BOOK REVIEW
Prolific songwriter in tune with old Hawai'i

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

"FROM A JOYFUL HEART: The Life and Music of R. Alexander Anderson" by Scott C.S. Stone, Island Heritage, paper, $9.95

Chances are the songs they name — "Haole Hula," "Lovely Hula Hands," "Red 'Opu," "I'll Weave a Lei of Stars for You," "Blue Lei," "Cockeyed Mayor of Kaunakakai," "Malihini Mele" — will include one by R. "Alex" Anderson.

Anderson, who died in 1995 just short of his 101st birthday, belonged to another time. It was a time when a lot more people found it easy to believe in the myth of Hawai'i as a paradise. Anderson's songs, the best of them written out of the brimming well of his own love for his home, expressed what many felt and believed then — and many would like to believe now.

Scott Stone's brief biography, commissioned by Anderson's children, shows how little the prolific songwriter dwelt on his own talents; he was much more proud of the singing voice of his Mauian wife of 71 years, Peggy Center Anderson.

It was only later in life that Anderson, an engineer by training who spent four decades with his uncle's Von Hamm-Young Co., realized that he could actually have supported his family with his music.

Throughout his life, he gave away songs to charitable organizations and community agencies to commemorate special occasions and institutions as diverse as Punahou School (his alma mater) and the Narcissus Festival.

But Stone, a Volcano-based author of a number of fiction and nonfiction books, wisely opens the book with the most dramatic chapter in Anderson's life, the period during World War I when Anderson served as an aviator with the American Expeditionary Forces.

The young SE-5 pilot crash-landed behind enemy lines, became a prisoner of war and then an escapee.

It is the kind of story you wouldn't believe if you saw it in a movie. (In fact, some of the events were incorporated into a film, "The Dawn Patrol," though Anderson's contributions were never acknowledged by the screenwriter.)

In another series of events that reveals that more heroic time, Anderson and a group of buddies boldly flout peril, knocking on farmhouse doors in Belgium, walking down the streets of occupied cities speaking what French and German they knew. At one point, Anderson is determined to steal an airplane to get back to his base in England; his friends talked him out of that.

Back in Hawai'i, Alex meets Peggy and the two fall so in love that, despite his encouragement to pursue her dream, she gives up a promising career in music to marry him. After a brief time living in Chicago, the two return home where she raised the children and he pursued his career and his avocation of songwriting.

Theirs was a life of unconscious privilege — schooling in the East for the four children, houses on the beach and in the mountains, membership in all the expected clubs. Their friends included many of the celebrities who passed through Honolulu at that time.

But the pair subscribed firmly to the philosophy of giving back to the community that was giving them so much. They were longtime patrons of the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra; he was an enthusiastic Rotarian, a member of ASCAP and worked with the the Downtown Improvement Association, the Hawai'i Visitors Bureau and in the cause of airport improvement and safety; she worked with the Outdoor Circle, Junior League and Daughters of Hawai'i. He was a person who, once involved, stayed involved.

"From a Joyful Heart" — a line from Anderson's own favorite among his songs, "Haole Hula" — is a well designed book, enlivened by photographs, letters and other artifacts from the family collection and Stone has done a good job of capturing that lost period and Andersons' unassuming, gentle personality.