 session of Talk Story with John Waihei. Boy, have we got an interesting show for you this afternoon. Now, there are going to be a couple of differences from our normal format. First of all, our show today will last for an hour because of the wealth of information that we will be discussing. Our show will be obviously Heroes, Rats, and Duds. And they involve all of us talking, gossiping, maybe, about all the various people who made Hawaii what it is today in one way or another. And the second difference in format is going to be the fact that I will be a guest on my own show. And we are going to have a special guest host. So this afternoon, our host will be Colin Moore, who is the dean of the Public Policy Institute or at the University of Hawaii. Colin, you can clarify the question. Director, close enough, Governor. I'm happy to be here. Director, and in addition to that, as we have a guest from Richard Verrecca. Richard Verrecca probably, I refer to him as the pundit of political commentators in Hawaii today because he's the only person that is actively involved in the media who would actually recall some of the instances that I may discuss this afternoon. And obviously, my last guest would be Chuck Freeman or Charles Freeman. Chuck has been around the political, well, has been around everywhere, starting from the big island that's coming to the state of Hawaii, worked with Jean King, worked with me, and is the first communications guru. So exciting show. Don't let me take up any more time. Colin, as they say, the microphone belongs to you. Terrific. I'm excited to be a guest host. This is going to be a terrific show. So like the governor said, we're going to go for an hour, discuss a lot of the people who shaped modern Hawaii, and we're going to talk about them as heroes, some rascals, and some duds. We've got so much ground to cover that we're going to move roughly from statehood era to the present. We're not going to be too disciplined about that. But we're going to start with some of the early folks and try to move our way to the present, talking in all of these eras about who are the heroes, who are the rascals, who are the duds. And I think in some cases, there are folks who were heroes, rascals, and duds all at once or at various times over their career. So Richard, I'm going to start with you because you just wrote a column about Dickie Wong, who just passed away at 88, and whose career really spanned a period of transition here in Hawaii. He was first elected in 1966 and later moved to the Senate and then held the Senate presidency, I think, for what is still the longest record from 79 to 92. So could you talk a little bit about Dickie Wong? First, was he a hero, rascal, or a dud? And what makes him so unique? Well, I think that first off, he was two of the three. He certainly wasn't a dud. He was a very strong leader. He started out as sort of the Hawaii prototypical liberal in the state house, where he represented the Kalihi area. And then he was a strong union member with United Public Workers and held an office with the UPW, which sort of burnished his liberal qualifications. But then it soon became apparent that this was a guy who knew how to organize and get people together and get them talking and get them talking. Usually it was about how Dickie Wong could probably be a leader. And so that's what he did in the state house. And then when he moved to the Senate, Dickie quickly became the ways and means chair of the Senate. And I remember that one of the interesting things was that he really showed himself as a people person. At that time, Hawaii didn't have very much money. He was always having budget cuts. The University of Hawaii was having big campaigns, big demonstrations down at the rotunda at the state capital. And Dickie was ways and means chairman. And instead of having just protesters there, what Dickie did was he said, you all come into the ways and means office if not stay out on the line. But let me explain the budget to you. And he went in detail through the budget. And I don't think if he may not have convinced everyone, but he did an amazing job of getting that forward. From there, he used the ways and means to gather more of his own power and became Senate president. And he was the Senate president who, as I said in my column, he could always count to 13, which is how many votes you need to organize the state Senate. And he was always able to do that. Then he became a quite powerful, but he also knew how to share that power, which was for legislative leaders is very difficult to do, but a good one knows how to parcel it around and still be able to crack the whip when you have to. But Dickie wanted more than that. Dickie wanted also a seat on the Bishop of State, which at that time was the most powerful position in Hawaii. And he kept telling me, he says, I'm going to be Bishop of State trustee someday. And sure enough, he was. That then became part of his downfall, where I think he reached for too much, grabbed too much, and wound up with attorney general investigations following him around. When he left office and became a Bishop of State trustee, it was not a good time for him. Bishop