, a retired Marine and executive vice president of business development for the K-12 school, said at the time that he had been cleaning up the neglected and deteriorating monument of broken beer bottles and other debris for three years, and eventually spearheaded the effort to relocate and safeguard parts of it.

The memorial’s support pole and airplane replica wound up in storage at the Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps base. The rock wall base remained at Barbers Point, stripped of its nomenclature, “Naval Air Station Barbers Point 1942-1999.” The letters were also shipped over to the Marine base.

The school admitted it wanted to use the land where the Navy dedicated the memorial in 1999 with the base’s closure for other purposes.

In the uncertainty that followed, two competing community groups sprang up to try to return the memorial to the sprawling old base.

Bev Brennan, a 30-year Navy veteran who was stationed for 13 years at Barbers Point and now runs the Barbers Point Bowling Center, was part of a group that advanced the plan to move the monument to the control tower site.

But the Hunt Cos. — which inherited the monument on land it now leases to American Renaissance Academy — aligned with Capelouto’s hui because of a personality conflict with another member of Brennan’s group, Capelouto said.

“I don’t care who takes credit for this or who gets it done or how it gets done, I just want to see it done, and right there (by the control tower) is the appropriate place for it,” Brennan said.

She added “there is so much (military) history out there that’s slowly being ruined. It’s being turned over to developers with no sense of what happened out here.”

That includes a Dec. 7, 1941, role at Ewa Field, which preceded Barbers Point on some of the same land.

“When you look at World War II and when it started — guess where the bombs started falling first? Out here at Marine Corps Air Station Ewa,” she said.

Brennan said she tracked down bronze plaques that were once attached to the base memorial that are hidden away on Navy land in Lualaulei.

“I’d be more than willing to help getting them back,” she said.

Capelouto said the memorial’s moss rock base may have to be shrunk a bit at the control tower site so it does not interfere with a fire hydrant.

He added that he wants transparency with the process and the point of the public comment period on Facebook is “to just open it up and see if anybody else has any other comments on it before we start taking down” the memorial’s original moss rock wall.