 Welcome to Quok Talk, Revisited. I did have a few year hiatus and I'm here back and this time my subtitle is Breaking Boundaries. This time I'm back and trying to push the way we look at everything. So, you know, whether it's race, gender, politics of framing, this is where it's gonna be from a feminist and performative lens and I'd love to kick off today's topic with something by censoring around a specific historical character. And this woman is quite controversial. People don't know much about her or worse. They have this glamorized view of her because of the nature of her business. She was a prostitute during the World War II, actually before that in the late 30s in Honolulu. And I'm here with a historian who's going to shed more light and to dismantle these old ways of thinking of what we thought we knew about it. And so without further ado, let me just introduce my wonderful first guest of my pop-rock return, Wendy Tolleson. Wendy is a Kama'ina raised on Ford Island. She researches and writes about topics relating to the 20th century Honolulu, Hawaii Islands and Maui for Historic Preservation Projects for the Historic Honoka'a Town Project, the Palama Settlement and the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit and others. She's produced studies of land ownership and written about dance halls, vaudeville, bull halls, hoymaking, vice, prostitution in the Evelay and Chinatown, architecture, redevelopment in A'ala and the military and many ethnicity themes. So quite appropriate in talking about today's topic, the question is who was Jean O'Hara? A book she self-produced has created a myth, a legend about the extravagance and the sexual life of a prostitute here. So Wendy, welcome to Think Tech and to Quok Talk to talk about this racy topic. Well, thank you. Go ahead. Yeah, I mean, so all right. So you have lived here. It's really quite interesting to hear what you have to say about this because you come from a perspective of, I know your background was in archeology. So you're used to digging and by digging, it's really looking into what has been produced, what has been created, what's out there in the archives, what's missing. And a lot of times it's challenging what's out there and how things are misread or misinformed, right? So I think that this Jean O'Hara is a perfect candidate for this topic because it's like we don't really know who she was. We're fascinated by her life. And yet there's so much that we think we know but do not. So perhaps you can give us a little background of who she is in a nutshell and then we'll go back to give context to why she was in Hawaii. Okay. First of all, let me clarify something and that is that Jean O'Hara has been used as a factual source. And I couldn't even tell you how many papers. PhD, theses, popular culture, a number of other things. And quite frankly, a lot of what she has written about didn't happen in World War II, which is where she's used in context quite a bit, almost exclusively. She wasn't even here until 1938. So a lot of what she writes about, she could have gotten out of a newspaper and or from, they're just so stories in a lot of ways. I've been able to document a lot of the things that she talks about, but it's usually things that happen to her. And one of the problems I had with this document that she wrote was that she doesn't really talk about prostitution in a context that makes much sense except about herself. Why do people have not challenged it in the past? Do you think people just love her story so much that they don't want to think that it's not true? Well, it's salacious and it's popular. Yeah. It takes quite a bit of documentation to understand what was going on here in World War II. And she, you know, this information most of it wasn't produced until she was long gone, but it can be found. And so, you know, she writes about what was going on in the 1930s. So these phrases that, you know, three minutes for $3 and all, and, you know, black folk and plantation workers had to come in from a different door. I have never found any documentation about that. Really? No. And I traced her quite a bit. She comes from, she comes from, it's important, Blue Springs, Mississippi. Okay. So she's a southern belle, a white lady who comes to Hawaii. Right. And she comes from Indiana. Right, okay. And she does come through San Francisco like most of the prostitutes did, but others came from Los Angeles. And she comes in, in 1938, she goes by several names while she's here. Betty Jean O'Hara, which is what she's most well known for, but she also was Betty Jean Quinn, because when she came here, she brought her husband who was four years younger than she at 18 years old and married him here. She also goes by Jeanette Blake, Jean Johnson, Jean O'Hara, and finally, Jean Noriger, who is what a lot of people, the other name they attached to her. But she, like I said, she doesn't really provide much context. And she devotes a lot of what she's writing about to herself. Not really. So by herself though, in her background, before she came here, as I understand, she grew up in quite a religious family, quite conservative and- So her father was a doctor. Father was a doctor. A doctor. Okay. And she writes, only a few pages about who she is and, but mainly it's how she feels about what she's doing and how she started. Okay. She doesn't really say where she started, except she does say she comes from San Francisco. But that was a leaping off point for a lot of people. And then she gets into descriptions about venereal disease and a number of other things. Okay, let's back up a little bit. The book that she, we based a lot of the sources from, can you just give us, maybe we can do this a good time to show the cover of the book too. And this is the only publishing that everybody's kind of basing their stories off of, right? Right. So she self published that book. Is that right? Or who published it? No, it's published by a company that no longer, I can find no evidence of. And the front art, I cannot find that person. And the person who wrote the foreword, I cannot find that person either. Okay. But there's something to say about a woman who