By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

You may have noticed that we ink-stained wretches of The Advertiser newsroom are wearing glamorous new company shirts in a floral pattern that sportswriters have misidentified as bird of paradise. Our newsroom women point out that it's heliconia.

Everybody agrees that it's a beautiful shirt and it continues a hallowed tradition. Probably no other newspaper in the world has as illustrious an aloha shirt history as The Advertiser.

So far as I know, the story of Advershirts has never been told. Let us therefore delve into the past when Advershirts were but a gleam in the eyes of executive editor Buck Buchwach. He got the idea to make a company shirt to celebrate a special U.S. bicentennial edition in 1976.

To put a different twist on things, I wrote the special edition as if it were a newspaper published in Hawai'i in 1776 before the Islands were discovered by Capt. James Cook. This made for an interesting perspective.

Buchwach transferred the pages onto fabric and created a shirt. It caused such a stir that he wondered if Advershirts might not be salable. An opportunity came in 1978 with publication of our special Capt. Cook edition.

"We did a blue T-shirt with Captain Cook's ship on the back, his face on the front," said Marcie Farias, who was Buchwach's secretary.

"We ordered 500. By 9:30 a.m. we sold out. The line still reached down the hall and out the back door into the parking lot. To satisfy 300 angry readers who didn't get shirts, we reordered."

Every other year, The Advertiser published a Progress Edition and made 1,000 newly designed shirts available. Women readers became annoyed because the shirts were for men. Farias got the idea of selling fabric to the women so they could whip up whatever garment was in fashion.

The most popular Advershirt pattern was a Pegge Hopper painting taken off the cover of the Progress Edition in 1980. "We cut it off at 7,200," said Farias. "By that time we had to hire college students to fill mail orders."

The Advershirt operation became more sophisticated. "In 1982 we did a Martin Charlot T-shirt," said Farias. "We'd start selling the T-shirt in November for Christmas so it promoted the Progress Edition that came out in February."

Each unusual event, like the appearance of Halley's Comet, prompted an Advershirt. The discovery of an alligator-like caiman in Nu'uanu Reservoir coincided with a statehood anniversary. That inspired a bilious yellow T-shirt that read: "I Caiman to Hawai'i For Statehood 25."

"It was the ugliest shirt I'd ever seen," said Farias. "We sold 3,000 in two weeks."

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.