 This is Think Tech Hawaii, Community Matters here. Aloha. I'm Roger General Neck, your host on Book World, and my guest today is Fred Hemmings, who just written a memoir called Local Boy, and he certainly is a local boy. Yes. I don't think I've ever met anyone who has taken such full advantage of Hawaii as you have. So let's talk to everyone about it. Where did you come from originally? I mean, you were born here? Born here January 1940. Did your parents came from somewhere? No, actually my mother was born here. Her grandmother came from Funchao Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic, and my dad came here in 1927 from New York City. So on my mother's side, I'm actually fifth generation. And why did your dad come from New York City? His father, believe it or not, was one of the first men involved in the Navy flying boats and naval aviation, so he came to Pearl Harbor to work on airplanes. He was a good mechanic. Oh, do you know the story of the guy that first flew across the Pacific? You know that? The Rogers that the airport used to be named after? Yeah, John Rogers Airport, right? John Rogers, yeah. That's a pretty amazing story. Yeah. We'll get back to that. So always on Oahu? Born and raised in Oahu, I'm in love with Hawaii and I've made a point, I think being intimate with something you love, knowing it well, is what I interpret intimate to be. I've made an effort to really put my feet on the ground of all parts of Oahu. So I've seen the sun come up from the top of Halaakala. You know, I've been cold, snow goddess Pollyahu on the top of Manakea. I've ridden the waves of all the shorelines. I've run through the lava fields of Kona. I've paddled a canoe across Honolay Bay down the Honokapi Eye. Did you have a bucket list or did you have a checklist? No, I just did it. I have a mental list and as time goes on, you know, I was heavily into jogging for a while, so I'd end up going with buddies. One buddy in particular was a dear friend. And we just decided to go run places. We've run what they call the King's Trail on the lava fields across Kona. Believe it or not, we ran through Halaakala, which was two hours and 46 minutes of absolute misery. But we did it. You got out alive. Yeah, exactly. I've only been there a dawn and looked around and you see it's an incredible sight. And you see all these huddle figures in their hotel blankets. Well, I got to tell you a funny story because we went up there to run and I didn't think about how cold it was being. You know, we got jackets on and stuff. So we started running and I think once your body warms up, you'll be all right. So I had shorts and a shirt on and we weren't all right. It was cold. It was cold, yeah. You stayed overnight or? We stayed at Kula Lodge and our wives took us up there at 5.30 in the morning. We watched the sun come up and then we... It's very cold at 5.30. Oh boy, I'll tell you it wasn't. It was very hot in the middle of the day. Not in the middle of the crater. It gets warmer, but hot's not a word to it. But the sun is intense, but not hot. I'll tell you what was intense, Roger. It was rather curious. I didn't realize until I read it years later is how quiet the interior of the crater is. And they say, and I don't know if this can be validated, it's one of the most quiet places on earth because there's no sound. It's like a bowl. It's like a bowl and there's no sound in the crater. And the sides of the crater are pretty remote until you get to the very top where the lookout is. But other than that, it's a very quiet place and very spiritual as I think as a result. Nature has a way of grabbing you. Well, it's a very special place. It is. So you grew up, where did you grow up as a boy? I was rather curious. I came from the house of modest means. We weren't a wealthy family. And so I grew up in Kahala. And people thought, oh, you must have had some money. Kahala's considered the gold-plated neighborhood. So all the pigs were raised, right? Exactly. When I was there, it was pig farms. The paved roads were Kahala Avenue and Aokai and Keala Olu. And the rest of Kahala was pig farms. And agriculture. They were mostly Japanese farmers. And we were on Farmers Road. It was a dirt road. And we had a three-acre aglot. How long did it take to get downtown? Oh, back then it took, you know. And how did you get downtown? Well, you went on Wiley Road. Wiley Road weaved its way up through Kaima Key. Or you could go down to Waikiki and weave your way that way. But usually you go to Wiley Road and you go through Kaima Key and then down around St. Louis High School and then down. And Kaima Key, then, was country, wasn't it? No. No. No. Kaima Key had developed. Well, let me arise. It housed us on it. Kaima Key was a lot more developed than Kahala was in the 50s when I was a young boy, early 50s. And Europe, everybody knows you as a famous surfer. When did you start surfing? I got my first surf board when I was eight. You know, I grew up in the beach like a key