takes advantage of her popularity, if you will, her agency, her voice to be able to produce something that's going to show a portrait of the war that we rarely see. Is there validation from that perspective? There's only some because as I said, she doesn't really provide a context for actually everything that's going on. Actually prostitutes in World War II had a lot of agency. They had a lot of power. They weren't, you know, in the 1930s, which is what she's writing about. Yes, there is a lot of control by the police department beginning in 1932. But prior to that, a lot of them were here in the late 20s. Prostitution was not a big thing that the police dealt with. They were interested in bootlegging because it was during prohibition. So when they finally got around to... Uh-oh. Hello. I told you that it went out. When they got around to actually starting to deal with prostitution in the late 30s, there was a lot printed in the newspaper about it because prostitution was not a crime here until 1942. So they were being arrested in charge for vagrancy. Okay, so you say that it was illegalized in 1942, but during the war, it wasn't at the time when the martial law and the military kicked in to regulate it. So in that sense, it was illegalized, wasn't it? Yes, and this is the difference between what she's writing about and the reality because everything she's writing about with the exception of a few things, for instance, her assault by Captain Kennedy and her arrest for speeding and also finally her attempted murder charge. That was all happened, one happened in 1941 and the others happened in 1940, late 44, just before prostitution was ended. And then she went on to be here until about 1947. But most of us... Okay, so when she came in 1938, sorry, prostitution was already quite, you know, a booming business, if you will. It had been booming business since EVLA. So 1920s you're talking about then? Yes, yes. But EVLA were Japanese women, but you're talking about, I'm talking about the whole of the white women who came in? Yes, I mean, EVLA was not all Japanese, most of it was, but it was finally shut down for good in 1919. So there was a kind of a vacuum. Now, you know, some of the, you know, you don't see very many Japanese or Chinese prostitutes at that point and a lot of women. I wanna show, I know you sent me this and maybe you can tell the source of it, but you said it was a postcard, right? It's a postcard. These are postcards that were taken in amusement halls that were very common here in World War II. And a sailor could come in and pay a certain amount of money and pose with a young woman who was being hired for so many cents a postcard to produce this postcard. And they wanted something exotic. So they were always, almost always Chinese women, YMs or something like that. They never posed with white women. So, but it's interesting. So, okay, well, I have this other one. This is, it looks like it's a white one, white woman and one Japanese Asian woman, right? Yes. I can't explain that. No, I'm just trying to think of like how the ethnicity played into this whole sex industry at the time because if a lot of the women coming in from California, as you said, were mostly white, but then prostitution existed in Hawaii at the time with mostly local women. Not, really not post-Evilay. I have found very little evidence of other ethnicities rather than white women. And if you look at the 1940 census for that area, all of them are white. Now it's interesting because the Madams are Korean, but the women are white and they come from all over the country. A lot of them came from the South. And unfortunately they didn't do ethnicity, so it's hard to tell whether these women- But surely there were prostitutes from Hawaii, you know, with all the Asians and API and different types of ethnicities here already before- I have not been able to document that. Okay. Because that sort of thing is not included in official records. Okay. So based on official records, you're saying that mostly were white women who came out to take advantage of this booming industry. Now there are some hints in the documents that there are black women because when the military came in and threw up Gabrielson's rules, which is what Jean O'Hara is talking about is how they were- Can you remind us who Gabrielson is for people who don't know who he is? I'm sorry, Chief Gabrielson. He became the chief of police here in 1932. And he was from the mainland. And he came in and put through a bunch of rules for prostitutes here because he knew prostitution was a big business. And he wasn't going to stop it from happening but he wanted to control it. So he did give them a lot of rules. When the military came in, the military took over and they got rid of all of Gabrielson's rules. They put out a set of rules of their own which the women had to abide by. And one of them was that you could not bring a black prostitute into a home, into a bordello unless there was already one there. If there was one there you could bring in as many as you could. But if you wanted to bring one into an all white or if a black woman wanted to work in prostitution she had to go across the new one river to A'Ala. And in A'Ala is where you find all of the different ethnicities. Native Hawaiians, Portuguese, Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, all the other ethnicities that tended to congregate in A'Ala because it was a slum area and it was very cheap to live. So you're saying essentially that the military was the one who segregated the women? Yes, yes. So I don't know. I believe, and this is only a supposition I don't want to use those, is that if you were a black sailor and you wanted to have a black woman you went to A'Ala and you didn't go to Chinatown. Unless there were the ones who were there, like you said and maybe at that point people kind of had like these. And there's no way of knowing how many there were. So there were two entrances, right? There was the main entrance for the white soldiers and sailors and then there was the back entrance for the non-whites or what was the difference of the entrances and why? That comes from a single oral history