By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

If you like to read this column, let me suggest a book you might enjoy: "The Companies We Keep" by Bob Sigall and his students at Hawai'i Pacific University. It's loaded with oddball information about Our Honolulu.

Sigall and his students have put together the histories of local firms, organizations and people from Lex Brodie to Amfac, City Mill to Arakawas, C.S. Wo to Liliha Bakery, E.K. Fernandez to Jack in the Box, Dot's in Wahiawa to Kukui Medical Center, etc. Here are a few tidbits to whet your appetite:

Telecheck, from pre-credit card days, started right here in Hawai'i at a Boy Scout leader's meeting. The scout masters compared notes and discovered that some of their bounced checks came from the same customers. One of them volunteered to keep a file that the others could refer to by telephone when a dubious check came in. It grew into an international business.

Arakawas, the legendary general store in Waipahu that closed in 1995, became a success partly because founder Zenpan Arakawa was too small to cut sugar cane. They made him the plantation water boy. That's how he got to know the needs of other workers. When he opened his general store, he knew exactly what would sell in a plantation camp.

The hamlet of Oroku Aza in Okinawa produced the owners of a supermarket chain in Honolulu, the Teruya brothers of Times Super Markets, and the proprietors of 72 restaurants including the late, great Tosh Kaneshiro of Columbia Inn.

Liliha Bakery sells up to 6,000 Coco Puffs every day. They have traveled all over the United States and as far away as Germany. It's ironic that Coco Puffs flopped the first time a Liliha baker put them on sale in the 1960s. Kame Ikemura added a dollop of chantilly frosting on top in the 1960s and Coco Puffs took off like gangbusters.

The Manago Hotel in Kona on the Big Island started in 1917 with two cots and futons. Today there are 64 rooms and a new three-story wing plus a room with a furo and tatami mats instead of a bed. The orchid collection in the bamboo garden is spectacular.

Roy Kelley, who founded the Outrigger resort chain, opened his first hotel in Waikiki in 1947, the Islander. Rooms cost $7.50 a night. He built the Edgewater Hotel on Beachwalk in the 1950s and used a corner of the lobby as his office. God help the clerks who didn't look busy.

Dot's in Wahiawa used to be a skating rink owned by the Harada family. Local people didn't know how to roller skate so the Haradas hired soldiers from Schofield Barracks as instructors. Dot's Drive-in came along in 1949. The roller skating rink is now the parking lot.

It's not true that Tripler Army Medical Center was painted pink because the Army had a lot of surplus paint that color. It was painted rose coral because there wasn't any planting around it then, just raw, red dirt. Pink doesn't show the red dirt so much.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.