and, you know, I was rolling around in the ways ever since I could remember. And I actually got my first surf board when I was eight years old and developed a real fine relationship with the ocean and surfing and canoe paddling. And did you learn it by yourself or were you? You know, back then, that's, you know, my dad made sure that I could swim well before he let me go on the board, which I could. And, yeah, you learn that back then no one took you out and said, OK, here's what you do. It was an osmosis thing. You just suck it up. But were the beach boys still very much? Oh, I like to call the 50s a romantic era of Waikiki, the old beach boys. And there's something curious about that. I'm glad you asked because there's very few pure Hawaiians now. And that's something I think about culturally. You know, we want to preserve the Hawaiian culture and there's a lot of things we can do affirmatively. We're certainly not going to preserve the Hawaiian culture by protesting anything. But the way we can preserve it is make sure we preserve those things that are nimic to Hawaii. You know, the food, the culture, the lifestyle, some of the most important places. But we're getting rid of the Hawaiian blood. I mean, there's very few pure Hawaiians. But the culture itself is actually very much alive. I run this Hawaii Book and Music Festival and we have a dedicated venue. And actually the action is in books because of the immersion programs. You've now had a steady stream of young Hawaiian scholars who get books published because it's part of that professional thing. The books are not that readable, frankly, so we surround them with panels. But they have fascinating information. Well, I give them a lot of credit. The Hawaiians are doing a lot. I think the seeds of the cultural renaissance were planted by Herb Connie, Tommy Holmes, and Ben Finney. The anthropological anthropology professor at the university. And that was with the Hokulea. That really kindled Hawaiian renaissance. And everybody decided, well, we can bring back from near extinction this voyaging society concept. How profound it was. I've only been here since 92. And at that time there were maybe 500 kids under the age of 21 who could speak Hawaiian. And now they're more like 30,000. So it's an impressive renaissance. Yes, it is. And they're even getting so sophisticated they're finding out. The Hawaiian language got adulterated because when the missionaries got here in 1820, they didn't have the written language. And Hiram Bingham was actually the one that took the sounds and gave them letters. But in that translation, there were a lot of things that were lost, as I understand it. No means of linguists. But I understand that the young Hawaiians now are a lot more articulate and knowledgeable of the language than generations ago. Well, there's a lot more material about that culture available now. There's also some really wonderful books from the middle of the 1800s. Sam Kamakau wrote a book about ancient Hawaiians. I recommend everyone read it, most especially young Hawaiians, to find out what the culture was really like. When you were growing up, did you have Hawaiian friends? Oh, sure. I was a surfer. So all the Beach Boys, when I was a young kid, all the Beach Boys, and this is what I was trying to relate to, most of the Beach Boys in that day, Rabbit K. Kai, Steamboat Mokawa, all the rest of them, they were pure Hawaiians. You have fun as you mentioned, Rabbit, because my wife came here as a kid on a vacation, and he taught her how to surf. And a couple of years ago, she was in a hospital here for some Kaiser, I think, and she saw this guy in a wheelchair, and on the back of his wheelchair, it said Rabbit. So she went to him and said, Mr. K. Kai, I'm sure you don't remember me. I was a barrel-shaped little girl, and you taught me to surf, and he teared up. It was a really moving moment. He was a great influence on my life, and he had a spirit that a lot of the older Hawaiian surfers had, and it was a spirit of sharing. They all wanted to share surfing, and so there'd be times, you know, I'd be on the beach with a young kid, you know, 10 years old, and Duke Kahanamoku walked by, hey, boy, let's go in it. He never called me by a friend here, even when I was older. He called me boy. He said, let's go surfing. So, you know, those Hawaiians wanted to take everybody surfing and share it with them. It was kind of like, we're so proud of this. Our sport of surfing, we want to share it with you. So Rabbit took a great number of young men and women. When I was young and started to compete, he used to take me out to Makaha as a young boy and show me the ropes, you know, don't do this, do that. And, you know, surfing doesn't appear to be a very sophisticated sport. So what was Duke like? I mean, he was a friend of yours, right? Yeah. The best way to describe it, yeah, I was close to Duke. I spent the last several years of his life with him because of Kimo McVeigh and the Duke Kahanamoku