source. Frank Spirit, I believe his name was the provost Marshall under Marshall Law and he spoke a lot about that but I can't document it. And if I can't document it, I have a problem with using it. Okay. And again, there are limited sources of who produced what. We do have one photo that we've got the rights to. I don't know if we want to share it now. It's just a spilling of soldiers and sailors in the streets. Is that Chinatown? No, that's just a street scene but it shows how crowded the streets were in World War II. You can see a bunch of sailors and things like this. And this is just the kind of activity that was going on during World War II. Right. And so the whole thing is all of a sudden you have these I don't know, what was the number of the amount of sailors and soldiers who came in at the beginning of the war? Well, at the beginning of the war, there were 345,000 people here. Okay. About 50,000 defense workers, many of who lived in Chinatown and lived in the area because they no longer wanted to live in the barracks that were supplied by the military, but the largest percentage were sailors who came in after Pearl Harbor. Right, so they were spilling in and families here were afraid that these young, horny soldiers basically were gonna rape their wives. And so that's why they regulated with this whole systemic kind of structure and prostitution. No? No, that's not right. Was that not the justification of why they legalized it in some sense? There are several reasons why. First of all, the military knew that it was a good idea to keep the sailors happy and the soldiers happy. Not that they were being happy before World War I, because they were coming in anyway and the soldiers had been here since the turn of the 19th century. Okay. But turn of the 20th century. So it was mainly because first of all, houses and the prostitutes paid taxes. They paid their federal taxes and paid something close to $15 million into the federal system before the war was over. And when the brothels were shut down on September 22nd by Governor Stainback, they all had to leave. And they took a big source of income with them. So there were a lot of businesses, jewelers, furriers, and others who depended on their business quite a bit. And they- Okay, so back to the women and the business sense of these prostitutes. Like going back to Gino Herra and all the other people who came out and made their fortunes. Would you say that they had agency? Because you have a lot of the other countries like Korea, where the comfort women, where they were victims of war, whereas can we relook at the prostitutes in Honolulu as being in a very different situation? I mean, there are some claims of being white slavery, but at the same time, these women had their power, their mobility, and essentially their own business. They did, at least two of them left here with over $100,000 in their pockets. And one of them was a madam, actually two of them were madams, and they took their money and they left. And as I said, there were a lot of them here that had been here since the late 20s. So there was not this cycling through of prostitutes that, you know, we're gonna work here for six months and then leave. They went back and forth to San Francisco. If you look at the manifests, you can see. And I've often wondered if they were going back to families or they were going back to tell their friends, hey, here it's time to come. But to some degree, the man act, which was the act that was passed against white slavery was a federal act. So the city and county didn't bother themselves with that. It was a federal thing. And I found some evidence where one of the madams with a couple of pimps from San Francisco brought a woman over and they were caught and they were subsequently sent back to San Francisco to be tried and be incarcerated. But there weren't very many, there wasn't very much documentation out there about that because- But your sense is that these women who did come over took advantage of the time and actually got away, most of them anyway, with what they were doing. I mean, there was a photo. Again, it's another quite famous photo of the Senator Hotel, these women. You wanna talk a little bit about that? And they're all white. Yes, you're right. But again, these are the things that are published. That doesn't mean that the others did not exist. So these women were the ones you're talking about who came over mostly from California, even if they were from some other, mid Western town that came out through there and made their fortune. But there was one lady you told us of me about before that didn't have such a happy ending. You wanna talk about her? Oh yes, Bernice Kimbrel. She's a very interesting woman. She was out here early. She started here in 1929 and she went through, went by several names, like many of them did. They would change their names frequently because they kept getting picked up, but only charged for vagrancy, like I said, which was usually a $50 fine. And then they were just kicked back out on the street. So there was no incentive really for them to stop what they were doing. But she worked, at one point, she bought what was called the Plaza Hotel, which at one point was a very nice hotel. And it kind of fell into disrepair. So she bought it and she fixed it up in such a way that when it was raided in the late 30s, there was a long description about how lovely the place is with pink lights and a huge dating table and a silver service and 24 rooms. And when they came in, they scared out a lot of high-class males and army majors and officers who were there. They all jumped out windows and ran away. So she did very well. Mostly white patrons, again, sorry to go back. Yes, yes, all white patrons. You did not have Asian or black officers then. The Navy didn't integrate until 1944. And the only blacks that were out here before then were Seabees. And they were located on Manana Peninsula a long way away from home. But what about the local blokes? The non-white people here before the war, where would they go in patron? I mean, I'm going off topic a little bit, but like... I have no idea. I have no idea. Like I said, the