of State was very controversial, and much of it was because of Dickie Wong. So it certainly wasn't a flame out. It was a steady march up to the top, and then a quick tumbling down from there. And you mentioned that he knew how to count votes, but he did some somewhat controversial decisions to keep his Senate presidency, including working with Republicans, right? Oh, yes. I mean, that was one of the things that people may not understand that the Republican Party at that time was much stronger. They had 16 senators than it is now. And I mean, you really picked sides, and you would fight over that. And that was one of the things that happened with Dickie. He, to organize Senate, he had to also take in the Republicans doing that. One of the things he did is that one of his buddies was Senate at that time, state senator Neil Abercrombie. And he had to take Neil Abercrombie's committee, his higher education committee away from him, and gave him lower ed. But he was the darling of the University of Hawaii. And to have him lose his higher ed committee was a big deal for him. And that's one of the things that happened. And it was because of what Dickie Wang needed to do to keep his organization. I think that the insight to all of that was that the people that he kicked out of power were his supporters. He actually came over to the Senate being supported with the likes of Neil Abercrombie, Ben Cayetano, Duke Kawasaki, and the other so-called Progressive. And when they got into the Senate, and at one point, I guess what happened was they were trying to undo his organization. And basically, he went over to his friend, which tells you a little bit about the collegiality that existed in those days. With, by the way, there were eight, I think, Republican senators. And went over and made a coalition with five Democrats and basically kicked out the guys who brought him over and strengthened his position. I just want to add on to that. I don't want to kill Dickie Wang. I'm sorry. That was a terrible thing to say. I don't want to kill discussion on Dickie Wang. But I want to point out that Dickie had a way of making friends and doing what he needed to do. Even with people that he opposed. Dickie Wang opposed my election two times, including in the general election when I was the Democratic nominee. He supported the same person he made a coalition with, which was the Indianus. But immediately after I got elected, we spent, he and I essentially worked everything out. And he was a, I consider him one of the foundations of anything that I got accomplished, including, when we sat down and actually had a conversation, I told him, Dickie, you never got along with the Democratic government, which is Governor Rioshe before this. So, what is it going to take for you and I to build a better Hawaii? And he said two things. He said, Governor, what I want to do is I want to build housing. And the villages of Kapolei and all of our housing programs would not have been possible without the strong support of the Senate, number one. And number two, he said, just to show you how to practical guy you are. And I want a library for the people in Salt Lake that I've been trying to get. Every year, for years, I've been funding that project and the prior governor would never release the money. And so, which brings us to another guy that was a part of that era. One quick concluding story about Dickie. At the height of his power, when he was really controlling a lot, I asked him in a private moment what it took to really be Senate president. And he looked at me with a sort of quizzical eyebrow look on his face and said, Chuck, it's 90% social work. Yeah, absolutely. He said that. He always said, I'm a social worker. That's what I do. But it's really funny because on the other side of the legislature doing that early period was a speaker, Henry Peters, who was also a very strong leader and a governor, Governor Ariyoshi. And the politics of those days basically saw those two individuals kind of aligned. And before Henry Peters, another strong leader, Jimmy Wachatsuki, who ended up in the Supreme Court, as you can see just by the politics of all of this since the governor appoints Supreme Court Justice. So Dickie's era was a very, very interesting political era. And as you know, following Richard's story about Dickie, Henry Peters also goes from the state legislature into the Bishop estate. And the controversy that involves the third person, who we already mentioned. The governor at the time that investigated the Bishop estate, which included these two gentlemen as trustees, was Ben Kayatana. And then any one of these guys are in their own right, probably a little bit of each of the definitions. I mean, they definitely all contributed to making Hawaii a special place. They were all rascals in a certain sense at some point. I mean, Henry, Henry not only used political power to get people in line, he used, you know, Henry was a big tough guy. And he don't want to mess around with it. And then it was George. Let me ask you about another group of folks who also were quite powerful during this period, but they weren't elected officials. And here I want to talk about