Foundation and all the things that went along with it. I traveled with him on goodwill trips for the state, but aloha wasn't a word for Duke of greeting or salutation. Aloha was a lifestyle. He generally was a man of aloha. He knew no malice and no negativity. He generally saw the positive in everything. And I just got examples. And he never was adantic with me where he'd tell me would do, you know, this. It was all he, everything I learned from was to just being with him and seeing how he handled other people and how gracious he was as a man. It manifests itself in the fact that there are a lot of great people in Hawaii in the 20th century and the one we love the most is Duke. Yeah. And did you see a lot of it? Yeah. Oh, no, I used to. The last couple years of his life on many occasions I'd take him to lunch almost every day. Where did you have lunch? We usually had it at the Outrigger, but we'd go to other places in Waikiki. I had good hamburgers at the Outrigger. My wife tells me. On Fridays, I don't have this anymore. They used to have lao lao and poi. And so every Friday, because Duke just loved this lao lao. And he hated the old-fashioned Hawaiian way with his fingers. You know, he never touched the utensil when they ate lao lao and poi. So we'd go down and have lao lao and poi on Fridays. But he was a truly joyous man. Well, he had several brothers, right? Two brothers and three sisters. Like him? Oh, no, Duke. Oh, no, Duke had four brothers. Were they like him? They were all gracious, wonderful men, but not because they didn't achieve the fame that Duke did. They weren't as well-known. But he was quite charismatic, wasn't he? In a subtle way. He was charismatic because he had a reputation and people went up to him. But he wasn't overt, is I guess the best word. He was very subtle. Very regal. So you were a terrific competitive surfer. How did that start? I think I'm a competitive... Person. Genetics, you know, and played a little bit of football up on a hoe. My dad, a young boy, took me out to Macau. My brothers and sisters were competitors, and they did very well. My brothers and sisters were all good servers, too. And I started entering and ended up doing pretty well in some contest. We'll take a break, but we'll come back to the surfing story. I'll be here. Yes. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. I just walked by and I said, what's happening, guys? They told me they were making music. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Hello. I'm here with Fred Hemmings, and we were just talking about the beginnings of his surfing career. I was just about to ask him whether the rules of professional surfing, which you were one of the founders of, were as strict then as they are now? The concept was the same. It evolved throughout the 50s and by the end of the 60s, led by a, believe it or not, a Peruvian gentleman named Eduardo Arena there, kind of was established a universal rule for competition. Ride the biggest wave, the greatest distance in the most critical section of the wave. And so that meant you'd wait and you'd only catch the best waves. And you ride at the longest distance. Distance included maneuvers on the wave, not just going straight across the surface of the ocean. And then the critical part of the wave, of course, is getting in. And so it's judged subjectively by expert judges. But I watch these contests occasionally now in the world pro-circuit, and they have interference rules and little caveats, but that basic concept still applies. Was the judging controversial at all? Never. Well, excuse me, I'm sorry to say that. Very seldom. I think there's a universal agreement that, when you, if you watch a finals with two guys in it, most people usually agree which guy did the better job. What was amazing, one of the things that did change is when I was competing, there were six people in a heat. And the finals of the World Championships in Puerto Rico, there were six of us. Now they go man on man, mano a mano, or woman on woman and they, so it's a man on man. And what difference has that made? Well, it makes for better surfing because you don't have six people competing for the wave and you don't have interference and you don't have to worry about. So it makes it more challenging for the surfers because wave selection is everything. Usually they take your best two or three waves in a half hour or whatever time period there is. So you can catch 10 waves, but if you catch 10 7s and your competitor catches 3 8s, the guy with the 3 8s is going to be 10 7s, you know. So there's a certain amount of luck involved in waves available or not? No, there is, like everything in life, there's luck. But the guy who has the best ability but also the best judgment, surfing is like most other things in life, being in the right place at the right time. And if you're in the right place and the lineup when the big set comes, I was in an hour finals in the world championship and I only caught five waves and