records about ethnicity are scarce to none. And the only time you ever see any kind of ethnicity is when there's an arrest of a panda or a pimp. And those are all exclusively Filipino. And I don't know why that is. I don't know why that is. That's a whole other language. Oh, okay, we'll bear off. We won't come back around and we'll come back because I don't know these women who are predominantly white that we're talking about who came over during this time. Yeah, so they took advantage of the time. And of course, Bernice Kimbryl did not have, as fortunate of it. She did not have a happy ending. She was, she finally picked up stakes about 1941 and took with her according to a source of a woman named Jean Hobbs, who was a newspaper reporter who lived here and wrote prolifically to her boyfriend and her mother about how she had invited her for lunch one day and Bernice had shown up with a bag full of diamonds and a bunch of cash worth about $85,000. And she left, and supposedly was retiring to go run a rabbit farm in California. But she came back at some point because she in 1947, she was brutally murder in Tin Pan Alley to a stab seven times, allegedly because she had stolen money from a man who had paid for sex. He was later charged with murder and figured out was mentally ill. Oh, he was. Yes. But when they did her estate, she had over $80,000 in her estate, including property, which was the Plaza Hotel. So she was- So who that went to? She didn't have any kids. Who would that money go to? I haven't traced that yet. I don't know. But back to the women who did survive. Most of them went off and took their money and bought property, right? Some of them bought property in Hawaii. Some of them brought it back to with them and didn't one lady, who was it that opened up a rabbit farm or something? No, that was Bernice Kimbrel. She swore that he was gonna go back and run one. And maybe she did, but she came back, you know? Would a greed that brought her back into it, you think? Well, she told Gene Hobbs that she wanted to run the best little whorehouse west of Singapore. So she still had it in her mind that she was gonna continue doing what she was doing. But it just goes to show that prostitutes here could stay here for quite a long time and make quite a bit of money. Many of them own property in Kan Ki and Manoa. Yeah. Other places like that because they were allowed to own property. Right. Chief Gabrielson put out all of these rules that they couldn't own property or go to Waikiki or all of these other things. When the military came in, military swept that away and put out their own set of rules, including they couldn't live in the houses. They had to leave by 6 p.m. and go live out on the economy. So a lot of them bought property because they feared that if they rented, it might get around that they're prostitutes and landlords would kick them out. And it did happen a few times. But that's what I'm saying. They're quite clever to think about these, to get themself a space, to take advantage, knowing that this was a temporary moment where you have that money, cash flow. You know, so what do you think about? These were smart women. These were smart women. Yes, right. So going back to the agency of these women who knew what they were doing and not to moralize it. You always get that from people. But, you know, sitting on all that side, all the criticisms aside from these virtuous, you know, families who feel like it's just the wrong thing to do, what do you have to say about women in general who take advantage of situations and do things to break barriers for themselves, to think for themselves? I mean, how do you... Well, I mean, when you look at prostitution, for instance, in the South at that time, you can imagine that they were pretty poor. I mean, the people there in general were pretty poor. It made sense to come somewhere, particularly if you'd heard that Hawaii was this place where you could make money, regardless of how exotic it was, something I really don't like much about that particular phrase. So it made sense to come. Now, I'm sure a lot of them came, made some money and left, but like people like, you know, Bernice Kimberle, she was smart. She didn't, you know, like I said, they didn't jail these women when they got them. Even when prostitution became illegal, the fines usually went up. Yeah. In fact, weren't they bold enough to protest something at one point when they're like... Yeah, that was Bernice Kimberle and another woman who was also quite a crusader, unlike Jean O'Hara, who would rather just write about the salacious things going on and write about her life, Peggy Miller. Actually, Jean Kimberle and Peggy Miller actually picketed the police station on Merchant and then marched around to the head of the chair of the police commission because they were being, by Gabriel's sin, they were being forced to pay big money for houses in Iowa. Sorry, Wendy, sorry, but you know, you're bringing up a new character when we have like no more time left unfortunately. You know, we have to leave it at that. What I'm glad and gracious and appreciative of is that you've kind of offered a glimpse of these different types of women who really had the guts, the bold, the color of their personalities or whatever it was that brought them to Hawaii at the time and place. Thank you for kind of resituating history through your research and challenging what we think we know out there and people out there, please kind of just, you know, do diligence on what you read. And if you want to learn more information about the history of Honolulu prostitution, you have to dig deeper than what is still on the surface. And we're trying to do that here, but hopefully we can do another conversation around this sometime in the near future. So Wendy- I would love to, I'd like to talk more about Jean and I'd also like to talk more about these women because they were something else really. Perfect, thank you so much for giving us the nice little portrait of Genohera and Bernice Kimbrough. Thank you for turning in. We'll see you guys next time. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, ThinkTechHawaii.com. Mahalo.