organized labor, which has always played such an important role in Hawaii. And I'll just throw a few names out here, you know, and anyone can react if they want to talk about it. I'm thinking here of David Trask, Aqwan, McElwraith, even Jack Hall, that's a little bit early. How did the labor leaders interact with the politicians in this period? And were they all heroes or were they rascals too? Well, Chuck, you haven't said anything. Well, my sense of the there's really quite a variety in the names you just rolled out. I think the prototype for relatively speaking heroic leadership from a union, and it's not totally heroic because some of it's pretty gritty and dirty, was Tommy Trask. I mean, he was, to me, the model, because he kept his dignity. And you knew when you talk to him, if you shook his hand, you had a deal. There were all sorts of variations beyond that. And some union leaders who failed to meet the call, including Gary Rodriguez, who was a terrific guy on the one hand, but ended up going to jail for his crimes. But to me, it's really hard to pick out one that stood that much above the others. I think Tommy, in my mind, did. Richard? I'm not sure, you know, because labor, labor itself was about the specific issues of each union. And if it were the unions that represented public workers, you had a group of unions that were more together than not. But even then, they had their own issues and so they had a hard time getting together. I remember when I was covering the legislature early on, how shocked I was that labor for so many different things could not get together. It was not a specific bargaining unit issue, but minimum wage had the hardest time getting heard by committees that touched on labor. It wasn't the same deal. Minimum wage and labor issues were completely different, labor being more along, raising the standard of living for everyone as opposed to one specific group. There were other parts of labor, however, that strayed far and away from just wages and salaries and benefits. And that was just the sheer power that labor had in the legislature and to an extent still does. There are always going to be a group of legislators who are owing more to labor than to anything else and they get their jobs, they get their re-elections accomplished through their support of labor. And that's a specific issue that the public should understand more, I would think. I think that the one underrated person, I mean, frankly, that was sort of with labor, but more than labor, that you mentioned was Aqwan Mechara. And she was in a category by herself. I mean, her origins were with the ILWU at organizing plantation workers, which is that time. One of the interesting things about Hawaii's history is how the plantation borrowed the tactics from slavery of the South to implement the program here in Hawaii. And Aqwan was obviously, when she was in beginning, was a force organizing labor and getting them to understand it. But as the years went by and labor became more institutionalized, Aqwan never gave up that fight. I mean, she was always on the side whether labor was with her or not. In fact, there were times when, as Richard mentioned, regarding the minimal wage, when labor actually saw it to their advantage not to have a minimal wage pass because it would help them facilitate organizing. And John, she really fought to her last breath. I mean, to the last breath. The longevity of her leadership is unchallenged. I think one of the things that I find interesting is that all the young women today who see Patsy Mech, Congresswoman Patsy Mech, as their role model are not realizing that Aqwan was Patsy Mech's title, mentor, the person she wanted to be like. So yeah, in my book, I wouldn't consider her anything but Aqwan. So you just mentioned Patsy Mech. And I know, Chuck, you wanted to talk about Patsy Mech. And I think she's probably pretty clearly a hero. And her career spans such a long period of time. Any highlights in your mind about what makes her so heroic? Yeah, and I know Richard wanted to chime in too. I mean, she was third generation, AJA from Maui. After college, she wanted to go to medical school, but they weren't taking Asian American women into medical school. So she went to law school and got a law degree, and then they wouldn't let her take the bar exam. I mean, she was fighting from the get-go, got into local politics, and then was eventually, I think in 1964, elected as the U.S. Congresswoman from Hawaii and became the first, not only Japanese-American woman. 74, Chuck. 64. I'm sorry. 