Author has ties to Islands

By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Books Editor

Author Geraldine Brooks fell in love with journalism early in life while living in Sydney, Australia.

Her father, the late Robert A. "Bob" Cutter (who later changed his name to Laurie Brooks), was a well-known tenor who lived in Hawai'i in the mid-1930s and sang with Harry Owens' Royal Hawaiians and Johnny Noble's Royal Hawaiian Hotel dance orchestra. Advertiser files document the smiling singer's comings and goings — joining the staff of KGMB in 1933; giving a December, 1934, solo recital at the Honolulu Academy of Arts; returning on the Lurline from six weeks' vacation in 1935; departing Honolulu on the President Coolidge to join Hal Grayson's band at the St. Francis Hotel in 1936. He was known for his renditions of "Hawaiian Paradise," "I Want to Learn to Speak Hawaiian" and "To You, Sweetheart, Aloha."

Brooks has a photo of her father from that time, wearing a lei, which she considers "charming," and she has made the pilgrimage to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel to see the room in which her father once sang.

There's another Hawai'i connection, too. Brooks' husband of 18 years, Tony Horwitz, recently completed a new biography of Capt. James Cook, "Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before" (Henry Holt, hardback, $26).

Brooks, however, didn't get to come to the Islands when Horwitz was researching Cook's ill-fated time here.

"I'd be pounding away in the office and he'd say, 'Oh, I've got an arduous research trip to Hawai'i," she said, wryly. "I definitely envied him."