they took the best three and they had to go back for a tiebreaker to the fourth wave. But all five waves I caught were the biggest waves. So part of the wisdom is in being able to say that. Wait for the big waves, yeah. You know, why ride in 10 minutes, two waves are going to get you six points when you can ride one that's going to get you eight points. So that's kind of the logic that I competed for under. But you actually founded a surfing league? Yeah, well, I saw the evolution of the sport and this is a long explanation for a short question. Surfing was going through growing pains as I think the culture was in the late 60s and there was kind of an anti-establishment aspect of surfing as there was with the culture. You know, smoking marijuana and all, you know, drugs had creeped into the sport and I didn't agree with that and I wanted surfers to be respected athletes and I thought it was the next logical step in the progression and evolution of the sport and it caught on and now I think people like Kelly Slater are incredible athletes but Carissa Moore, the young lady who represented all the best in young athletes in America. The training seems to be formidable now. I never trained. I would stay in good physical shape because I definitely not drink or smoke especially when competing but nowadays the young people are actually got trainers and they exercise and they keep themselves limber and it's become very sophisticated and rightfully so because when I started professional surfing the first contest, the Pipeline Masters, 48 years ago, we gave out $1,000 total purse. The first place guy won $500. Nowadays the first place guy can win $20,000. Have the skills improved? It's like space age surfing now. These young people are doing things we couldn't have dreamed of. Are they doing it younger or not necessarily? They've got kids competing now that are 10, 11, 12 years old that are doing things that... My son wanted to be an Olympic skier and he was training in Colorado for a year and he decided he'd already graduated from college and he decided he wasn't going to go forward because he was competing with 14-year-olds who didn't know fear. That's the same thing as surfing. I attribute that to experience. You learn fear real quick. It's a learned experience. That's fabulous. You then went into politics at one point what took you into politics? I love Hawaii and I think things could be a lot better here. I don't talk about politics much anymore. It's the past life, but I think we can do a better job here in Hawaii and we just keep doing the same thing and expect different results. Things could be better, especially for the working middle class and the poor. It's a sad situation. You had one mission you mentioned in the book, which is your idea for sports administration degree. I thought that was fascinating. Just describe that. I know, because I was in the industry, one of the biggest businesses in America is sports. When you think of sports, you think of professional football or something. Every high school in the country has sports teams and they all have coaches and they all have sports equipment. There's sports medicine. There's sports technology. There's sports sales of equipment and everything affiliated with sports. So it's a big business that employs a lot of people. I would say if you added up the economic impact of things like the Kona Billfish Tournament, the Triathlon, the Humboldt Marathon, it would exceed agriculture. Now we have a college degree. There's a college agriculture department, but we don't have even a college of sports. I think it makes sense to allow young people to go into some aspect of the sports industry, whether it's coaching or sports medicine or one of the other disciplines in sports, to go get a college degree. I got a master's or bachelor's degree in sports. Because there are colleges, several colleges have arts administration degrees. I think HPU is actually exploring one right now. What would be the curriculum? Well, it depends what you want. I think in order to get the degree, you'd have to have a broad curriculum of everything. Like I said, from coaching to sports technology, sports training, there's all aspects of sports equipment, sports law, all of those things. You mentioned something very interesting, sports law. It's real hard to get permits now to have some sport events because the event interferes with public right away. There's a big argument every year about getting permits on the North Shore to have the surfing events. That's right, it's a big fight right now. Despite all the recognition and revenue that the whole marathon generates, there's people complaining about that. I can't drive to town at 8 in the morning of the marathon because there's all these damn runners in the way. There's a lot of things that can be done better here in Hawaii when it comes to sports. But most importantly is recognizing it is an industry and not just a pastime. Well, it's fascinating how many sports