64, the House of Representatives. Yeah. Oh, you're in state health. I'm sorry. Anyway, and became the first Asian female American in the United States House. And then also the first person of color. But the one thing that stands out to all the things she did in fighting against the war in Vietnam and always on the side of the poor and the underrepresented is that 1972, she co-authored the Title IX of the United States Civil Rights Act, which basically prohibited gender discrimination in any college or university receiving federal money. That's a lot of gobbledygook. But what it did is it totally opened up women's athletics, changed the face of what kind of opportunity women had, changed the way we looked at, not just women's sports, but women in this country and internationally. And ultimately, that particular Title IX amendment was renamed, and I have it in 2002, Title IX, Patsy T. Mink Equal Opportunity and Education Act. She was a force of nature and a remarkable person. And really to me, if I had to pick an all-time hero in modern Hawaii, she was it. I also got to go to lunch with her a few times. She had a great sense of humor, self-deprecating as well. And it was just a wonderful person to be with. Richard, you have some more. If I could offer a little bit more on Patsy Mink. One of the parts of her history that is not very well remembered, but should be, because it was straight out politics. And that was when she was council chair. And at that time, she was on the mainland. And three members of the city council switched parties, George Akahani, Teraki Matsumoto, and Rudy Pacaro, suddenly decided that they were going to be, that they were actually Republicans. And this was a deal to get more power at City Hall, which was then controlled with Fawcett. And Patsy Mink hopped on a plane, flew back to Hawaii, and was immediately started a campaign to have all three of those people, not thrown out of the Democratic Party, to have a special election held to throw them out of the city council. And who knew that what happened? It actually did. She caused an election to be held, and all three of them lost their seats on the city council because of what Patsy Mink did, how outraged she was that they switched from Democrat to Republican. So that's a lot of clout she had that you don't really appreciate until, unless you were Pacaro or Akahani. Since we're on the subject of influential and heroic women, Governor, I wanted to ask you about someone who I know you worked with in the 78 Con Con, and that's anti-Frenchy de Soto. Oh, yeah. I actually knew anti-Frenchy because she was a community advocate on the Y-9 coast. And this is a strange, teaches you a little bit about working in the community. And I was then working for Frank Fawcett. And my job was to do programs on the Y-9 coast. And anti-Frenchy was one of the community participants. And we got to know each other because she issued a complaint about Henry Peters, who was also working for Frank Fawcett on the Y-9 coast, and saying that there was a little group running anything, blah, blah, blah. And immediately, and I went in there to evaluate the situation. And then she got to Henry Peters. And so I found myself, the evaluator was in the corner. I was there to help Frank Fawcett because Frenchy had a way of Frenchy. Frenchy was, first of all, everything that you saw. She was a loving kupuna. She was completely dedicated to making Hawaii better and Hawaii cost. But underneath all of that, anti-Frenchy was a very skillful political operator. And she knew how to do it. In fact, in one of my first democratic conventions in Hawaii, I remember I forgot my badge. And nobody was letting me into the room. And anti-Frenchy said, oh, poor boy here, take one of my. That's it. I mean, this was a woman. So along the way, she became a member of the Protect Kaho'olavi O'Hana. And up until then, anti-Frenchy was basically wanting to see how the political system could work for Hawaii and I, poor people. And she got a real interest in protecting the O'Hana. And she began to use all of her leadership skills to keep the group together and help the people who are involved. People with names like Walter Reddy, who is still around today, and Amitah Luli, who is a doctor on Oolokai. And starting to not only mentor these individuals, but actually work with them. And a young guy named John White Haig, pulling it into her web and keeping it up. So anti-Frenchy and I both got elected to the 1978 Constitutional Convention. And she and I went through an organizational phase. Anyway, she ends up being chairman of the Hawaiian Affairs Committee. And one of the most interesting things she did was she then reached out and hired on her staff all the people, the leaders, that were protesting something in the state of Hawaii. And basically said, if you guys got a solution to the problems that you're identifying, what are they? And if you, I don't want to take up a whole bunch of time, but to really get to see what that meant was that if you read the Hawaiian Affairs Sections of the Hawaii State Constitution, every one of those articles came from a specific Hawaiian activist group. And so she was able to put all of this together. She had this unique talent that was just, now you got to remember that there were only like four Native Hawaiians on Native Hawaiian Committee, maybe five. And she and out of 30 members. And yet she was able to sit down and every one of the proposals passed unanimously. So that to me, that took a real talent. She was totally grassroots, totally oriented to her community. And a deal maker too. Yeah, and people had a way of misjudging her. They thought she was just some activists of the Waianae Coast. No, anti-Frenchy, in fact, anti-Frenchy was a group of Hawaiian women across the Oahu who were all skilled politicians