Posted on: Wednesday, July 14, 2004

OUR HONOLULU
The fight goes on for the Circle

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

There's a wise old saying in Our Honolulu: "Don't buck the Outdoor Circle. They never lose a battle they choose to fight." Look at the bundle Hawaiian Electric Co. dropped trying to put power lines on Wa'ahila Ridge.

HECO could have learned from Charlie Frazier, Hawai'i's pioneer advertising executive. He had the perfect setup, a monopoly on the billboard business 100 years ago. At a temperance meeting in Central Union Church, the ladies decided to make war on billboards.

"They will boycott certain brands of vegetables until the objectionable billboards are removed," The Advertiser reported on Sept. 30, 1905. By 1911, the ladies had organized the Outdoor Circle and Frazier's goose was cooked. In 1916 he ran up the white flag and offered to sell them his billboard business.

You are now permitted to look deep into the soul of this beautification juggernaut by visiting Hamilton Library on the University of Hawai'i campus. In the first-floor Bridge Gallery, a hallway between the library and a new addition, is an exhibit of photos that tells the Outdoor Circle's secret.

It is this: The ladies in white pumps, equipped with gold-plated shovels, have done what everybody else should have done a long time ago. They have simply behaved like sensible women who want to live in a nice town. What's ironic is that this requires true grit and iron determination.

Their first revolutionary act was to plant monkeypod trees on a barren desert called 'A'ala Park, which wasn't a park then, just an open space. Half of Kapi'olani Park was a swamp with Makee Island in the middle and a horse-racing track on the dry ground.

When your streetcar turned from King Street down Kalakaua Avenue on the way to Waikiki, you gazed at bullrushes, rice paddies and duck ponds on both sides — if you could see around the billboards.

One billboard was legendary, according to Lynn Ann Davis, head of Hamilton Library's preservation department, who put the exhibit together. The Heinz Dill Pickle billboard blotted out Diamond Head. After a barrage of letters from the Outdoor Circle, and a pickle boycott, Heinz surrendered. By 1927 the Outdoor Circle had talked the Legislature into banning billboards.

The Outdoor Circle planted those mahogany trees down the sides and center of Kalakaua Avenue. They planted trees on barren Schofield Barracks and Hickam and in bare dirt school yards.

A million trees later, the Circle is still fighting the same battle. Executive officer Mary Steiner said they will soon be in court for the fourth time about aerial advertising. Never fight the Outdoor Circle. They don't quit.

Reach Bob Krauss at 525-8073.