OUR HONOLULU
Remembering statehood drive and Buchwach
By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist
The historical photo with this story shows some of the 120,000 people who signed a Statehood Honor Roll exactly 50 years ago in a massive outpouring of support for giving people in Hawai'i the full benefits of U.S. citizenship. However, this is also the inside story about a unique journalist named Buck Buchwach who engineered the whole thing.
So let's step back 50 years to February 1954 when Hawai'i was still a territory, when "From Here to Eternity" was premiering in Our Honolulu, when Jim Michener lived in Waikiki and was writing "Hawaii" and when Henry J. Kaiser had just arrived for a visit. Television was so new that the TV schedule listed the time of the test patterns. Dan Inouye was running for Legislature.
Our big motherhood issue was statehood. We were victims of taxation without representation. As a territory, we elected a delegate to Congress who couldn't vote. He could only introduce bills and beg congressmen from other states to support them. The president appointed our governor.
Advertiser library photo • February 1954
This was also the time when J. Akuhead Pupule was the highest-paid disc jockey in the world. In 1954, TV pioneer Kini Popo and myself sailed down the Ala Wai on a raft to prove that the owners of fancy yachts in Ala Wai Yacht Harbor probably migrated down the canal on rafts from the low-rent district in Kapahulu.
Fifty years ago, 120,000 people signed a statehood petition that spanned a block of Bishop Street. It was the brainchild of publicist-journalist Buck Buchwach.
Enter Buck Buchwach, Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Oregon, U.S. Army veteran, star reporter for the Pacific Stars & Stripes during World War II when it was published from the Advertiser Building, Capt. George Chaplin, editor.
Buchwach was immediately hired by Advertiser editor Raymond "Boss" Coll when the war ended. He became our military reporter, the most important beat on the paper. But reporters then were lucky to get $50 a week. You could make more money shining shoes in the Alexander Young Hotel's barbershop .
Meanwhile, glamorous press agents with fat expense accounts operated from tables in the Outrigger Club bar on Waikiki Beach. Dole Pineapple Co. wooed Buchwach from the straight and narrow by dangling a big salary in front of his nose.
He turned out to be an inspired public relations man. He sold pineapples in ways you wouldn't believe. He went on Frank Sinatra's payroll as publicist and worked for Harry Truman on vacation. He became co-producer for J. Akuhead Pupule's television show that flopped. But such commercial ventures did not satisfy Buchwach. He was really a newspaperman at heart, a concerned citizen and defender of the Constitution.
That's why he invented the Statehood Honor Roll. He could be a public relations man and patriotic at the same time. If we had more like him, this country would be better off. Consider what he did. He waited until Congress was going to consider statehood for Hawai'i again. Then talked the governor and important politicians into marching down Bishop Street with a Dixieland band.
He gave The Advertiser exclusive rights to the story. I'm not sure he didn't write it himself. He got the milkmen of Honolulu to attach notes to deliveries to urge people to sign up. On the first day of signing, he unrolled a spool of newsprint a block long on Bishop Street and let people sign the Statehood Honor Roll.
It created a traffic jam downtown. People couldn't wait to sign up. Between Feb. 10 and Feb. 25 (the deadline was extended because so many people wanted to sign), the Honor Roll collected 120,000 names. Buchwach himself, 50 years ago today, carried it to Washington.
Of course, Southern senators killed the statehood bill again. We had to wait until 1959. In the meantime, Buchwach realized that being a press agent isn't all that great. A Statehood Honor Roll is a once-in-a-lifetime promotion.
He took a cut in pay to come back as The Advertiser's city editor. Nobody could mobilize a small staff for a big story like Buchwach. He became managing editor, executive editor and editor, then retired from the newspaper to become a public-relations consultant. Up until his fatal heart attack in 1989, promotion skills never deserted him.
While at the newspaper, he sold Advertiser shirts and mu'umu'us, and Advertiser-print teddy bears, Advertiser baseball caps and Advervisors. People bought Advertiser-print fabric for gifts. Some stuffy critics snickered behind Buchwach's back. They didn't know how many papers he was selling when we needed the circulation.
So here's to the Statehood Honor Roll and to the late Buck Buchwach, a journalist of many parts.
Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.