and people like Waduku Trey, people like Sister Kareya, people like all of these women who knew how to use political power at the grassroots level. So with that, we're supposed to take a five minute break, but we'll be right back. One minute break, I think. A one minute break, excuse me, one minute break. So don't wait long, we'll be right back. Hello, my name is Kathleen Lee, owner of Kathleen Lee Consulting and host of Think Tech Hawai'is Connecting Hawai'i Business Program aired every other Wednesday at 2 PM. In this show, we highlight business and community leaders in the Aloha State. So we thank Jay Fidel and the staff of Think Tech Hawai'i for making programs like ours possible. Aloha. Welcome back to a talk story with John Waihei. I'm obviously not John Waihei. I'm filling in for him as the co-host because the governor is a guest today. And we're talking about heroes, rascals, and duds, people who shape Hawai'i politics. And we talked about a lot of heroes in the first segment. And we're going to take a minute to talk about some rascals. And I want to talk about one of the chief rascals. In fact, someone whose tagline was Hawaii's favorite rascal. And that is Sam Amalu. Chuck, do you want to start us off? Well, he was a remarkable man. He used various names for himself. He called himself the Indian Maharaja. He called himself a banker, Albert Wilcox. I think his most famous of his fraudulent type deals was announcing the purchase of five shirt and properties for $34 million back in, I think, 1962. And it sounded like it would have been the biggest deal in Hawai'i that there ever was, except for one thing. There wasn't any money. It was a complete hoax. And sometimes his stuff was really fraudulent. And sometimes he would just say, it's just a prank. What's everybody all excited about? He ended up in an awesome prison of all places. I didn't realize that till I looked it up. And that's when he started writing his columns for the Star Advertiser. And they were wonderful, grassroots, meaty, kind of. At that time, it was just the advertiser. I'm sorry. I said the Star Advertiser. Yeah. There used to be two papers in town. I'm sorry. Sammy Amalo had a great relationship with the publisher at that time. And he got a column out of it. The column was stopped because the people protested to the then governor of California, Ronald Reagan, that a prisoner should not be allowed to write columns. And then the Hawai'i public, in turn, protested that he should be allowed. And Reagan let him start writing again. And he was writing columns when I was here. And I didn't get here till 1972. I don't know any other. I didn't actually know him. Of all these people we've talked about, at least knew them. I never met him. Maybe somebody else has something to add. Well, I didn't know him either. But I love reading his column. I love the idea of reading his column. We had a bunch of people like that. I mean, Chuck, you remember Ron Reeve-Wald, right? Why don't you tell the Reeve-Wald? Yeah, he was a real Arrasco, at best, a Rascal. Well, he was more than a Rascal. He was a few. I and Barbara Tanabe were the people who broke the Reeve-Wald story. And I remember being in an investor's house the day after the story broke. And I was interviewing him about what happened. And he was just ashened because his wife was trying to take on the money that they had in stocks that suddenly had disappeared because Reeve-Wald's fictitious accounts, their money had been invested in essentially fictitious accounts. It was a Ponzi scheme that he had going. It was just appalling some of the stuff that he did, the money he took from people. Do you remember the name of the firm, Richard? Bishop Baldwin, Reeve-Wald, Billingham. Bishop Baldwin, Reeve-Wald. Bishop Baldwin, Reeve-Wald, Billingham, and Walt. But none of those people except for him were involved. He really, he came through down on a whirlwind, though. He really duped a lot of people. And I think that- Including for a time, even the CIA was, for a while, duped into thinking that he had some clout. And the closest they ever got to it was to be on the greeting line for, I believe it was George Bush, Henry Walker Bush, the first one, that he actually was part of the receiving line for that. And he had a very low, low profile place in the Central Intelligence Agency. But from that, he was able to trade himself up as being a big Akamai person within central federal government, which of course none of that was true. It was all con. And I think that he used his entree into Hawaii was the fact that he was a sponsor of Polo. And he sponsored the Polo Games out at Mokolia. And as a result, he constantly had these associations with the rich and famous that played Polo. And I remember when I was in office, I didn't want to talk to him. I was already getting suspicious of some of the things. And I don't know why, but I said, I actually sent Chuck. I said, Chuck, this guy Rewald wants to do something for Hawaii. You go talk to him. I don't want to go. He was the lieutenant governor then. He didn't want to talk to him. So I went over to see Ron Rewald in his office. And he gave me the Storm and Drone. And I