Bold industrialist, bold dreamer. That was Henry J. Kaiser, a multimillionaire with a long resume of successful ventures by the time he came to Hawai'i and changed it forever.
Kaiser arrived in 1954 on a five-week vacation and never left. Part of his inspiration came from a Waikiki hotel that was unable to honor his reservation because it was full. He decided to build one of his own — the Hawaiian Village, now called the Hilton Hawaiian Village.
Island residents didn't quite know what to make of Kaiser, but they knew he could get things done.
Kaiser was born in 1882 to German immigrants. They were so poor, he had to quit school at 13 to help support the family by working as a cashier in a dry-goods store in Utica, N.Y. His lack of education never hurt his success.
He built roads and helped build dams — Hoover, Bonneville, Grand Coulee and Shasta — and his seven shipyards, which produced a cargo ship every 30 days, were a decisive factor in winning World War II. Kaiser is viewed as the father of modern American shipbuilding.
But his stamp on Hawai'i was of a different type altogether.
In 1959, he leased 6,000 acres in East Honolulu from the Bishop Estate and brought a Mainland style of suburban housing to the newest state in the union. Enter Hawai'i Kai, a $350 million project.
Kaiser built homes in Hawai'i Kai at a pace unheard of in the Islands. Then Kaiser built a palace of his own along the shoreline of O'ahu's new suburbia.
A bald, bulky man, Kaiser had eccentric tastes. Witness his official corporate color: pink. His trucks, barges, bulldozers and everything else were painted pink. And he usually went to work in red-pink slacks and a pink sports shirt.
Few could match his work ethic. Up at 5:30 a.m., Kaiser was off to work within an hour and usually stayed until 7 p.m. When he took a day off once, in 1963, he made headlines in Honolulu.
But he enjoyed life, too. A huge supporter of Hawai'i's only professional baseball team, the Islanders, Kaiser reserved a box seat behind home plate at the old Honolulu Stadium for all home games.
At the time of his death in August 1967, Kaiser was worth $2.5 billion. He was 85. His funeral service was held in Kawaiaha'o Church, where the Rev. Abraham Akaka eulogized the industrialist as "a modern ali'i."
