ISLAND VOICES
Hawai'i's brand name burns bright
By Robert E. Brown
I read it in The New York Times. Back East, the official spin is that there's "trouble in paradise" because of a Hawai'i government shakeup affecting how the Islands are marketed as a tourist destination. But from my perspective, Hawai'i can never lose its power over the traveler's imagination.
I ought to know. When I was a senior in high school, Hawai'i lured me all the way from New York City. On the day after Thanksgiving, 1961, with an equally mesmerized friend, I ran away from home.
Instead of mailing my application to college, I decided to wing it as Huck Finn. As for my friend, Chuck, he was happy to go along for the flight. After all, running away is the definitively American thing to do.
Very early Friday morning, as our parents slept, we sneaked out of our respective apartments, hailed a cab to the airport and boarded a jet. Neither of us had ever flown. Now we would be jetting halfway around the globe. We took our seats on a TWA, another brand name time has swallowed.
On that sunny, brisk November morning, we began an adventure that turned out to be expensive, dramatic, brief but indelible. We landed in Honolulu at 2 a.m. in a light rain. We had $30 between us — enough for hamburgers. The rest of our cash — around $500 — had gone into capitalizing two one-way tickets. We told the flight attendants (stewardesses then) that our parents, who owned a fabulous ranch, were expecting us home from our holiday in New York. For this whopper, we were treated to an extra glass of champagne.
By 4 a.m., we were walking down an unknown road near Honolulu Airport. I was carrying the typewriter I had brought with me to write stories for the New Yorker. I was in style in my clamdigger pants — but out of money and moxie. We wired back to our parents for the return fare. It never came. Instead, the next morning as we stumbled around outside the airport, half asleep, we were arrested, taken downtown and booked as "wayward minors." After an anxious lunch in a juvenile prison somewhere in the hills, we were flown back to New York — this time in the company of a cop.
After more than 40 years, the brand-name luster of Hawai'i burns bright in the memory of at least two consumers of travel and tourism.
Robert E. Brown teaches writing at Salem State College in Massachusetts. In 1974, "The Amazing Activity of Charley Contrare and the Ninety-Eighth Street Gang," a play based on a Hawai'i adventure, ran for a month off-Broadway. The author was the late Roy London, Chuck's older brother.