are identified with Hawaii that either were founded here or flourished here, or flourished here better than almost anywhere else. You touched on a very, very salient point to how Hawaii is the birthplace of a lot of sports. There was no hunnable marathon. I'll never forget the first hunnable marathon that Jack Scatts ran in the darn thing. But one day I was coming home from the North Shore and I saw these guys running up that long hill from Hollywood. One of these guys, he said, oh, they're in this new thing. It's a first one, it's called a triathlon. That's right, it was started here, right? Yeah, it was started here and a guy had the rough water swim and then you got out and you ran what essentially was a corner run 126 miles and then you got on the bike and you did a bike ride and that was the first triathlon. It was birthplaces right here, professional serpents birthplaces right here. Many countries have ministers of sports and the whole administration of sports. Maybe that's the way to start it here, to have somebody actually a cabinet position in charge of sports. You know, I tend to. You're not keen on government. I'm not keen on some bureaucrats sitting in their office downtown, you know, administering sports. I'd like to have a free marketplace where you have good rules and have some sort of criteria. Like this, there's an easy solution with this thing about surf contest permits. You set up a grid. How long has your contest been in existence? What's the prize money? How many people get to participate? So you have kind of a criterion for saying, yeah, this is a Class A event of international caliber that's giving away a lot of prize money. It's going to get, you know, a permit before some guy that's giving out a, you know, $27 to some of his friends in a small event on the North Shore. If I have a question for you, I've often wondered if North Shore surfing has a kind of mythology about it. For instance, you mentioned you were in a championship in Puerto Rico. I wasn't even aware that there was surfing in Puerto Rico. Oh, that's probably the best surfing in the Atlantic. Well, that's my question. Is there a mythology that Hawaii is the place for surfing simply because it started here? And is there actually a danger of losing that position? No, we have individual places that garner a lot of coverage like there's a place in Portugal that breaks two or three times a winter. And it's called nozzlery. Well, they have a hundred foot way there. We don't ride hundred foot waves in Hawaii. The closest we get is JAWS, maybe 50 or 60. But when it comes to total surfing from small waves to big waves to pipeline to Waimea Bay to JAWS, Hawaii has the broadest spectrum and the best surf in the world. Oh, that's gone. There's other specialty spots, you know, that have, you know, Malibu's got a beautiful clean wave, but it's colder in one wave. You know, we've got everything. I think that's what separates us. We're still the ultimate testing ground of surfing. So are you going to write another book? I'm thinking, you know, it's funny you ask that. I'm thinking of writing a book called Solutions. Oh, yeah. And I think that all of Hawaii's problems have solutions. And, you know, the old cliche about doing the same thing and expecting different results. So I think everything from, you know, traffic to cost of living and all the things that are affected by policy and by government, I think there's solutions to our most pressing and basic problems. And I'd like to see them discussed. I'm not saying I got all the answers, but I think I have some different ways to look at maybe solving some of these problems. And these problems are not new at all, you know? And you think they do have solutions? Oh, I know they do. I can rattle off one or two now on traffic. Between a lower stadium and Pro City, there's two huge ridges that have thousands of houses on each ridge. There's no on and off ramps off the highway under those ridges. So if you... So how do they get that? You've got to drive down to Pro City and then circle back and go up the ridge. So that makes all the cars have to get off at Pro City to circle around and go back. So if you just made all that off ramps just up those ridges, you'd take a huge amount of traffic that afternoon off H1. So it's simple things like that. We've only got a minute, but what about the train? Too expensive and not needed. But you know, let me tell you something just... Maybe they can run buses on it. Sorry, it's too late. I think it's a done deal. But the other thing is everybody's talking about the $8 billion unfunded future liability of paying for it. Right now, retirement benefits for state workers is $24 billion. We're at a big hole financially. People just don't know about it. Well, that's true in a lot of cities across the country. It's exactly your exactly right. Well, I'm going to break off here, but thank you very much for that. Oh, my pleasure. Off with my city. Thank you. I've enjoyed it. Thank you.