By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Lots of gossip has been passing over the back fence so we'd better catch up. For example, somebody should tell Hawaiian Airlines that they've got the wrong airplane in their television commercial that's on the air. The first Hawaiian airliner was an eight-passenger Sikorsky flying boat, not a two-cockpit land plane.

Here's an Our Honolulu fashion note from the University of Hawai'i. Math professor J.B. Nation plays trumpet for the Kailua Jazz Hounds. In the morning, he runs a few miles before driving the kids to school. Next he sit on a park bench overlooking the Ala Wai and practices riffs. Then he goes to class in an aloha shirt, jeans and go-aheads.

At the State Archives now you have to sign in and out to get the key for the men's john. You're supposed to lock the door while you're inside to keep terrorists out, I guess.

I was curious to see if my check-in, check-out times match those of other men because I don't walk as fast as I once did. The quickest dasher-to-the-john did it in three minutes from sign in to sign out. That's pretty fast. I got back in five but it took some slowpokes 10.

It's a good thing to admit your mistakes because, like getting lost, you usually learn something. I put the famous Black Cat Cafe on the wrong street in a column recently, King instead of Hotel Street across from the Army-Navy YMCA.

Warren Luke, head of Hawai'i National Bank, called to say his father, K.J. Luke, one of Hawai'i's pioneer Chinese financiers, got his start as an owner of the Black Cat Cafe and the Motor Coach Grill before he took over the Fort Shafter Officer's Club.

A column I did about the feisty, missionary Gulicks produced all sorts of reaction. Pauliekeakalani Jennings, a Gulick on her mother's side, called to say everybody mispronounces it. It's not Goolick like in gooey, but Guelick as in Q-tip.

Then, too, the family is noted for more than mission work. Dr. Luther Gulick, son of the missionary, was director of the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Mass. He noticed that his students had no sport to play after football in the fall and before baseball in the winter.

He told his assistant, James Naismith, to think up a game to keep the boys from getting into trouble. Naismith nailed up a peach basket with the bottom cut out in the gym and sailed a soccer ball through it. That's how basketball was invented.

I got a nice letter from Clifford Putney, history professor in Massachusetts. He said Gulick Street wasn't named after the missionary Gulicks but after Charles, the black sheep of the family, who hated missionaries and was a patriotic supporter of the monarchy.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.

Correction: A previous version of this column gave an incorrect street for the Black Cat Cafe.