went back to the lieutenant governor and said, I can't say there's anything fraudulent here, but there's something wrong with all this. And the lieutenant governor told me, well, you better report it to the Department of Commerce and Consumer Affairs, which is what we did. That was in 1983. And Richard, I think by the end of 83, he had already spun out, tried to commit suicide. He made Barbara Tanabe famous because Channel 2 kept saying that Barbara Tanabe broke the story and they were pushing Barbara as the first female anchor. So every time I saw Barbara after that, I would go, and she broke the Rewald story to laugh. But yeah, he flamed out pretty quick, but he goes sort of beyond Rascal. He was a great leader in that, too. I didn't want to meet him, but then I get a chance to actually meet him. One day, I'm sitting in my office, this lieutenant governor, wondering what I'm going to do just to make sure I can check out at 5 and it's like 10 o'clock in the morning, which is what lieutenant governors do, state of Hawaii. So anyway, I get a call from Gene Ariyoshi. And Gene tells me, she says, I'm having this very important lunch today at Washington Place, and the governor can't make it. Governor can't make it. And can you come over as lieutenant governor and fill in for him? I said, wow, I've been waiting for it to do something for Governor Ariyoshi, because he's not the easiest person to delegate the activities to. So I go over there, and this is a lunch that she's putting on for the Sultan of Brunei and the Crown Prince of Brunei. And they show up, and they're here to play polo. And following them into the room was also this guy, Ron Rewall. So I finally get to meet him, sort of, and he's sitting at the other side of the table. And the luncheon begins with, well, there's two little side stories. There are two little faux pas that drove the First Lady crazy. The first thing was that the Crown Prince of Brunei shows up with two wives, not one. And they had to immediately reset the table, according to some kind of protocol. And the second thing was after giving strict instruction to the chef that these people are Muslim and they can't eat any pork, the chef prepares a tenderloin steak for lunch wrapped in bacon. And if you know anything about the genie as the First Lady, she was like the ultimate hostess. And this was totally of Brunei. By the way, Richard, I think, sort of wrote this story in passing in one of your articles about how Ariyoshi had the Rewall over to Washington play. In hindsight, I think George didn't show up with that luncheon because he didn't want to be with Rewall. Not just duck. And I was too naive not to know. But it was that that's a Rewall story. As I remember, I was going to say, as I remember when I was working then at Channel Two with Barbara, that when we were looking through clips of Rewall, some of the stuff we found was with Ariyoshi. And there were several different parties where I think Rewall managed to worm his way into gubernatorial receptions. And he's clinking champagne glasses. I don't remember pictures of the First Lady with genie, Ariyoshi there, but the governor there, and Rewall. But for him, he was a total chameleon. He could slip himself into any group of people and pretty soon be the one telling all the jokes and being the good buddy to everyone. It was a remarkable con act that he was able to go on with. But as I said, it was a Ponzi scheme. And Ponzi schemes don't last. And he was quickly running out of money. And it was the state, we got our hands on the first investigations that the state was doing. And we were able to broadcast that. And then his little empire collapsed. And he had an attempted suicide. And we were very suspicious about it at the time, about whether it was really whether or not it was for more for sympathy of record, he was actually trying to kill himself. I think it was a very minor wound he had on his wrist. But he soon was in jail from the whole thing. Let me ask you about a dud. And really, I think this is one of the more tragic figures of Hawaii politics. And that's Milton Holt, who had the quarterback of the Harvard football team, had this meteoric rise in politics early and then a really tragic collapse. What do you think was behind that? Or how well did any of you know him? I knew Milton, obviously. And we served them together in the sense that when I was in the house, he had got elected to the Senate. His career began with a big bang, because in order to win the seat in the Senate, he had to upset one of Dicky Wong's closest associates, TCEM. TCEM was a long time campaign, a good senator. And Milton got elected by beating TCEM in his district. And he was a star. And it was going up. And at that time, one of the experiences I had with Milton was deciding which one of us was going to run for lieutenant governor. I wanted to run for an office. And he was toying with it. And he was in the Senate. And so we did one of Milton's say-ons. He took me down to this bar in Kakaako, and bar at a steakhouse place. And we spent like three hours. And he finally told me that he wasn't going to run for the lieutenant governor. But to give you some of his skills, I