By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

When I get the summer blahs, I go into the newspaper morgue and rummage through old editions. It's a good way to cheer up.

You think we have a traffic problem? Here's a letter from Hanalei on Kaua'i, dated June 25, 1877.

"Sir: Since our last flood, nothing has been done for the repair of the roads and bridges. We do not know whether our road supervisor is dead or has resigned, as we have had no news from the other side where he resides. If he is dead, we respectfully ask the Minister of Interior to appoint a new road supervisor so that he may work on the roads."

I admit that air travel has become a drag. Consider yourself lucky that you weren't aboard the bark Mary Belle Roberts when it sailed into Honolulu Harbor in 1877 from San Francisco.

Captain L. C. Gray had brought along a case of wine, a keg of beer, and a 5-gallon demijohn and 2-gallon demijohn of whiskey. He was drunk the whole time and he threatened to shoot one of the passengers.

On arrival, he was arrested for smuggling 40 tins of opium into the kingdom. He never did appear in court, because he ended up in the insane asylum.

Do your kids complain about school? Here's a story about Miss Aylett's academy in Honolulu about 125 years ago, when all of the students came in Sunday clothes and had to stand up for the examination in front of everybody.

Miss Becky Ruth spelled and defined 55 words, getting only one wrong. Others got up for a geography test and an arithmetic test. Miss Hannah Paul read through a selection with correct accent, inflection and enunciation.

Before it was over, Miss Aylett sang several edifying songs of her own composition, accompanying herself on the guitar. How would you like to sit through four hours of that without wiggling, kids?

Now let's talk about governmental tourism agencies. There's nothing new about controversy over how much to spend on tourism, how, and who should do it.

While the students were reciting at Miss Aylett's, their elders pontificated about the lamentable inability of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel — the old one downtown for which Hotel Street is named — to show a profit. It turns out that the government built the hotel for $150,000 in 1872 as a tourist promotion to show how "people in Hawai'i have not just emerged from savagery."

For the first five years, the government leased the hotel to genial Allan Herbert at no charge. Then the fee went up to $6,000 and the hotel went downhill. The Advertiser's editor asked plaintively, "Should the government be in the hotel business?"