Posted on: Sunday, November 21, 2004

OUR HONOLULU

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

I just checked my file of what's come in over the back fence lately. There's quite a pile. Planner George Atta said people his age are starting to look old. He noticed it when he went to a new dentist.

In the reception room, Atta read the dentist's certificate. The name made him remember a tall, handsome boy in high school about 30 years ago. But it couldn't be the same person because the dentist was balding, gray-haired with wrinkles, way too old to be a classmate.

While getting his teeth examined, Atta asked, "Did you go to high school in Honolulu?"

"Yes."

"When did you graduate?"

"In 1971. Why?"

"You must have been in my class."

"Oh? What did you teach?"

How time flies

Alison Kay, the authority on seashells, said she likes stories about white pigeons at the zoo. She told a story of her own that revealed her age. Kay said that when she was 4 years old on Kaua'i she had to see a doctor in Honolulu.

"My parents thought that going on the interisland steamer was the adventure that got me to go," said Kay. "But the real bait for me was seeing the pigeons at the zoo."

Slow boat to history

Here's a story from the Honolulu Harbor Festival yesterday told on board the Falls of Clyde. The conversation got around to how long it took to sail from Honolulu to San Francisco.

The answer: two weeks on a good run.

The longest passage was made by the American three-master Elsinore in 1883. At 45 days, she was given up for lost. The insurance company offered to pay the ship owner 50 percent of the insured amount. The owner was ready to accept the next morning when the Elsinore was sighted off the Golden Gate.

Two More tidbits

Here are some things you didn't know:

Royal Hawaiian Band conductor Aaron Mahi's dad made the pulpit for a church at Kalaupapa when he was a student at Kamehameha School for Boys in 1915.

Honolulu didn't have newsboys until the spring of 1893 when the Star appeared in print. (In 1912 it merged with the Bulletin to become the Star-Bulletin.) The Star needed business, so three boys were paid 50 cents each to sell the newspaper on the street.

The boys made so much money that half a dozen others came around for papers. But they refused to shout out the news because they didn't know English very well and and some didn't know the name of the paper.

A voice from the past

The Roosevelt High School yearbook for 1937 has a fascinating page on the student jazz orchestra. This combo had to be the best high school dance band in Our Honolulu. They played all over town. The vocalist, Alfred Afat, became famous in later years as Alfred Apaka.