don't need to keep me there for that time. He also made me pick up the check. But I got to tell you, because I worked with him. And it is a tragic story to how his career ended, because quite frankly, he was one of the smartest politicians I ever worked with. And I worked with a lot of smart boys in terms of knowing the process, in terms of knowing the process, knowing how to get things done at Hawaii. Yeah, it was Hawaii's loss when he tragically had to leave the Senate. Well, it was. He had a lot of devils chasing him around, I think. And I always found it to be so fascinating, because the Holt name is such a famous name in Hawaii history. I think, although I haven't been to the newly remodeled Bishop Museum, but the Bishop Museum used to have an entire section on the Holt family and going back through. So there was like a whole cubicle just to the Holt's and their impact on Hawaii. And so to have Milton so tragically and have so many problems, and it was more than just the indictments of that. I think he had a lot of other problems. And he sort of set the land speed record for drinking during the Mardi Gras in New Orleans. I think it was one of his first arrests. But he was a lot of problems. Who else is on your mind? I can go on. I have lots of names. I can think of a rascal for sure, someone who was very influential and who I haven't talked about yet. And that's Frank Fosse. Oh, Frank, I got to tell you, Frank is one of my favorite people. I mean, really, first of all, I work with him. And he was kind of a Donald Trump with a lot of class. I don't know how else to do it. I mean, just to modernize the image of it in the sense that Frank, first of all, loved his job, which makes him maybe a little bit different than the Republicans today. He loved being there. He liked doing things for people. I mean, he was, in many respects, a classic Democrat. And I have so many Frank Fosse stories. But along the way, well, not only I work for him, but then I also, I was the only Democratic governor candidate in there doing the error that he was around, which he didn't run again. Because we sort of developed this relationship. And we developed it really around building houses. The villages of Kapolei and the Kapolei and every village was between Frank and I. It was a little contest of seeing who could build more houses quicker and extract more from the Japanese investors than others have done. And Frank was totally. But then we got to the point, though, that he changed party. And when he changed parties, he was going to run against, well, he changed parties, and he was starting to run for reelection at City Hall as the Republican. So I asked my communications director, Mr. Chuck Friedman, to put a speech together for me to give at the Democratic Party Convention. And Chuck thought about this great line talking about how we need to take the Polly out of Honolulu Polly. And I used it. I used it in the speech out there. And I immediately get a phone call. And there is one really angry Frank boss. What are you talking about? What do you mean? And so we had a little ups and downs. But Rapid Transit, all of that. I don't know how to talk about it, but the plus of our Frank boss was that he, in many respects, was here at the time. I mean, Frank wanted to build the mass transit system in the 70s and 80s. And he along with myself visited Washington DC to get the people on board, starting with the Bush administration, and get the funding for doing it, all of that. And on the other hand, he alienated. He alienated the city council, so we had to constantly count boats that could barely get them to do it. They didn't have it. They rejected it. Yeah. Well, they rejected it with one of the dots and rest of it, which I like to read very much. But he had a thing I have to remember about Frank Fossey in context. And he was a very creative, bright guy, and kind of fun to get to know. And I don't think it was partisan so much as he just didn't like Arioshi and Arioshi's people. And he didn't like them because in his mind, they just weren't doing enough. They had all this power. Here I am, this little mayor, Governor Arioshi has all this power, all this money. He just isn't doing the job. So Frank took it upon himself personally to vex the Arioshi administration at every turn. It was, he wouldn't miss an opportunity. When Waihe got elected governor, there was immediately de-taunt, in part because Governor Waihe knew Frankie had worked for him. Plus I hired half of his cabinet. Yeah, that's right. Frank's former managing director became your director of transportation at his last name. Pirata. Pirata. And so the game changed. And we actually had a pretty good relationship between state and county for the years at Waihe. But the other side of Frank Fossey was he'd been at Rich Borreka from going into his press conference. That's what we need to talk about. We got banned, Richie? That's true. That's true. In fact, Borreka v. Fossey is case law for a reporter's ability to go into a news conference. I was banned from his news conference. I had written a lot of stories about them. I mean, Frank Fossey was the mayor. He was never an angel. And I had a lot of stories that explained that. He had the fire department inspectors would go and inspect different restaurants and businesses. And while they were inspecting them, they also had birthday tickets that they passed out and hoped to sell to his fundraisers. So he was not angelic. So stories, that was one of the many, many, many stories Dave Shapiro and I wrote about Frank Fossey that were not showing him in a good light. And I was banned from city hall for that. And it went on and on. Finally, the star bulletin sued him in federal court. And Sam King was the judge and upheld, I believe it was your TRO, saying that I was allowed back into city hall. And that's how I went from covering city hall to covering the state capital. Yeah. All right. So we have five minutes left. So this is the lightning round. And we'll just end with if each of you, and I'll call on you in order, could give me one name and identify them as a hero, a rascal, or a dud. And just 30 seconds to one minute about why they are, who they are. And Chuck, I'll start with you. OK. I'll take a rascal, Mayor Tony Coonimura, the state legislature. He was and is beloved. There was a statue of him on Kauai. He used to have, he had fistfights with fellow legislators. He had a lot of power. He was a kind of tough, bulldoggy looking guy. But he was also a devil. I remember one hearing where a finance committee hearing where Nelson Doyle, lieutenant governor, Nelson Doyle walked into the room. And Tony stood up and went, hey, I'm hot. And everybody looked, a little silence. Devani said, well, after all, he is a lieutenant. That's the kind of thing he would do. He also, at the end of finance, Jerry Burris remembers that at the end of finance committee, when at the very crunching end of budget, he would get in his chair with wheels on it and roll himself up and down the aisles of the third floor, seeing why exactly to distract people or to who knows. But that's the kind of crazy guy he was. And one day, he asked Jerry Burris. He asked Jerry after the budget was in, did you get the whoops? And Jerry goes, what do you mean did I get the whoops? And he says, well, in every budget we put in one thing that just flat out wrong. So if we have to call everybody back together to do the budget, we have a reason to do it. But if it goes through, nothing will happen. So did you get the whoops? That was great. Richard. Well, I was going to say, I don't know how remembered he is now, but one of the characters of city hall back then was a councilman, Frank Liu. He had a lot of different things. Many people remember him when he campaigned was that he always managed to break a leg. And people suspected that this was just a lot of bandage. Literally. But he campaigned on crutches. He would campaign on crutches. And they would also be in some of his campaign ads or the crutches where he would be limping through his campaign district, walking the district. But of all those, probably the most famous thing was when Frank Liu was doing a city council hearing when he was demonstrating the effectiveness of pepper spray. And he kept saying, no, no, no, it's not that. They won't do anything. So this woman sprayed him and sprayed him so much that he he lost it and attacked her. And it wound up both of them on television wrestling on the floor of a city council meeting. That is terrific. That is one of the biggest characters. Governor, you have the last two and a half minutes. Well, I tell you what, I'm going to pick a couple of heroes actually from the business sector, which we didn't really deal with. But I remember, first of all, Johnny Ballinger, who was the president of First of All In Bandage. And what was unique about Johnny Ballinger and his time was that Johnny used to call up his friends, David Trask and Tommy Trask. And if you want to talk about unions and big business cooperating, they would get together along with Willie Cannon from the Bank of Hawaii and basically, and Chuck O'Boss at the Hawaiian Electric. Charlie Pratt. Charlie Pratt. And basically trying to set an agenda for what ought to happen politically and send their messages out to the legislature. And they sort of did that for the 1970 Constitutional Convention. And so they sort of put an agenda that they thought, well, it was an agenda that was opposite of what the popular perspective might have been about what people should talk to. So these are people who they really were common items that felt very strongly about Hawaii. And it's very interesting, because as native Hawaiians strive to have more political power, they ought to go back in 1970s when this was real power. And the last person I want to mention real quick without going into details is another great business leader, but also part of Hawaiian leader, was Kenny Brown. He was on practically every board that you could find. And he was just an outstanding community leader. So in addition to all the rascals and all the others, we've had some really outstanding people. Well, thank you for participating in this great show. It was a real pleasure to be the guest host. You've been watching Talk Story with John Waihei. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.